"Bitcoin" by dinosaur
paper placeholders
instead of carrying physical commodities, people started using paper notes, token coins, credit cards, and electronic bank accounts to act as placeholders for actual money
instead of carrying physical commodities, people started using paper notes, token coins, credit cards, and electronic bank accounts to act as placeholders for actual money
instead of 1:1 relationship between paper notes and physical commodities, banks began to simply declare by government decree that the paper notes have value.
"We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership."
a bitcoin is defined as a chain of transactions.
"The solution we propose begins with a timestamp server. A timestamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash... The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the time, obviously, in order to get into the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it."
to prevent double spends, we must know every transaction of every coin.
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