Were there attempts to create a thing like Bitcoin before Satoshi Nakamoto?

[HamletZZZ]

As popular as Bitcoin is today ever since it’s origins 10 years ago in 2009, I’m curious if there were other attempts before Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in order to create a decentralized currency that would belong to the people?

I really respect Satoshi Nakamoto’s work with the development of Bitcoin which jumpstarted the new age of cryptocurrencies, but I don’t think that Nakamoto himself  (if he is a real person or a group of people) was the only person in the world that had the idea as there are many geniuses around the world that would probably try to do the same thing.

Maybe they were limited by the technology of their time/money or their ideas weren’t adopted by many people and their ideas fell into obscurity. I’m rather curious if anyone had an idea before Satoshi Nakamoto.

[DabsPoorVersion]

I am not quite sure if there were actually an attempt to create a digital money before the existence of bitcoin. But it is possible, since there is no success if there is no failure to begin with. Bitcoin was called as the first ever crypto that was created on the year 2009, if there were attempts, we cannot determine since there is no publication of articles regarding that.

[yazher]

Since it was Satoshi Nakamoto introduce this first innovation, If there really was some attempt of creating cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin before, I'm sure they already made development or update after they saw the continuously successful story of the bitcoin. As you can see there wasn't any claim after the successful launched of the bitcoin 10 years ago. The answer to this question is more likely negative on my point of view.

[arcmetal]

...

Maybe they were limited by the technology of their time/money or their ideas weren’t adopted by many people and their ideas fell into obscurity. I’m rather curious if anyone had an idea before Satoshi Nakamoto.

Yes, there were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin

You'll find some in the section titled "Pre-history".

[Wind_FURY]

OP, there were some attempts, but they lacked the most revolutionary part of what makes Bitcoin decentralized, and Byzantine Fault Tolerant, which is distributed POW.

Trolls will call it "wasteful", but distributed POW might be Satoshi's most important discovery of all, not blockchain.

[Kakmakr]

Yes, there was several attempts to do this, but most of that was centralized and/or ineffective <not immutable like Bitcoin> so they failed. Also remember that it was illegal and still is in most countries to create your own currency, so these people were operating on anonymous platforms to collaborate on these projects.

Satoshi Nakamoto also took several established concepts and technologies and put them all together to create Bitcoin. He just found the perfect ingredients for everything to work.

Some more info here : https://www.investopedia.com/tech/were-there-cryptocurrencies-bitcoin/  < DigiCash / B-Money / Bit Gold / Hashcash >

[peter0425]

i have passed some thread before about those first cryptocurrency created before Bitcoin,and just like mentioned above me most are centralized but only Bitcoin made a History and progressed longer and now staying more than 10 years.

anyway there is no importance about if there are first than bitcoin because the important thing is we are having crypto now and making another history as years go by.

[alani123]

A good place to start is the citation Satoshi added to his paper for bitcoin:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
To quote it:

[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.
[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimaltrust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.
[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no2, pages 99-111, 1991.
[4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping,"In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.
[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conferenceon Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.
[6] A. Back, "Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure,"http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf, 2002.
[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security andPrivacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.
[8] W. Feller, "An introduction to probability theory and its applications," 19

Hashcash I think is one of the most noteworthy attempts to create a similar system. Satoshi came in with the implementation of blockchain to solve the age old problem of double spending.

[bitbro678]

Apparently yes, and there's a lot of information in this article: https://hackernoon.com/the-amazing-story-of-cryptocurrencies-before-bitcoin-fe1b0e55155b

[Baofeng]

A good place to start is the citation Satoshi added to his paper for bitcoin:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
To quote it:

[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.
[.. snip ..]

^^ This one, specially Wei Dai's b-money.

You can also read email correspondence between the two here, Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails.

So obviously, Satoshi just take it to the next level and was very successful as compare to its predecessors.

[crwth]

Just like what @alani123 posted, it's all in the references in the white paper.  Different articles support the whole Bitcoin system, and it's built up of different concepts combined into one. That's why Bitcoin is the first to arrive there and solving the problem, double-spending, in which other virtual currencies haven't done yet. Satoshi Nakomoto may or may not be a group of people, but what's important is what they created, and it gave birth to what we have now.

Nothing is created purely out of nothing. Most are ideas that lead one to another in combination with different things or something.

[Linkkoin]

As far as we remember, the original creators of XRP had been trying pre-2007 to try something a bit resembling decentralized virtual currency, but the project failed, as there was lack of trust among its users. For sure Satoshi was observing this project and included own conclusions in his own whitepaper.

[todiboa]

...

Maybe they were limited by the technology of their time/money or their ideas weren’t adopted by many people and their ideas fell into obscurity. I’m rather curious if anyone had an idea before Satoshi Nakamoto.

Yes, there were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin

You'll find some in the section titled "Pre-history".

