Thanks for the pointers you gave me to Wei Dai's b-money paper and others. I just released the open source implementation of my paper, Bitcoin v0.1. Details, download and screenshots are at www.bitcoin.org The main idea of the system is the generation of a chain of hash based proof-of-work to create self evident proof of the majority consensus. Users get new coins by contributing proof-of-work to the chain. There was a discussion of the design on the Cryptography mailing list. Hal Finney gave a good high-level overview: | One thing I might mention is that in many ways bitcoin is two independent | ideas: a way of solving the kinds of problems James lists here, of | creating a globally consistent but decentralized database; and then using | it for a system similar to Wei Dai's b-money (which is referenced in the | paper) but transaction/coin based rather than account based. Solving the | global, massively decentralized database problem is arguably the harder | part, as James emphasizes. The use of proof-of-work as a tool for this | purpose is a novel idea well worth further review IMO. Satoshi
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