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21 entries / 1 thread
Hal Finney's RPOW system, a 2004 prototype for reusable proof-of-work tokens, gains posthumous recognition as one of Bitcoin's most important precursors.
Finney's RPOW FAQ: how RPOW differs from hashcash and ecash, why the central server is a crucial element rather than a bottleneck, and why the IBM 4758 was the only possible platform.
Finney's rpow.net home page: RPOW lets hashcash tokens be reused in sequence, runs on an IBM 4758 whose attestation lets anyone verify the code, and could serve as a form of Nick Szabo's bit gold.
Before reading the draft, Adam Back points Satoshi to Rivest's MicroMint paper; a 2025 profile quotes him calling his failure to read the whitepaper carefully 'probably my biggest mistake.'
On August 20, 2008 Satoshi called his C++ code nearly finished. Which precursors were in front of him by then? The earliest record for Hashcash, b-money, MicroMint, Bit Gold, DigiCash and RPOW.
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.
Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer (1964-) who conceived Bit Gold (1998) and coined the term smart contracts.
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.
Hal Finney invites the list to try rpow.net: a server that takes hashcash and issues reusable RSA-signed tokens, running on an IBM 4758 card whose signed attestation lets anyone check the code.
DigiCash's press release, forwarded to the Cypherpunks list: David Chaum demonstrates software-only electronic cash payments over the Internet at the first World Wide Web conference in Geneva.
Cryptographer who invented blind signatures at CRYPTO '82 and founded DigiCash in 1990 to build eCash, an anonymous digital currency two decades before Bitcoin. DigiCash went bankrupt in 1998.