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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Not quite. The central ideas underpinning bitcoin are very old, tracing back to hashcash and bitgold. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash#History

It's not really an important distinction, but maybe someone will find the history interesting.

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See also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money...

(and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).

The idea of electronic money is old. What this describes is a Chaum blind-signature style centrally-cleared coin, which dates back to his 1983 paper. There is no protection against double-spends in this scheme (without the clearing agency taking an active role), and no protection against the central agency creating unlimited amounts of coin.

Proof-of-work schemes like hashcash and bitgold are much closer to hitting on the central ideas that led to Bitcoin. It's like crediting Democritus with atomic theory -- yes, he's talking about the same thing, but in such a way that the final realization is so different as to be unrecognizable.

Lots of people try to take credit for the ideas in Bitcoin (especially Adam Back, who you linked to), but Satoshi was its clear inventor.

Satoshi Nakamoto referenced Adam Back in his Bitcoin white paper. I don't see that as Adam Back ‘trying to take credit’, rather the reverse.

In that case, Ben Franklin is the inventor of the internet.

HashCash's contributions were fairly small. PoW was already invented and RPoW quickly improved upon it. I have no idea why Satoshi even referenced it.

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