Hacker News Reader

the citations of the paper is incomplete also, in that it does not mention finney's RPOW from 2004: http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/

quoting from there: "Security researcher Nick Szabo has coined the term bit gold for information objects which are provably costly to create"

bitgold as it was publicly described in 2005 was different than bitcoin in that there was a market for the tokens. bitcoin uses an agreement mechanism to establish the difficulty.

View on HN

This would make sense because Szabo's initial post about Bit Gold does mention RPOW, so any search for RPOW would immediately lead back to Szabo.

Szabo also appears to have forward-dated his posts talking about implementing Bit Gold so that they appear to be written after BitCoin was released.

It's the worst date faking attempt in history if that was his intention - I think he republished his 2005 story after bitcoin to point out that he came up with these ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com