The fictional science of psychohistory, described by Isaac Asimov, illustrates this concept well. In psychohistory, even if the actions of a particular individual cannot be predicted, future events can be predicted using statistics applied to large populations.
Both psychohistory, a concept from science fiction, and the adjacent possible, a concept from biology, have a common characteristic: the actions of specific individuals do not matter for the macro tendency.
We like to think of ourselves as special snowflakes, but actually we’re all quite commonplace with limited basic variations and a few possible personality archetypes, as the few categories in any personality test like the Holland Code (RIASEC ) or Myers-Briggs tests demonstrate.
Which raises the question: can a human being invent something really new?
The Discovery of Bitcoin
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” – Eric Hughes, Cypherpunk Manifesto , 1993
As with the image of the lone scientist, we also tend to imagine Satoshi Nakamoto in this way. But in reality, he was also on the shoulder of giants when he conceived Bitcoin.
Bitcoin may seem “new,” but in reality it is the culmination of a 30+ year process by a group of people interested in encryption and privacy. They are called “the cypherpunks.” The Cypherpunk Manifesto dates back to 1993; several attempts to resolve the issue of conveying value with privacy without the need for a trusted external validator had already been made and failed. In a nutshell, we can simplify some of the puzzle pieces of the cypherpunk memetic pool used by Satoshi:
In 1997, Adam Back created Hashcash, an anti-spam instrument that made it costly (in time and computing power) to send an email, making spam economically unfeasible.
In 2004, Hal Finney created the reusable proof-of-work (RPOW) based on Hashcash. RPOW were cryptographic tokens that could only be used once. Validation and double-spend protection was still performed on a central server.
In 2005, Nick Szabo published the proposal for “bitgold,” a digital token based on RPOW. Bitgold did not have a token limit, but imagined that the units would be valued differently according to the amount of computational processing used in their creation.
In 2008, a person operating under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, which directly cites both bitgold and Hashcash.
It was by learning from all these attempts that Satoshi was able to reach the magical possible adjacent called Bitcoin. But the truth is that, as brilliant as Satoshi was, if he hadn’t discovered Bitcoin in 2008, someone would have probably already discovered it by now.
Figure 4: Timeline of Bitcoin prehistory from Plan B tweet .
This is a guest post by Leta. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.