Bitcoin – was it the first decentralised project?

Bitcoin has revolutionised the world of finance and is rightly considered the first cryptocurrency. Its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, created a digital asset that solved many of the problems of the fiat money system by offering unique value in terms of anonymity, deflationary nature, or the lack of a central entity to control the flow of funds. However, before Bitcoin, were there ideas to create other assets that could be laboriously called digital currencies?

Bitcoin - what solutions does it leverage? 

The world's oldest cryptocurrency is based on cryptography, which, as a scientific discipline, offered many unique solutions to Satoshi Nakamoto when designing BTC. Asymmetric cryptography itself, i.e. that which uses a public key and a private key, has been known since the 1970s, with many of its solutions developed by Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie. It was also developed by mathematicians Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who gave rise to the popular RSA algorithm. Proof-of-Work, on the other hand, was a spam defence mechanism proposed in 1993 by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor. In itself, the Peer-to-Peer model before Bitcoin was used in, for example, Torrents, which used to be very popular. 

Were there any other interesting concepts before Bitcoin?

Bitcoin was the first blockchain-based project that achieved success on a global scale. Before it, however, there were also initiatives similar in some aspects. Let's take a closer look at them. 
 

B-Money

In 1998, computer scientist and cryptographer Wei Dai attempted to create B-Money. The project envisaged a distributed system where each participant would keep a copy of his or her account register and balances and use only a pseudonym to ensure anonymity. Transactions would take place by sending messages to the entire network. The second protocol of the project envisaged the occurrence of Proof-of-Work to verify the execution of contracts. The project was never realised, but it has some similarities with Bitcoin. 

DigiCash

In 1989, one of the pioneers of cryptography, David Chaum, founded DigiCash. The aim was to create an anonymous payment system. The project had a number of interesting developments, such as blind signatures allowing data to be signed without revealing its contents to the bank, which was to be the central point of the system issuing the system's currency, E-Cash. Coins were to be the payment unit even outside the system for entities that would accept them. Due to the system's complexity and lack of acceptance, the project failed to gain popularity, and the company eventually went bankrupt. 

Bit Gold

In 1998, a well-known computer scientist and cryptographer, Nick Szabo, designed a system that would not require the operation of any central authority. It was a distributed registry of transactions verified by users via Proof-of-Work. In concept, the project was very similar to modern Bitcoin. It aimed to become a reserve currency or the basis for other digital currencies. Bit Gold was never realised and remained only at the concept stage. The reason was the lack of community support and acceptance of the project. At the time, technology was also not advanced enough to provide the right environment to develop such an innovative initiative. As an interesting side note, Nick Szabo also created the concept of smart contracts. 
 

Bitcoin is one of its kind

Does the fact that some of the elements that make up Bitcoin have been around before make it less unique? Science is a field where one takes what has been discovered so far and enriches it with new developments. Satoshi Nakamoto created the first cryptocurrency in part from solutions that already existed, but the Bitcoin blockchain as we know it today was very unique at the time. The theoretical concept of how the network would work and what benefits it would provide made it a major financial phenomenon of the 21st century.