This essay gives a brief summary of the main early e-currencies that were developed prior to Bitcoin. And the also the people involved, who went on to work on other projects, became notorious or Satoshi contenders/pretenders.......
Quote from Satoshi Nakamoto c2010
"Alot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990's. I hope it's obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we're trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system."
DigiCash
David Chaum lead the first serious attempt at building digital money, founding the electronic money corporation DigiCash Inc in 1989.
DigiCash used novel cryptography to unsure user privacy while solving the double spend problem. The underlying algorithm was known as eCash, first published in 1982 and later improved by later cryptographers.
It lost out in user adoption against credit cards and less private payment systems like PayPal. DigiCash declared bankruptcy in 1998.
Below is part of a paper by David Chaum where he introduces the concept of "Blind Signatures For Untraceable Payments".
How the structure of the new electronic payments system must address two conflicting sets of concerns.
extent of criminal use of payments (e.g. Silk Road and money laundering)
personal privacy
MojoNation
Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow was a startup company founded by Jim McCoy to create MojoNation. Mojo was a digital cash currency.The only application built onEGTP/Mojo framework was a distributed file publishing system.
MojoNation ceased operation as a commercial enterprise in February 2004, when it was replaced by the noncommercial Mnet Project. Former employees Bram Cohen went on to create BitTorrent and Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn created Mnet out of the MojoNation source code.
Hashcash
First proposed Adam Back in 1997 and described more formally in the paper "Hashcash- A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".
Hashcash is a Proof-of-Work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks.
e-gold
The system was launched in 1996 as a digital gold currency and grew to 5 million accounts by 2009 when transfers were suspended due to legal issues.
Founded by oncologist Douglas Jackson and attorney Barry Downey. The pair originally backed the services accounts with gold coins stored in a bank safe deposit box in Melbourne, Florida.
b-money
An early proposal created by Wei Dai for an "anonymous, distributed electronic system". Published on the Cypherpunks mailing list in November 1998.
Satoshi Nakamoto referenced b-money when creating Bitcoin.
Bit gold
In 1998 Nick Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralised digital currency he called Bit gold. Bit gold was never implemented.
The phrase and concept of "smart contracts" was developed by Nick.
Nick has been a Satoshi contender/pretender....This story is still playing out
Liberty Reserve
Founded by Arthur Budovsky (Gold Age 2001-2006) after fleeing the US and settling in Costa Rica. Liberty Reserve, a centralised digital currency service, was incorporated by Arthur Budovsky in Costa Rica in 2006.
May 2013 saw Liberty Reserve shut down by US federal prosecutors under the Patriot Act for money laundering and operating an unlicensed financial transaction company.
A Timeline of Pre-Requisite Developments to Bitcoin's Blockchain
1979 : Hash Tree
1980 : public key crytography
1991 : cryptographic timestamps
1992-1993 : Proof-of-Work for spam
1997 : HashCash
1998 - 2003 : Nick Szabo, Bit Gold - concept of smart contracts - MojoNation/BitTorrent - Karma
1998 : b-money, Wei Dai
1999 - present : P2P networks
1999 - present : Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT etc.)
2001 : SHA-256 finalised
Some Other forms of Virtual Currencies
WebMoney 1998
PayPal 1998
Beenz 1998
Flooz 1999
Bitcoin, a decentralised, a non-trust-based system of e-currency was built on the work done by its predecessors.
The End.
I hope you found this post interesting and informative. I always enjoy doing the research and putting it all together.
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Nice piece of article with nice pieces of information embedded within it. Thanks man.