A few days ago, thanks to Adam Back (cryptographer and Co-Founder / CEO blockstream), we got a direct historical post on digital money and it is highly probable that it comes directly from the creator of Bitcoin – Satoshi Nakamoto.
We quote directly from the source:
“I wouldn’t say ecash has to use blinding, but I would argue it would be a misuse of the word “ecash”, if something which was revocable were dubbed ecash.
With that definition it is not technically possible to implement electronic cash at all without tamper resistant hardware, because reliance on a mint, or double spend database means your “cash” can become worthless over night if someone (say a government) decides to switch off a computer (the one holding the double spending database).”
As we can see already in 1999, the e-money theme was up-to-date. The creator of this e-mail notes that e-cash requires hardware that is tamper-proof so that the government does not shut down the system overnight and your money is worthless.
The e-mail creator also mentioned alternatives that could work:
- The first could be a double-spending database that would run in parallel on a large number of servers, making it impossible to shut it down.
- In the second variant, a measurable amount and computational work called hashcash is already mentioned, he claimed that it is impossible to falsify and this method could be a really robust payment system and recommends to continue in development.
It is really questionable whether it was Satoshi Nakamoto, but the definition and view of digital money are very similar to today’s model of Bitcoin and the whole network.
Sources:
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin’s original reference implementation.
As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. In the process, Nakamoto was the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency using a peer-to-peer network. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010. /wiki
