proof-of-work

Part 3 of 5. New bitcoins exist because computers race to win a lottery-style puzzle, and the prize is the right to add the next page.

Litecoin copied Bitcoin's code and rescaled four parameters by an identical factor of four, then its creator divested his entire holding, citing his own influence over the price.

Monero forked away from a currency whose founders had quietly mined 82 percent of its supply, then built a ledger that hides what Bitcoin's discloses and an emission with no final block.

Proof of work vs proof of stake, scored axis by axis with dated numbers: market cap, track record, energy, attack cost, decentralization, speed and new-chain adoption, with DPoS and PoA beside them.

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.

Ethereum's first CEO, removed in 2014, who built Cardano on the opposite design choices. His verdict on Bitcoin moved from "worth a Turing prize" to "a religion, not an ecosystem".

Twice-over fintech founder (E-Loan, Prosper) who co-founded the company that built the XRP Ledger in 2012. In 2021 he called Bitcoin's proof-of-work a technology the industry should retire.

Charlie Lee launched Litecoin on October 13, 2011 as a Bitcoin-codebase fork with Scrypt PoW, 2.5-minute blocks, and 84 M cap. He framed it as 'silver to Bitcoin's gold'.

Nick Szabo's May 2011 blog post on why digital cash took thirteen years between bit gold (1998) and Bitcoin (2009). Names libtech as the private list where bit gold and b-money developed in parallel.

Satoshi addresses concerns about Bitcoin's energy consumption, arguing it would be far less than traditional banking while acknowledging the tension between economic liberty and conservation.

Satoshi's standalone bitcoin.org explanation of the Byzantine Generals problem, using a proof-of-work chain to make the generals agree on a plan.

Satoshi responds to Hal Finney's botnet/pay-per-send point, proposing that fake mailboxes could 'reverse-spam' spammers by harvesting their POW tokens. He also describes e-gold's 'dusting' problem.

Security consultant at Periwinkle who joined the cryptography list discussion of Bitcoin in January 2009, ironically observing that botnet-controlled machines are among the most secure on the network.

Trammell shares his IP for Satoshi to send coins, says proof-hashes is open for posting, names the challenge of getting people to value bitcoins, and compares mining to a roulette wheel.

Trammell asks what prevents the most powerful node from generating the majority of bitcoins — one of the earliest questions about mining centralization.

Trammell tells Satoshi about his proof-hashes Google Group, gives feedback on the credit field display, reports running v0.1.1 and will upgrade, and offers to help test new features.

How Bitcoin nodes agree on a single chain: SHA-256d proof of work, the difficulty adjustment algorithm, block validation rules, fork resolution, and probabilistic finality.

Donald gave the difficulty its 1982 name; Satoshi claimed a solution outright, swapping the fixed world of known generals for an open one. The King's wi-fi answer became a page on bitcoin.org.

Nine pages posted to a mailing list on October 31, 2008 — already the report of an 18-month-old, working system. Met first by silence, then by doubts about scale.

Bitcoin v0.1 reuses one cypherpunk primitive (PoW from Hashcash), borrows general CS components (Merkle trees, linked timestamping, ECDSA), and synthesizes the rest (UTXO, mining, 21M cap, P2P).

Satoshi thanks Adam Back for the b-money reference and reveals he was not previously aware of Wei Dai's proposal. Historically significant line: 'my ideas start from exactly that point.'

British cryptographer and cypherpunk (born 1970) who invented Hashcash (1997). The first known person Satoshi contacted about Bitcoin (August 20, 2008). Co-founded Blockstream in 2014.

On his Unenumerated blog, Nick Szabo asks for help implementing bit gold, his 1998 digital currency design. No one responds. Six and a half months later, Satoshi publishes the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer (1964-) who conceived Bit Gold (1998) — the closest conceptual Bitcoin precursor — and coined the term smart contracts.

Adam Back replies to Wei Dai on Cypherpunks, identifying seven monetary-design issues in b-money and proposing Hashcash as the minting mechanism — a substantive analysis ten years before Bitcoin.

Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, framed within the digital-cash discourse as a stop-gap or fallback for digicash.