Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 16

Bring together the Internet, complicated online transactions, a fear of using credit cards online, a desire for cash-like anonymous online transactions, and David Chaum’s work in the ’80s (see preceding section), and what do you end up with?

You get DigiCash, for a start, David Chaum’s 1990 digital-cash system. Unfortunately, Mr. Chaum seems to be early for the party too often, and DigiCash was out of business by 1998. There was also E-Gold, a digital cash system supposedly backed by gold, DEC’s Millicent (yes, yes, most of you are too young to remember DEC, too… . I’m starting to feel old writing this “historical” section), First Virtual, CyberCash, b-money, Hashcash, eCash, Bit Gold, Cybercoin, and many more. There was also Beenz, with $100 million in investment capital; Flooz, endorsed by Whoopi Goldberg (no, really!); Liberty Reserve (shut down after being accused of money laundering); and China’s QQ Coins.

With the exception of QQ Coins, still in use on Tencent’s QQ Messaging service, all these digital currencies are gone. Notably, many of these early digital currencies were in one way or another centralized with a trusted third-party intermediary.

Digital currency was not over, though. It got off to a rough start, with much trial and error, but plenty of people still thought that the world needed cash-like (in other words, anonymous) online transactions. A new era was about to begin: The cryptocurrency era.

The earlier digital currencies also depended on cryptography, it’s true, but they were never known as cryptocurrencies. It wasn’t until cryptocurrency was combined with a blockchain in 2008 that the term cryptocurrency started to gain usage, and the term really didn’t begin to appear widely until around 2012. (Blockchain? It’s a special form of database, but we’ll describe in more detail later in this chapter.)