Thats the point Adam is making. "Anyway I claim the hard part about bitcoin is the decentralised secure inflation control (and sybil resistant byzantine generals solution.) "
Yes. And the second part (sybil resistant BGP solution) is maybe not as critical - ie if we imagine that Satoshi didnt find that solution, or it were broken unexpectedly, could we repair bitcoin and have it still work, just not as elegantly/securely whatever?
I think the answer is probably yes: use a conventional identity based BGP solution (of which there are existing eg Lamport himself in the original paper up to 1/3 malicious players) and work-around the identity problem by copying what i2p did for its identities from 1998 or the nymservers (pseudonymous mixmaster related mail service) did - require hashcash to create identities. You might need to tune some stuff - eg the identities must be timestamped, time-limited use etc but probably you could make that work. Doesnt seem so removed from how bitcoin sybil resistant BGP works even so maybe thats how Satoshi arrived at it.
The former question though decentralised secure inflation control, people who were trying to figure this out in 1997/1998 were mostly aiming for $-adjusted zero inflation which isnt possible without exeternal price feeds which are not decenralised/machine-measurable.
Adam
I remember knowing about HashCash being related to email, I just didn't remember the name of it until BitCoin....
Szabo(BitGold), and apparently Satoshi(BitCoin), had figured out that Hal Finneys “RPOW” could be used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through “game theory” how a group of potential co-operators can come to the best consensus even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them. This was the final piece to the BitGold/Bitcoin puzzle.
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm“RPOW” was added on top of Adam Back’s “HashCash”. (The solution for the Byzantine General’s Problem which allows BitGold/Bitcoin to be completed).
Note: BitCoin was released anonymous. There are reasons BitGold and RPOW are not mentioned. Why was Bmoney cited?
The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai’s “bmoney”.
The first paragraph of “bmoney”: (read carefully)
“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
Why......
The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.
Why anonymous?
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: it seems BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" papers(look at "url's" for correct dates). What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known. Szabo & Zooko or maybe Jim McCoy? We may never know. IMHO...Szabo and Hal made all this possible in one way or another. They had dedicated their lives since at least 1993 to bring an anonymous digital currency to us.
Thank you for HashCash. Without it BitCoin would not exist.
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