However, these are just prototypes that lacked perfection. I wonder what happened to people and their attempts? Did Satoshi Nakamoto take these developments to create Bitcoin or not? How many questions and how few answers

[Eugenar]

Just like what @alani123 posted, it's all in the references in the white paper.  Different articles support the whole Bitcoin system, and it's built up of different concepts combined into one. That's why Bitcoin is the first to arrive there and solving the problem, double-spending, in which other virtual currencies haven't done yet. Satoshi Nakomoto may or may not be a group of people, but what's important is what they created, and it gave birth to what we have now.

Nothing is created purely out of nothing. Most are ideas that lead one to another in combination with different things or something.

Just like if you are doing an academic research, you can not conduct a research if you don't have any references for you to look into and to take into consideration as your inspiration in creating a particular project. In this case, satoshi extracts what ideas are the best to create a concept like this. In addition, the blockchain technology concept greatly impacts his project why it has a very good standing today is because of that very good backbone that bitcoin has.

[lionheart78]

I think there is already an attempt to create a thing like Bitcoin but it was centralized.   You can check this page of Wikipedia about digital currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_currency, and you can also check the history of blockchain technology here.

[Leonardo7]

There have been several attempts but their currency was never really decentralized as couldn't solve the byzantine general problem, so they quickly fade away. Bitcoin is the first decentralized currency that runs on the blockchain. Bitcoin is beyond government control and any body's control.

[LeGaulois]

People started to think about creating digital currencies since the 90's, mainly the Cypherpunk/crypto-anarchists.
Even the NSA did it in 1996, they published a paper about cryptocurrencies (it's a 'famous' one, you can find it easily). There are maybe a dozen of digital currencies before BTC. The last was B-money, IIRC, but the dev. wasn't able to fix the double-spend attack.

[sana54210]

Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency, but before it there have been people who created similar things. David Chaum created ecash in 1983, which was later implemented through Digicash, and it's also anonymous, but unlike the decentralized cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.

Even if there have been anyone or group that tried to create something exactly as Bitcoin and end up not succeeding with it, people wouldn't care, because they failed. People only care about those that made it happen, and the first to make it happen was Satoshi Nakamoto. So, Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency there is for sure.

[alani123]

A good place to start is the citation Satoshi added to his paper for bitcoin:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
To quote it:

[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.
[.. snip ..]

^^ This one, specially Wei Dai's b-money.

You can also read email correspondence between the two here, Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails.

So obviously, Satoshi just take it to the next level and was very successful as compare to its predecessors.

Mr. Dai is one of the most mysterious people behind Bitcoin. His lack of public appearances has lead some to speculate he might actually be (maybe part of) the personality behind satoshi.

His Wikipedia article reveals he's a bachelor of Science degree from the University of Washington in computer science, with a minor in mathematics. while from there we can see he was also quoted saying when asked about b-money's connection with bitcoin. :

...my understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didn't even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So my connection with the project is quite limited.

(Source)


It just fascinates me how this person fell out of the spotlight so much while others that received a mention by satoshi are taking advantage of titles like "founding fathers of bitcoin". And I'm not trying to discredit anyone, their work is of the utmost excellence, but to contrast the difference:

Adam Back is the founder and CEO of blockcstream, being a keynote speaker at conferences and promoting products and services from his company.
Scott Stornetta appears in crypto-related conferences representing Yugen Partners
Stuart Haber is still involved with developing and promoting commercial solutions related to blockchain after the blockchain boom.
Honorable mention although not mentioned in bitcoin's whitepaper, David Chaum, often referred to as the inventor of of e-cash, has made a comeback to crypto with his new venture: Praxxis.

In my own personal opinion, those early pioneers deserve all the attention they get thanks to the cryptocurrency and blockchain boom, but all that begs for an answer to the question, where's Mr. Dai? He appears to be active online still, but it's curious that we can't find him actively promoting any ambitious commercial ventures or research projects in the last few years. Pictures of him aren't even turning up when searching his name! He can't be found to be have been associated with any marketing efforts for a project ever since he created b-cash. His website lists mercatoria.io as a company he's involved with, with the description project to create an arbitrarily scalable blockchain. The website of that project doesn't appear to load currently. Only a single archived page of it from November 2018 comes up on archive.org saying "coming soon". His last published paper on Google scholar is on 2009.

To me, it's also commendable if a much sought after person seeks to remain out of the spotlight. But seeing as to how much success people mentioned in bitcoin's whitepaper are finding themselves to be met with, I'd think that Mr. Dai would also be the receiver of myriads of request to join companies, advise projects, co-author papers, assist research projects etc. Why is it then that he's staying out of the spotlight to such an extent? Curious nevertheless.

[Wind_FURY]

A good place to start is the citation Satoshi added to his paper for bitcoin:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
To quote it:

[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.
[.. snip ..]

^^ This one, specially Wei Dai's b-money.

You can also read email correspondence between the two here, Wei Dai/Satoshi Nakamoto 2009 Bitcoin emails.

So obviously, Satoshi just take it to the next level and was very successful as compare to its predecessors.

How did Satoshi take it to the next level? What was missing in those earlier attempts? The answer is the real breakthrough that trolls dismiss.