The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai’s “bmoney”.
The first paragraph of “bmoney”:
“I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations”. ~Wei Dai
*Below is a Tim May quote which explains why a system like Bitcoin would have to be created and launched open-sourced and anonymously:(THIS IS THE REASON)
Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”
"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.
"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".
Note: You can't give the government someone to accuse of being crazy or accuse of having connections to anti-government or terrorist groups.
^ Good Post, Here's more of Tim C. May on the subject....
Tim C. May: "This makes Yahoo, Amazon, EBay the easy targets for lawsuits by foreign governments, lawsuits by PC groups in America, boycotts(which are OK, of course), and even direct actions against corporate officers. How long will it be before corporate offices at EBay are bombed because birth control stuff is sold on EBay? How long before the President of Amazon is assassinated one night for "allowing" books like "The Satanic Verses" be sold on his system?"
"These three companies are representative of the trend toward a corporation, readily traceable to a physical location, acting as the "marketplace" location. Even more abstractly, Napster only distributed an _indexing_ application and then provided a forum for indices to be published. And yet what has happened with Napster is and was predictable. (If you set up a music pirating system, as seen by others, and paint your name and address on your back, you _will_ be sued. A bunch of us pointed this out at a CP physical meeting in early 2000, when Napster was just starting to become known.)"
"There's a better solution to this "big targets problem": peer-to-peer, a la Gnutella, Mojo, etc. No identifiable nexus of corporate control. Online clearing. Reputation intermediaries. Digital cash (not strictly needed, if N (number of sellers and buyers) is large enough and there is no central clearinghouse which can be sued.)"
"Making the agora disappear into cyberspace, whether by sheer numbers of sellers and buyers (peer-to-peer) or by robust encryption (a la BlackNet) is an important goal."
"The Theory of the Corporation" needs revisiting."
"So, what's the solution?"
"The solution is that the technology clearly exists to allow entities to reside in cyberspace. What is lacking, as always, is the means to collect untraceable digital cash..clearly a bidirectionally untraceable system, "true" digital cash, is needed." ~Tim C. May
