Quote from: L.Detweiler on November 15, 2014, 01:42:23 AM

Quote from: jdbtracker on November 14, 2014, 07:08:51 PM

I am pretty sure we cannot truly know the answer of who this person really is, but should we care? I personally don't; I just want to know their mind.

And I've already read it so, I just want to find out what the people of this forum think.

History:

-1992 The Cypherpunks create an anonymous mailer for like-minded users to share ideas.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc.)
https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html

-1995 Tim May posts a call to the Cypherpunks to create a decentralised electronic currency.
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

-1995 Nick Szabo answers Tims call(He also has smart contracts to include once it gets going)
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

1996 Wei Dai PipeNet 1.1
http://www.weidai.com/pipenet.txt

-1997 Tim Mays Anonymous Digital Cash paper.
http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm

1997 Adam Backs Hashash
http://www.hashcash.org/

- 1998 Wei Dai elaborates on Tims idea for a digital currency and called it Bmoney.(It reads like the beginning idea of BitGold/Bitcoin)
http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

-1998 Szabo had a simular more detailed idea BitGold soon after Dais paper and he worked relentlessly on making that idea work.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00988.htmle

-1999 Szabo mentions bitgold and talk of a special ASIC type chip that could be used for mining.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html

-2001 Tim May explains a system like BitGold/Bitcoin would have to be released anonymous:
https://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@lne.com/msg00080.html

- 2004 Hal Finneys RPOW was the missing piece of the puzzle. RPOW was added on top of Adam Backs HashCash. (The solution for the Byzantine Generals Problem which allows BitGold/Bitcoin to be completed)
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

-2004 Wei Dais c++ library
http://www.cryptopp.com/

-2005 Nick Szabo publishes BitGold paper.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1

2007 Szabo Blogging about two ideas. BitGold and Scarce Objects(finite supply like Bitcoin)
Note: These two ideas put together is Bitcoin.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

2007 Satoshi (at a later date) says he started putting Bitcoin together.
http://m.benzinga.com/article/3563567

-2008 Szabo calls out to the cypherpunk types for help to finalize coding BitGold and run a test net a few months before the white paper gets published online.
*Szabos post for assistance:
Bitgold would greatly benefit from a demonstration, an experimental market (with e.g. a trusted third party substituted for the complex security that would be needed for a real system). Anybody want to help me code one up?
https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/

-Satoshi Nakamoto appears out of thin air and introduces Bitcoin right in the middle of the economic crisis that was saturated in the news at that time and then disappears.

*Szabo has extensively studied British history for his legal and monetary theories (its hard to miss this if youve read his essays), so I do not regard the Britishisms as a point against Szabo. ~ gwern

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching BitcoinThat purpose is fulfilled. The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him. Thus ends the story.

*Hal Finney quote: How do you find someone who has spent a lifetime covering his tracks?For some, he was a guardian angel. others, a ghost, who never quite fit inWhats the S stand for?

I got a couple of PM's about leaving someone out of this list so here it is:

Nick Szabo: (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)..Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme.

There seems to be one other person with the motivation that Szabo says would be needed to create Bitcoin:

2007
Zooko quote: Nick Szabo is a very interesting thinker whose domain includes law,
economics, networking, cryptography, and so on. Ive been acquainted with his ideas for many years (starting with his inspiring and mind- expanding Smart Contracts, which I became aware of in approximately 1996). He has just now posted a blog entry about Allmydata-Tahoe economics:
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000025.html

2007
Zooko quote: I want to invent something else: a truly decentralized economic mechanism. Research that points in this direction includes the sub-field of algorithmic mechanism design within economic game theory, some peer-to-peer research such as GNUnet, Wei Dais and Nick Szabos ideas about bit gold, Nick Szabos smart contracts, and much more. Another inspiration is BitTorrents tit-for-tat mechanism, which is decentralized and minimal, but gets the job done within its limited problem domain.
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000022.html

2007 Szabo applies BitGold and his Scarce Object theory to Zookos p2p hard drive project with "Nanobarter"
Szabo: One possible answer to central mint vulnerability is bit gold a currency the value of which does not depend on any particular trusted third party. Another alternative is (an object barter economyScarce Objects).
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

2007 Szabo's "Nanobarter" (READ THIS LINK)
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m= 1

2007/2008 Zooko c++
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3

Zooko quote 26 January 2009(right after Bitcoins release, seems to be pointing people to Bitcoin)

"What I want is a currency which everyone can cheaply and conveniently use but which no-one has the power to manipulate. No-one has the power to inflate or deflate the currency supply, no-one has the power to monitor, tax, or prevent transactions. Truly the digital equivalent of gold, during the times and places when gold was the universal currency. See the BitGold idea by Nick Szabo and b-money idea by Wei Dai, and recent effort to actually implement something along these lines: BitCoin by Satoshi Nakamoto."

Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:42 PM

"Gwern's post fails to appreciate the technical advances that BitCoin originated."

"I have been trying, off and on, to invent a decentralized digital payment system for fifteen years (since I was at DigiCash). I wasn't sure that a practical system was even *possible*, until BitCoin was actually implemented and became as popular as it has. Scientific advances often seem obvious in retrospect, and so it is with BitCoin."

Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:44 PM

"Oh wait, I have to revise this, as I remember trying to invent a decentralized digital payment system in about 1995, which was before I joined DigiCash. :-)"

NOTE: I emailed Dominic Frisby after he released his new book:

D.Frisby: "Yes, I looked at Zooko. In fact he was one of my main suspects at one stage - although I hadn't seen those posts that you sent through so thank you."

D.Frisby: "I had some people look at his C++ and was told it didn't match. I'm afraid I'm relying on the expertise of others here."

D.Frisby: "Look at Zooko on Twitter and you'll see lots of exchanges between him and Szabo. Indeed Zooko is one of the first people Szabo followed. He's definitely in the mix somewhere."

D.Frisby: "Maybe in the next book I'll look further at that possibility. I found it hard to see beyond Szabo. I'll admit."