The concept of decentralized digital currency,
as well as alternative applications
like property registries,
has been around for decades.
The anonymous e-cash protocols
of the 1980s and the 1990s,
mostly reliant on a cryptographic primitive
known as Chaumian blinding,
provided a currency with
a high degree of privacy,
but the protocols largely failed to gain traction
because of their reliance on
a centralized intermediary.
In 1998, Wei Dai's b-money
became the first proposal
to introduce the idea
of creating money
through solving computational puzzles
as well as decentralized consensus,
but the proposal was scant
on details as to how decentralized consensus
could actually be implemented.
In 2005, Hal Finney introduced
a concept of "reusable proofs of work",
a system which uses ideas from b-money
together with Adam Back's
computationally difficult Hashcash puzzles
to create a concept
for a cryptocurrency,
but once again fell short of the ideal
by relying on trusted computing
as a backend.
In 2009, a decentralized currency
was for the first time implemented in practice
by Satoshi Nakamoto,
combining established primitives
for managing ownership
through public key cryptography
with a consensus algorithm
for keeping track of who owns coins,
known as "proof-of-work".
25 июн 2024
