|
|
|
|
|
|
by acdha
3177 days ago
|
|
|
These things are always hard to judge but there's certainly plenty of prior art: there's a ton of CS history for distributed consensus, distributed attestation, etc. prior to 2007 and the proof of work concept goes back to at least the 90s – see e.g. http://www.hashcash.org or http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf. Anyone who spent time on cypherpunks-l in the 90s would also be familiar with the discussions of e-currencies like David Chaum's 1989 digicash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash) which did not use proof-of-work but did cover a lot of the same ground for anonymity, etc. |
|
|
The components of an iPhone (e.g. the touchscreen, microprocessor, RAM, SSD drive) OTOH were already mass-produced and widely adopted in consumer electronic.
I don't want to understate the iPhone's impact. It spurred the development of better LCDs, touch interfaces and especially SSDs, but it was undoubtedly still working off a more established base than Bitcoin.
The consensus algorithms predating Bitcoin required some percentage of participants to be trusted identities, so were quite different than what Bitcoin pioneered.
Hashcash was a very limited experiment that had no consensus system. Utilizing the proof of work idea of Hashcash to create an identity-less consensus system was more conceptually groundbreaking than iPhone's marriage of touch screen mobility and personal computing.
While the iPhone added a personal computer to a mobile phone, in a user friendly touchscreen package, the blockchain created something that was totally new: distributed consensus without known and trusted parties.