On his blog “Unenumerated” on April 10, 2008, replying to a reader’s criticism of bit gold’s tranching design, Nick Szabo put out a public call for help implementing bit gold:
Quote from: Nick Szabo on April 10, 2008, 3:53:00 AM UTC…it would greatly benefit from a demonstration, an experimental market (with e.g. a trusted third party substituted for the complex security that would be needed for a real system). Anybody want to help me code one up?
This request went unanswered publicly. Six and a half months later, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper — a design that solved problems bit gold had left open, the need for a trusted third party among them, without citing or mentioning bit gold. Szabo’s original bit gold blog post was dated December 2005, but the blog’s timestamps were later found to have been modified, complicating the precise chronology.
This implementation-request post is the load-bearing primary source in several later analyses and reports that treat Szabo’s bit-gold proximity to Bitcoin. The Nick Szabo biography treats it as the late-2008 turning point in Szabo’s pre-Bitcoin record; Szabo’s own 2011 retrospective “Bitcoin, what took ye so long?” reads it from inside; and the post-2013 identification corpus — the Skye Grey TechCrunch stylometric report, the Popper NYT investigation, the Szabo identity hypothesis, and the identity-hypotheses overview — uses this post as a documented anchor for the “Szabo was actively recruiting for a bit-gold implementation immediately before Bitcoin shipped” data point.
