Why did Satoshi Nakamoto create Bitcoin? In his latest blog post, “How Bitcoin Won the Race…,” Dr. Craig Wright gives the world some background information about why Bitcoin was created.
Dr. Wright begins by explaining that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency because it is not encrypted. He goes on to say that the idea of a digital currency was not necessarily new when Bitcoin was created and that many projects came before Bitcoin that aimed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash—although their intended uses were not always honest.
“The race was one of finding and implementing an anonymous digital currency system that would work. It was a race to create a cryptocurrency that could spread and be implemented across society before an alternative digital currency could be found,” says Dr. Wright. “The alternative, which they did not want to see, was Bitcoin. You see, Bitcoin is not encrypted in any form. Bitcoin presents sheer cleartext, and Bitcoin is completely traceable.”
As we all know today, Bitcoin is the only digital cash system from the era of electronic cash projects that survived into the future and inspired the many blockchain networks that came after it. Although this is the case, Bitcoin did find some inspiration from some of the earlier projects, in particular, the digital cash project that Wei Dai wanted to create.
“Wei Dai (1998) wanted to work on an anonymous form of digital currency. One that could not be cracked or altered. His first protocol presents what most individuals want Bitcoin to be. A redefined version of the second protocol is what I used to create Bitcoin,” said Dr. Wright, before going on to discuss the new elements that he introduced to a few of the core concepts in Dai’s system to create what we know as Bitcoin.
Dr. Wright goes on to talk about mining digital currency, the limitations and legal bindings of commercial nodes, the alert key in Bitcoin, as well as decentralization, the lack of decentralization in a few blockchain networks, and the implications that their lack of decentralization has.
To find out more about why Bitcoin was created, some of the earliest digital currencies created by cypherpunks and the incentives they had to build out their projects, as well as, miners on the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin alert key, and decentralization, you can find out more in Dr. Craig S. Wright’s latest blog post, “How Bitcoin Won the Race…”
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