The Rise and Fall of Bitcoinby Benjamin Wallace (41.9 MB. The ledger prevents fraud, but it also requires a trusted third party to administer it. If a digital dollar is just information, free from the corporeal strictures of paper and metal, what's to prevent people from copying and pasting it as easily as a chunk of text, "spending" it as many times as they want? The conventional answer involved using a central clearinghouse to keep a real-time ledger of all transactions-ensuring that, if someone spends his last digital dollar, he can't then spend it again. One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem. Other proposals followed-bit gold, RPOW, b-money-but none got off the ground. Ecash, an anonymous system launched in the early 1990s by cryptographer David Chaum, failed in part because it depended on the existing infrastructures of government and credit card companies. Yet every effort to create virtual cash had foundered. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. The idea of digital money-convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks-had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information it was clearly a pseudonym. His email address was from a free German service. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. None of the list's veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin.
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