Could Bitcoin Have Launched in the 1990s – Or Was Satoshi Waiting?
With the internet, elliptic curve cryptography, even Merkle trees and PoW protocols all present, Bitcoin was "technically possible" in 1994 .
Analysis
This year, October 31 marked the 14th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important white papers of this century: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Payment System" by Satoshi Nakamoto. Its 2008 publication sparked a "revolution in finance" and "heralded a new era for money, an era that derived its value not from government decree but rather from technological skill and ingenuity" , as NYDIG celebrated in its November 4 newsletter.< /p>
Many don't know, however, that Satoshi's nine-page white paper was met with some initial skepticism, even among the cypherpunk community where it first surfaced. This reluctance may be understandable since previous attempts to create a cryptocurrency have failed - David Chaum's Digicash effort in the 1990s, for example - and at first glance it didn't seem like Satoshi was bringing anything either. something new on the table in terms of technology.
“It was technically possible to develop Bitcoin in 1994,” Jan Lansky, head of the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Finance and Administration of the Czech Republic, told Cointelegraph, explaining that Bitcoin is based on three technical improvements that were available at that time: Merkle trees (1979), blockchain data structure (Haber and Stornetta, 1991), and proof of work (1993).
>Peter Vessenes, co-founder and chief cryptographer at Lamina1 - a layer 1 blockchain - basically agreed: "We certainly could have mined Bitcoin" in the early 1990s, at least from a perspective technical, he told Cointelegraph. The necessary cryptography was in hand:
"Bitcoin's elliptic curve technology is a technology from the mid-1980s. Bitcoin does not need in-band encryption like SSL; data is unencrypted and easy to transfer.
Satoshi sometimes gets credit for establishing the
With the internet, elliptic curve cryptography, even Merkle trees and PoW protocols all present, Bitcoin was "technically possible" in 1994 .
Analysis
This year, October 31 marked the 14th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important white papers of this century: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Payment System" by Satoshi Nakamoto. Its 2008 publication sparked a "revolution in finance" and "heralded a new era for money, an era that derived its value not from government decree but rather from technological skill and ingenuity" , as NYDIG celebrated in its November 4 newsletter.< /p>
Many don't know, however, that Satoshi's nine-page white paper was met with some initial skepticism, even among the cypherpunk community where it first surfaced. This reluctance may be understandable since previous attempts to create a cryptocurrency have failed - David Chaum's Digicash effort in the 1990s, for example - and at first glance it didn't seem like Satoshi was bringing anything either. something new on the table in terms of technology.
“It was technically possible to develop Bitcoin in 1994,” Jan Lansky, head of the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Finance and Administration of the Czech Republic, told Cointelegraph, explaining that Bitcoin is based on three technical improvements that were available at that time: Merkle trees (1979), blockchain data structure (Haber and Stornetta, 1991), and proof of work (1993).
>Peter Vessenes, co-founder and chief cryptographer at Lamina1 - a layer 1 blockchain - basically agreed: "We certainly could have mined Bitcoin" in the early 1990s, at least from a perspective technical, he told Cointelegraph. The necessary cryptography was in hand:
"Bitcoin's elliptic curve technology is a technology from the mid-1980s. Bitcoin does not need in-band encryption like SSL; data is unencrypted and easy to transfer.
Satoshi sometimes gets credit for establishing the
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