Clicky

On November 30, 2012, Adam Back made his first edit to the Bitcoin entry on Wikipedia. His intent was to offer clarity on the distinctions between Wei Dai’s B-money, Nick Szabo’s bit gold, Hal Finney’s RPOWs, and his own hashcash. “In 1998 Wei Dai published a description of an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system based on hashcash which he called ‘b-money'” he wrote. “Around the same time, Nick Szabo created bit gold. Like Bitcoin, Bit gold and b-money were currency systems where users would compete to solve a proof of work function, with solutions being cryptographically chained together and published via a distributed property title registry. A variant of Bit gold, called Reusable Proofs of Work, was implemented by Hal Finney. It would also be useful to point out that Bitcoin uses the hashcash cost-function and stamp or coin mechanism in which ever section talks about the use of cost-functions for minting.”

Back must have been suspicious because a year later he went a step further and updated the history of bitcoin section on Wikipedia, stating that “There has been much speculation as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto with suspects including Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and accompanying denials.”

Nick Szabo, meanwhile, was also suspicious of this group. “Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai’s case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai),” Szabo wrote on his blog on May 28, 2011. “Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme.”

Finney, by contrast, didn’t think it was any of them. “Today, Satoshi’s true identity has become a mystery,” he wrote on March 19, 2013, “But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere.”

Wei Dai, meanwhile, said in 2014 that only two people in the world were capable of creating Bitcoin at the time in question, himself and Nick Szabo, but that it wasn’t either of them. He said, “Coming up with bitcoin required someone who, a) thought about money on a deep level, and b) learnt the tools of cryptography, c) had the idea that something like Bitcoin is possible, d) was motivated enough to develop the idea into something practical, e) was technically skilled enough to make it secure, f) had enough social skills to build and grow a community around it. The number of people who even had a), b) and c) was really small ā€” ie, just Nick Szabo and me ā€” so Iā€™d say not many people could have done all these things.ā€