History

The concept of decentralized digital currency, as well as alternative applications like property registries, has been around for decades. The anonymous e-cash protocols of the 1980s and the 1990s were mostly reliant on a cryptographic primitive known as Chaumian Blinding.[8] Chaumian Blinding provided these new currencies with high degrees of privacy, but their underlying protocols largely failed to gain traction because of their reliance on a centralized intermediary. In 1998, Wei Dai’s b-money[9] became the first proposal to introduce the idea of creating money through solving computational puzzles as well as decentralized consensus, but the proposal was scant on details as to how decentralized consensus could actually be implemented. In 2005, Hal Finney introduced a concept of reusable proofs of work,[10] a system which uses ideas from b-money together with Adam Back’s computationally difficult Hashcash[11] puzzles to create a concept for a cryptocurrency, but once again fell short of the ideal by relying on trusted computing as a backend. In 2009, a decentralized currency was for the first time implemented in practice by Satoshi Nakamoto,[1c][1d] combining established primitives for managing ownership through public key cryptography with a consensus algorithm for keeping track of who owns coins, known as “proof of work.”

The mechanism behind proof of work was a breakthrough because it simultaneously solved two problems. First, it provided a simple and moderately effective consensus algorithm, allowing nodes in the network to collectively agree on a set of updates to the state of the Bitcoin ledger. Second, it provided a mechanism for allowing free entry into the consensus process, solving the political problem of deciding who gets to influence the consensus, while simultaneously preventing Sybil attacks.[12] It does this by substituting a formal barrier to participation, such as the requirement to be registered as a unique entity on a particular list, with an economic barrier - the weight of a single node in the consensus voting process is directly proportional to the computing power that the node brings. Since then, an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not its computational resources. The discussion concerning the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency.