Nick Szabo's personal blog, active from 2005 to 2018, where the bit gold creator posted his own essays on money, law, and Bitcoin's origins.
9 entries / 0 threads
Szabo on why Bitcoin took so long: the "why" was the biggest stumbling block, bit gold dated to 1998 on the same private list as b-money, and Nakamoto fixed a security shortcoming in his design.
Nick Szabo's May 2011 blog post on why digital cash took eleven years to get from bit gold (1998) to Bitcoin (2009). It names libtech as the private list where bit gold and b-money grew in parallel.
Asked why bit gold needs puzzles at all, Szabo suggests the issuing algorithm could be run by many parties in parallel by Byzantine agreement, and weighs its pull toward inflation.
Szabo corrects a slip in his call for help: it should have read "no more wasteful than gold mining," since bit gold rests on an unforgeable, timestamped auditing log anyone can check.
Asked whether bit gold pools could hide fakes as mortgages did, Szabo answers that bit gold minimizes trust through strong security, and its public title registry means supply cannot be hidden.
On his Unenumerated blog, Nick Szabo asks for help implementing bit gold, his 1998 design. No one responds. Six and a half months later, Satoshi publishes a whitepaper that never mentions bit gold.
In a comment on his Unenumerated blog replying to a reader's criticism of bit gold's tranching design, Nick Szabo asks for help building a demo. No one responds publicly.
The first comment under "Bit gold" had nothing to do with bit gold: a tax blogger said she had cited one of Szabo's papers. Szabo thanked her and pointed to his article on value measurement and taxes.
Szabo lays out bit gold: unforgeably costly bits made from proof of work, securely timestamped, chained so each piece sets the next challenge, and owned by position in a distributed title registry.