Re: The NSA created "CIA Project" Bitcoin - Gavin Bell (aka..Gavin Andresen in 2008)

The government didn't create bitcoin. The cypherpunks created bitcoin in one way or another.

@ jonald_fyookball quote: "But it wasn't until Satoshi invented Bitcoin that it became possible".

*Actually, bitcoin didn't become possible until Hal Finney figured out his "RPOW could be added on top of Adam Backs HashCash to create the solution for the Byzantine Generals Problem which prevented systems like BitGold/Bitcoin from being a reality.

not that it really matters, but that makes it sound like Finney invented Bitcoin, not Satoshi.
Satoshi referend POW in his white paper first, did he not?

Whoever Satoshi was he didn't invent Bitcoin alone. It was a collaboration between Satoshi, Hal Finney and Ray Dillinger building on the previous work of Adam Back and others.

I wonder how much of it was derived from Hal's work on RPOW?

To bad we can't ask them. Two out of the three are gone. Sad

Szabo(he goes onto great detail about it), and apparently Satoshi, had figured out that Hal Finneys RPOW could be used to solve the Byzantine Generals Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through game theory how a group of potential co-operators can come to the best consensus even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them. This was the final piece to the BitGold/Bitcoin puzzle.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf

http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

Szabo: "Nakamoto improved a significant security shortcoming that my design had, namely by requiring a proof-of-work to be a node in the Byzantine-resilient peer-to-peer system to lessen the threat of an untrustworthy party controlling the majority of nodes and thus corrupting a number of important security features".