I found a "Bitcoin" style patent, from 1997... and 1981...

[Aethion]

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1996041286A9

In this patent, it's about digital microtransactions and instead of "wallets" they are called "purses"... o.O

Thoughts?

Then there's this (from 1981): https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2092344A/

[ranochigo]

Satoshi did have a few references in his whitepaper, notably b-money. B-money was conceptualized in 1998 by WeiDai and apparently was one of the first people whom Satoshi contacted.

I don't think the idea of cryptocurrency or any distributed currency of that sort was very new at all. There were some discussions about this during the 1990s as well, or so I've heard.

[seoincorporation]

Satoshi did have a few references in his whitepaper, notably b-money. B-money was conceptualized in 1998 by WeiDai and apparently was one of the first people whom Satoshi contacted.

I don't think the idea of cryptocurrency or any distributed currency of that sort was very new at all. There were some discussions about this during the 1990s as well, or so I've heard.

That's right, there used to be a group of people called the cypherpunks, they have some ideas about mixing technology with security and money. And I'm almost sure bitcoin is the result of his ideas. They used to communicate on a mailing list, and satoshi was a member of that list.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

Almost every invention is going to have prior steppingstones as a basis, as well as an array of discarder preambles that ended-up nowhere.  

I’ve skimmed through the first patent, and what it addresses is to facilitate fiat payments in a moment in time when online purchasing transactions basically resorted to payments through debit/credit cards with a high TX fee. It does not question the centralized fiat systems in any way, although it does consider centralized card payment systems a potential weakness (only from a technical standpoint though).

The proposal introduces the "electronic purse", which preloads/loads money off the users account through the FSP, and lets the user pay from it, possibly returning balance to the bank account if balance remains unspent for some time. If a way, the purse seems to resemble an electronic giftcard or with a big leap of imagination, a sort of embryonic (distant) look-alike LN wallet (TXs settlements with central bank account seem to be unsynchronized, but perhaps I didn’t quite get the procedure in full here).

[dkbit98]

If you look at some Bitcoin Prehistory tree graphs you can see that roots for Bitcoin are coming all the way from 1970s ans 1980s with improvements in cryptography, PGP and invention of internet.

That patents you posted are mentioned Bank Computers that has nothing to do with bitcoin, electronic payments existed years before Bitcoin and many people today are calling wallets a purse, so I don't see anything strange with that.

[remotemass]

https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2456000/

It is very easy to remember. You skip "3" and put three zeros at the end.

(3,4,5) is the only "Pythagorean triple" with consecutive positive integers... I am fascinated by it...

x^2 + [(x+1)^2] = [(x+2)^2].

I believe the ideal "Dyson's sphere" will be pulsing (3,4,5) in infinite ways to the Cosmos. Shine on 3-4-5...

[EDIT: Maybe the reason our brains perceive the 12 musical notes as we do (in between doubling of frequency) is the Three-Four-Five reason...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQwXDd6P0Us ]


 

[LeGaulois]

Surely a bought patent since Google didn't exist in the '80s but no matter

(The priority date is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation as to the accuracy of the date listed

The very first 'digital' currency is probably e-Cash during the '80s. It was developed by David Chaum, and in the '90s he developed another one (Digibit or Digicash, I don't remember enough).
The idea of a 'crypto' currency came later between the '90s and '2000s. It has always been "a dream" among the cypherpunks, they tried probably a dozen of projects but decentralization was not really a thing at this time before they evolve in a crypto-anarchism philosophy.
Satoshi came about 10 years after



If you want to read more about the history, this PDF is freehttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3079241

[iq_armando]

History of bitcoin

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

Prior to the release of bitcoin, there were a number of digital cash technologies starting with the issuer based ecash protocols of David Chaum and Stefan Brands.[3][4][5] The idea that solutions to computational puzzles could have some value was first proposed by cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1992. The idea was independently rediscovered by Adam Back who developed hashcash, a proof-of-work scheme for spam control in 1997.[6] The first proposals for distributed digital scarcity based cryptocurrencies were Wei Dai's b-money[7] and Nick Szabo's bit gold.[8][9] Hal Finney developed reusable proof of work (RPOW) using hashcash as its proof of work algorithm.[10]

In the bit gold proposal which proposed a collectible market-based mechanism for inflation control, Nick Szabo also investigated some additional aspects including a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocol based on quorum addresses to store and transfer the chained proof-of-work solutions, which was vulnerable to Sybil attacks, though.[9]

etc etc

[Twentyonepaylots]

The idea isn't that novel, but the execution that Satoshi did was what made it really successful. The patent did nothing but profiteer from the project which I don't think is unfair but is generally frowned upon in this industry. Not to mention the fact that bitcoin was inspired from B-money made by WeiDai, whom he also contacted prior to coding bitcoin.