I was charmed as soon as I read a few paragraphs about the Bitcoin project. I had a thirst for exactly this ever since DigiCash folded in the late 1990s. Efficient digital cash was ideal to achieve proof-of-concept for a project I began in 2007.
As soon as I looked into it enough to realize it was basically an implementation of a lot of the concepts David Chaum had written about as secure digital cash, with improved safeguards, and that other people who know more about the subject were also taking it seriously. I had read about this stuff in the early '90s and had thought it sounded interesting but seemed to be impractical.
Once it actually seemed to be working, though, my opinion changed.
Thing is, Chaum's DigiCash was actually working too. There was a period of time when Mark Twain Bank (and one more?) were issuing coins in exchange for fiat. If you think about it, that was an
amazing achievement: Chaum was able to get a European bank to issue fully anonymous currency tokens! (A sender could voluntarily prove they had sent funds from their software "coin purse," to combat extortion, but no one including the bank could otherwise track what was being done with the money.)
Then it collapsed. (That may have been due, I read at the time, to Chaum's excessive demands regarding licensing his technology, a problem bitcoin entirely solved through the open-source release/premine combination. Chaum seemed greedy; however he was so far ahead that his licensees probably couldn't conceive of the immense value of what he was offering them.)
