A new HBO documentary airing on Oct. 8 has teased that they have discovered the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.
While it could be a marketing trick, the announcement has fueled renewed speculation as to who could be the inventor of Bitcoin.
One person that has been tipped as the potential real Satoshi is Nick Szabo, an American cryptographer, legal scholar and computer scientist who has contributed greatly to the blockchain sector since the early 90s.
That’s to say Szabo was contributing to blockchain before Bitcoin was even a thing.
Szabo graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer science in 1989. He also holds a Juris Doctor degree from George Washington University Law School.
In 1994 Szabo introduced the term “smart contracts” to bring legal surety into the digital realm via code. Smart contracts went on to become the basis of the wider blockchain industry.
In 1998 Szabo proposed a new form of currency called “bit gold.” Szabo’s bit gold was different from other currencies because it was entirely digital, it didn’t require any intermediaries and solved the double-spend problem via proof-of-work.
Szabo’s bit gold network used a chain of proof-of-work cryptographic solutions but relied on a quorum of addresses rather than a quorum of computing power to reach consensus. This is said to have made bit gold susceptible to Sybil attacks.
Szabo went on to describe the reasoning for his theoretical currency thusly: “A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party for its value. As many inflationary and hyperinflationary episodes during the 20th century demonstrated, this is not an ideal state of affairs.”
If you anything about Bitcoin and this all sounds more than a little familiar to you, you’re not the only one to spot the similarities. Bit gold is widely considered to be one of the major precursors to Bitcoin.
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In Oct 2008, 10 years after Szabo first proposed bit…
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