Duality: An excerpt
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
I think the question that is most often brought up about bitcoin, is why. Why was it created at all? And
the answer, as plainly visible as anyone could see, I
In creating bitcoin, much thought went into how to
explored the possibility of anonymous
explored the possibility of anonymous
Untraceable Electronic Cash he
embedded in the coinbase of the first genesis block.
integrate already existing ideas from
the cypherpunk community. Ideas proposed by individuals like Adam Back, Wei Dai, David Chaum, and
Hal Finney.
David Chaum preceded me by almost twenty years, but with his paper
transactions using a number of cryptographic protocols. Its
inherent flaw however, was that it was centralized. And like all things, people can lose trust in
something that is controlled by one authority.
Still, it paved the way in showing us (as in cypherpunks) at least that anonymous transactions were
possible.
The principles for bitcoin originated from the cypherpunks, a community I naturally gravitated to as a
fourteen year old, a place where anonymity was as fundamental as breathing, where in order for
genuine freedom of speech to exist in an open society one had to be able to fully and anonymously
express themselves.