With Bitcoin, we have seen extraordinary hype, with astronomical price booms and busts, and thousands of spin-off cryptocurrencies and private blockchains that are all just variations of the original
A mysterious, anonymous entity known as “Satoshi Nakamoto” posted a white paper on October 31 2008 entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. It was the first time that the concept of Bitcoin entered the world.|BS| But outside of the cypherpunk mailing lists – those promoting the use of privacy-enhancing technology – this event was hardly noticed. Ten years on, who hasn’t at least heard of the cryptocurrency?
On just nine pages, the white paper explained how the Bitcoin system would work. Many attempts at electronic cash had already been made going right back to computer scientist David Chaum’s “Digicash” developed in the 1980s. Using an intricate dance of cryptography, Digicash enabled people to pay each other online anonymously, yet prevented users from sending the same money to two different people at the same time (the so-called “double spending problem”).Read More..
Nakamoto’s vision
Business Standard|Previous attempts came close to creating secure digital cash, but there was always one major problem they encountered: the need for a trusted third party like a bank to maintain the system in some way. Nakamoto’s white paper solved this problem by distributing the process of maintaining a totally transparent public ledger (known as the blockchain) among a network of competing “miners”.
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