I was curious about bitcoin's origin (not so much with a name but in how and why it was developed) and looked into it a bit yesterday. My summary: Satoshi used one or more of the commerical payment systems of the late 90s/early 2000s, wanted something like that that didn't rely on the trust of a particular third party, and realized that hashcash + Haber and Stornetta's public timestamp system could achieve that. Satashi wrote the code first (C++ on Windows), worked out the practical details, then wrote the bitcoin paper to summarize the key ideas and calculate the properties the system had. While there was some ideological basis for the idea, Satoshi was much more interested in writing code and solving a problem then in talking about the ideology. Possibly imitating the commerical systems, Satoshi did have a bit of a marketing spin.
My guess is that Satoshi did not actually know about Nick Szabo's bit gold. There seem to have been several people working on vaguely similar ideas at the time. It looks like Nick got a sense of the bitcoin way of doing things from comments on his blog maybe six months before the bitcoin paper was released (it isn't clear when the comments were made and Satoshi had already been working on code for at least a year at that point), but a couple of years after bitcoin was released Nick still seemed to like the bit gold way better. Bitcoin could be seen as a simplified bit gold, but I think it makes more sense that bitcoin is hashcash + public timestamps without direct influence from bit gold. Nick approches the issue from a much more economic theory perspective (which is really interesting reading IMO):
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-y...http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.ht...
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 11.1 ms ] threadMy guess is that Satoshi did not actually know about Nick Szabo's bit gold. There seem to have been several people working on vaguely similar ideas at the time. It looks like Nick got a sense of the bitcoin way of doing things from comments on his blog maybe six months before the bitcoin paper was released (it isn't clear when the comments were made and Satoshi had already been working on code for at least a year at that point), but a couple of years after bitcoin was released Nick still seemed to like the bit gold way better. Bitcoin could be seen as a simplified bit gold, but I think it makes more sense that bitcoin is hashcash + public timestamps without direct influence from bit gold. Nick approches the issue from a much more economic theory perspective (which is really interesting reading IMO): http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-y... http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.ht...