Pre and early bitcoin history

[kaggie]

(Original here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5352664.0)
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Early US
The first decimal currency, "The Mint Act", USA, 1792: https://www.mycreditunion.gov/financial-resources/history-united-states-currency
Paper money first issued in the US, 1861
The Federal Reserve Act, 1913
Keynesian economic theory developed, 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics
Confiscation of gold, Executive Order 6102, 1933: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 reversed in 1974
Removal of gold standard, June 1933: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-takes-united-states-off-gold-standard

1970s

The Crypto Wars, or limits to public encryption as a hold on from Cold War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

The Coderpunks, which would evolve to be Cypherpunks: http://www.toad.com/
(Example of toad.com email: http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html)

Public cryptographic algorithms, 1978: http://ocw.bib.upct.es/pluginfile.php/5337/mod_resource/content/1/rsa_base.pdf

1980s

David Chaum develops idea of e-cash, 1983: http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF

S. Even, O. Goldreich, Y. Yacobi: "Electronic Wallet", Proc. of Crypto, pg 383, 1983

1990s

1990, B.Hayes, "Anonymous One-Time Signatures and Untraceable Electronic Cash," Proc. of Auscrypt, pp.294-305

Cypherpunks group starts, 1992: https://web.archive.org/web/20020603230702/https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt
This includes Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, & Zooko.
Several of these embrace "extropism".

Hal Finney predicts NFTs, 1993, Compuserve: https://twitter.com/justintrimble/status/1357098395110952964

David Chaum implements Digicash, 1995: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/1101/6411390a.html

NSA publishes "Anonymous Electronic Cash", 1996: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm

(Julian Assange and Craig Wright show up.. 1996: https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1035162505293778944)

Tim May proposes crypto based on remailers, 1997: http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm

Adam Back proposes HashCash 1997, implemented 2001: http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Wei Dei starts b-money, 1998, http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

Liberty dollar starts, 1999, https://libertydollar.net/the-history-of-the-liberty-dollar/

Cypherpunk Forum on E-Cash, 1999: https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=95280154629912&w=2 ; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=205533.msg2149044#msg2149044

Anonymous replies to Adam Back, 1999: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23km92/potential_post_by_satoshi_nakamoto_in_1999/

Milton Friedman predicts e-currencies, 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MnQJFEVY7s

2000s

Paypal, 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_PayPal

Len Sassaman helps develop PGP, 2001: http://www.fastcrypto.org/vmac/draft-krovetz-vmac-01.txt

Pecunix, an Panamaian e-currency based on gold reserves, 2001: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/2014/5/cato-journal-v34n2-5.pdf
https://www.mail-archive.com/e-gold-list@talk.e-gold.com/msg12834.html

Matthew Gaylor, E-cash's feasibility, 2001: https://www.mail-archive.com/e-gold-list@talk.e-gold.com/msg04919.html

"X" publishes on digital peer to peer currency in UK finance group, 2002: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/X

(Julian Assange??! on the cypherpunks list, 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20160101223032/https://marc.info/?a=90366091900010)

John Nash, Ideal Money, 2002: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061553

The Digital Monetary Trust, 2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20031008175805/http://orlingrabbe.com/dmt_guide.htm

The "Gold Age", Liberty Dollars, 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20131231234813/http://www.ticotimes.net/More-news/News-Briefs/Millions-of-dollars-in-limbo-after-shuttering-of-digital-currency-site-Liberty-Reserve-_Saturday-May-25-2013

2007

The Amero discussion, 2007: https://imgur.com/a/9aRaGuR

Wei Dei + Ted Krovetz, initiates VMAC, or hashing a key, http://www.fastcrypto.org/vmac/draft-krovetz-vmac-01.txt

November 2007, Liberty Dollar raid: https://reason.com/blog/show/123553.html

Spring 2007, Satoshi begins working on bitcoin.  https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/15/#selection-115.0-117.67

I believe I've worked through all those little details over the
last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them.

eCache, a Tor based currency, 2007: https://www.scribd.com/document/27467097/Interview-With-Operator-of-eCache

2008

The Digital Monetary Trust, https://web.archive.org/web/20080905150703/http://www.orlingrabbe.com/dmt1.htm

Nick Szabo, Bit Gold, 2008: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

Satoshi emails on E-cash, October, 2008: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/

2009

Hal Finney on Twitter, "Running Bitcoin", Jan 10, 2009: https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988?lang=en

Wikipedia entry created, March, 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bitcoin&oldid=275832581

The First Bitcoin post on reddit, May, 2009: https://np.reddit.com/r/business/comments/8itlf/bitcoin_a_peertopeer_network_based_anonymous/

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Additional interesting things:

also see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=875242.msg9674258#msg9674258
https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin-is-Worse-is-Better

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[NotATether]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:History

I half-finished the list, I'll do the other half in a few hours after I run some errands.

edit: address the rest of the historical entries too other than things that don't make contextual sense to bitcoin.

