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title: Innovations before Bitcoin
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# Innovations before Bitcoin

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Before Bitcoin, there were many pioneers who practiced the idea of an electronic payment system, but only Bitcoin was ultimately successful, while all other projects failed.

A closer look at the technology used by Satoshi to implement Bitcoin is actually a matter of solving problems as they come up in the building process.

Most of the technologies used in Bitcoin were proposed more than a decade ago (1990+), and Satoshi finally put them together by introducing the PoW consensus mechanism.

[This article](https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/) is a good review of the process of developing bitcoin and gives the reader an intuitive understanding of why these technologies were introduced. What problems are they designed to solve?

A look back at the pioneers of Bitcoin:

- David Chaum first applied digital signature to paper money in 1983, and developed blind signature technology to solve the double-spending problem. DigiCash, Inc. and patented the technology he developed.
- Many believe that Bitcoin's non-corporate (cathedral) marketplace (open source community) development model is a major reason for its success.
- Adam Back invented hashCash in 1997 to solve the spam problem, which used the idea of using mathematical calculations to increase the cost of abusing server resources (PoW).
This type of idea was proposed by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor back in 1993, mainly to solve the spam problem Bitcoin's PoW is directly borrowed from hashcash and is directly mentioned in the white paper.
- Later Wei Dai (the Wei who is the smallest unit of Ether) proposed b-money in 1998, and Nick Szabo (the one who first proposed smart contracts) also proposed the idea of bit-gold in 1998.
These two projects are already very close to what became bitcoin, they are also a p2p network, but without introducing a consensus mechanism, each node does not synchronize all transactions and only maintains what it thinks is the correct ledger.
- Why is Satoshi building and solving problems at the same time? 
In Satoshi Nakamoto's own words: "Most academics write down their theories first and then put their ideas into practice, but I'm the complete opposite. I had to write all the code first to convince myself that the idea could solve any problem, and then I wrote the theory. I think I can make the code public before I can write the specific details of the theory".
- The importance of deductive methods (especially first principles) can also be understood from Bitcoin's success: in the early days many so-called professionals didn't believe Bitcoin could work, simply because all past attempts had failed, so they (by simple induction) felt that this time it was bound to fail too.
This bias came from not understanding the underlying details of Bitcoin, or even not bothering to understand.