[tek-cyb-org]

Bitocin has been in the works since the 80's. There have been many papers trying to get to the point we are at now so you can say that bitcoin is just version 1.0. Other teams and people (cypherpunks) have been working on this for a while.

[CalChris]

Even further. Bitcoin really stems from Merkle Trees which were patented in 1979 [1]. But most of the ideas are present in Szabo's bitgold [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US4309569

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo#Bit_gold