The page is still woefully out of date though, now I have to add the recent events too.

[kaggie]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:History

I half-finished the list, I'll do the other half in a few hours after I run some errands.

edit: address the rest of the historical entries too other than things that don't make contextual sense to bitcoin.

The page is still woefully out of date though, now I have to add the recent events too.

Oh hey!  Cool!

I made an account, so hopefully someone can grant access.

There will be historical events that are related but tangential that could use its own history page (e.g. "End the Fed" movement).
For later events, the development of litecoin and other major forks could be noted.

I will put references and links in the forum, but think these can be pared to the relevant only.
Call it an editing space while I collect info.


A few typos: "Feburary" in 1936; "an Panama.." should be "a Panama.."; and "2007Your Liberty Dollar Raid Update " should be cleaned. Cool, thanks!

[NotATether]

I made an account, so hopefully someone can grant access.

You have to request for access on #bitcoin-wiki IRC channel on Freenode server (you must follow https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration instructions to register an account first). No one reads the request thread here anymore; I wonder why people still post there.

A few typos: "Feburary" in 1936; "an Panama.." should be "a Panama.."; and "2007Your Liberty Dollar Raid Update " should be cleaned. Cool, thanks!

Will update.

[kaggie]

1991
"Universal Electronic Cash" by Tatsuaki Okamoto and Kazuo Ohta
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-46766-1_27

1993
"Untraceable Off-line Cash in Wallets with Observers." by S. Brands, in CRYPTO.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.41.8411&rep=rep1&type=pdf

1996
Alan Greenspan: "We could envisage proposals in the near future issuers of electronic payment obligations, such as stored value cards or digital cash, to set up specialized issuing corporations with strong balance sheets and public credit ratings."
https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19960919.htm

1999
The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which details an underground people with a digital currency

Hal Finney, Reusable Proof of Work
"POW tokens have been proposed as a form of pseudo-payment in several applications. One example is email. An email message containing a POW token would be relatively costly to send in terms of computing power. A POW token could then be a sign that the message was not spam."
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/finney/rpow/index.html
https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-0-387-35568-9_18
This pops up again on the cypherpunks list in 2004: https://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

2005
Ukash, an electronic money system, established, similar to prepay credit cards but with a 19 digit code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukash

2007
"Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems" By Ivan Osipkov; Eugene Y. Vasserman; Nicholas Hopper; Yongdae Kim

"In this paper, we present an electronic cash scheme that introduces a new peer-to-peer system architecture to prevent double-spending without requiring an on-line trusted party or tamper-resistant software or hardware."

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4268195

2008
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20100042841A1/en

2011
First bitcoin forks, tonal bitcoin and litecoin, released
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=218388.0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litecoin


November 16 2011
Largest bitcoin transaction, 500,000 BTC at $2.26
https://siliconangle.com/2011/11/17/500000-bitcoins-transferred-in-one-exchange/
Transaction ID: 29a3efd3ef04f9153d47a990bd7b048a4b2d213daaa5fb8ed670fb85f13bdbcf

2014
Email arrives from satoshin@gmx.com, Satoshi's original email, presumed as hacked
https://www.coindesk.com/hacker-hijacks-satoshi-nakamoto-email

April 2014
Gavin Andresen steps down as lead developer
https://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-steps-bitcoins-lead-developer

2015
Forum hack. I wonder if there are other references?

My rating is not speculation. The forum was hacked last year, during which time, password hashes to all the accounts were leaked. Based on the length of time since your account was last active, it is reasonable to conclude that someone with access to the password hashes was able to figure out the prior password to your account. I don't think the original owner will come back for his account, however unless you got a signed message, the account is almost certainly hacked.

2021
Jan 2021
"A double spend"
https://phemex.com/academy/bitcoin-double-spending
https://medium.com/deribitofficial/was-there-a-bitcoin-double-spend-on-jan-20-2021-45bdbd178c58

19 Feb 2021
Bitcoin market reaches $1 trillion for first time
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/bitcoin-hits-1-trillion-in-market-value-as-cryptocurrency-surge-continues.html

6 Apr 2021
Cryptocurrency market reaches $2 trillion for first time
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/06/cryptocurrency-market-cap-tops-2-trillion-for-the-first-time.html

Notable Deceased
Hal Finney
Dave
Len Sassaman https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33618.msg420597#msg420597
Mircea Popescu
John McAffee