Wow man. That was a hell heaven of information [...] Thanks for sharing such a great article and I am sure it will help a lot of people like myself and give them more knowledge about the earlier digital financial system.
GazetaBitcoin, The reminder about what is really important is refreshing, thank you!
Thank as well for spending the time and reading this topic. I am so happy to see so many people here interested in history, libertarianism, anarchism and crypto-anarchy! I also recommend you to follow all the hyperlinks inserted thorough the text, as you'll find there even more valuable information.
This essay was very important for me, being my 1000th post and I put a lot of efforts in writing it, making the proper research, finding the quotes together with their sources, proof-reading and so on. However, the result makes me so happy: seeing it raised so much interest!
There could be a better thread for my question, yet I would like to raise a question that came into my head while I was reading OP, which I understood attempted to suggest both an ideological underpinning to bitcoin that was achieved through technological progressions and/or improvements to what ended up being bitcoin.
So, when you described b-money in OP, you suggested that it seemed to have a lot of bitcoin's attributes but it was both subject to sybil attacks, but also suffered from the problem of NOT being coded or implemented. Bit Gold was also subject to sybil attacks, and I am suspecting that the network of proof of work was not decentralized enough in bitgold so it ended up having potential hashpower manipulation vulnerabilities?
A question came in my thinking regarding what aspects of bitcoin exactly helped bitcoin to overcome the deficiencies of b money and Bit Gold? Surely, bmoney was not coded, so the lack of coding or implementation causes a considerable amount of disadvantage to figuring out how it may have possibly played out or even further developed based on having code that would have to run if it were attempted to be coded and thereafter run - even with the computing power and network (internet) limitations of the late 90s and early 2000s.
Did bitcoin overcome the sybil attack angle (even if not really completely eliminated) by making it costly to attempt to sybil attack because of proof of work and the time chain of subsequent blocks that would cause going back each block more and more expensive to attempt to undo the earlier established blocks.. so in that regard, if you have miners who are already attempting to put resources into solving the next block through their hashpower, any sybil attacker not only would have to attempt to maintain hashpower to solve the next block, but would have to continue to maintain hashpower at a kind of 51% level to be able to go back in time for each subsequent block that is mined while competing with all the other hash power?
So, I am not sure if that resolved some of the issues of the earlier proposals? Of course, wei dai had said that he was not exactly excited about the strict supply of bitcoin, and surely some kind of prolonged tail emissions would cause different issues in terms of coding. Implementing the code does likely cause a lot of the theoretical questions to have a much more likelihood of better understanding how they might play out in a variety of scenarios.
I am not sure if what I am attempting to describe is making much sense, and maybe there is a thread, an article or series of posts out there that actually address my curiosity about bitcoin's development that causes it to build upon other ideas but to be able to become much more likely to be successful as compared to its predecessors that most closely resemble it?
This post in a bitcoin prehistory thread (that I browsed through) gives a seemingly good overview description, too.
Here's one article that I found on the topic, but I am really thinking that there must be much better articles and discussion out there.