Содержание статьи:
- Hal Finney, the optimistic computer scientist
- RPOW: reusable proofs of work
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Bitcoin did not come out of nowhere and emerged from a general context mixing technique, ideology and experiments. We were thus able to note that the various attempts at digital currency, whether with eCash, e-gold or Liberty Reserve, had ended in failure because of their centralized infrastructure. Furthermore, if systems emancipating from a central authority such as b-money and bit gold have been conceptualized, they have never been implemented. However, a third model was implemented on the Internet in 2004: the RPOW system, designed by Hal Finney. This is why it is the most advanced version of decentralized electronic money before Bitcoin.
Contrary to what one can sometimes imagine, the concept of proof of work used to give rarity to a digital token is not new. Indeed, in 1998, the Hashcash algorithm was found in the idea of ??b-money by Wei Dai in order to maintain the value of the token around that of a basket of goods, and Nick Szabo imagined a similar method to give a rarity cannot be forged with its bit gold, a digital reserve currency.
Besides that, we have also seen the concept appear in academic projects. In 1996, Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir (the R and S of RSA encryption) imagined MicroMint, a centralized micropayment system whose corners must have been impossible to counterfeit. In 2003, the Karma system was described by Emin Gun Sirer and two of his students: it was a currency model to prevent parasitism in file sharing protocols such as BitTorrent. In this model, users were expected to have karma units to download, which they obtained either by sharing content or by making it with their computer processor.
However, all of these ideas have remained theoretical and have never been implemented publicly on the Internet. It wasn't until 2004 that a model was implemented correctly: the reusable proof of work system, also called the RPOW system, invented by Hal Finney. So let's find out who this man is before we take a look at the system he designed and the potential impact he had on Bitcoin.
Hal Finney, the optimistic computer scientist
Harold Thomas Finney II, known as “Hal Finney”, was an American computer scientist and cryptographer, known for having participated in the cypherpunk movement and for having worked on PGP encryption software in the 1990s, as well as for being the first recipient of a bitcoin transaction. Like Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, he is one of the people most suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto because of his unique abilities and experience in the field of digital currencies.
Hal Finney was born on May 4, 1956 in Coalinga, a small town in California located halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. His father was an petroleum engineer for the Union Oil Company of California, causing his family to relocate several times soon after his birth.
After six years in Lousiane and two years in Texas, the family returns to California to settle in Temple City in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where Hal will grow up. Coincidence: it is also the city where Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto lives, an American of Japanese origin that Newsweek will (wrongly) present as the creator of Bitcoin in 2014.
Hal Finney goes to high school in Arcadia, where he learns how to program FORTRAN using punch cards. According to Andy Greenberg who interviewed his former comrades, Hal Finney shows exceptional intelligence, remarkable independence of mind, and moves in the halls of the school with a copy of the novel (Atlas Shrugged) by Ayn Rand under the arm.
In 1974, he joined the prestigious California Institute of Technology (commonly abbreviated as Caltech) in Pasadena, where he studied engineering science. There he meets his future wife, Fran Wetter, who is already in the third year of biology. Their romance begins in 1976 after Fran graduated. Although he is very athletic, Hal Finney hates the requirement to take physical education classes and dries them regularly, which leads him to repeat his fourth and final year of study.
Nevertheless, he is taking advantage of this year to start his professional life. In fact, in 1978, Hal started working for APh Technological Consulting, a small firm which was responsible for conceptualizing and maintaining the operating system of the Intellivision video game console for Mattel, and which also designed certain games for this. console and for the Atari. Hal will work on different games like Adventures of Tron.
Hal Finney and Fran in 1978, on APh premises
Hal and Fran married in 1979 after graduating from Hal. They start a family: their son Jason was born in 1983, and their daughter, Erin, in 1985. After APh, Hal Finney worked for Ametek for a few years. Then in 1991, the family moved to Santa Barbara, on the coast west of Los Angeles, where Hal was hired by Greenhill Software.
It was also around the same time that the Internet emerged, with Prodigy and especially the web, that the Finneys adopted from the start. This easy access to the Internet allows Hal Finney to communicate with those who think like him, and who have the same independence of mind. He thus became a cypherpunk from the start of the movement and participated enormously on the mailing lists. On November 15, 1992, he wrote about cryptography (notably that developed by David Chaum):
“Here we are faced with the problems of loss of confidentiality, deceptive computing, massive databases, increased centralization - and Chaum offers a completely different direction to follow, one that puts power between hands of individuals rather than those of governments and businesses. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them. ”
At the same time, he got in touch with Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the encryption software PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). Enthused by the project, Hal Finney began to help him and worked on version 2 of the program, which was published worldwide in September 1992. In February 1993, the American federal government launched an investigation against PGP, because the software violated the law on the export of cryptographic products, then considered as ammunition. This case will show Hal Finney what leverage a state has when it dislikes what its citizens do. When he left office in 1996, Hal Finney was one of the first employees to join PGP Inc., the newly formed company to develop the software, where he worked until his retirement in 2011.
Beside PGP, Hal Finney is interested in many other things. He launched the first anonymous email remailer in the early 1990s. Then he participated in the experiments of digital currencies of the time like eCash, the Hawthore Exchange or Magic Money.
Finally, as an eternal optimist, it is only natural that he also joins extropians, these optimistic transhumanists wanting to radically improve the human condition using technology, which also include Timothy May, Wei Dai or Nick Szabo.
RPOW: reusable proofs of work
Inspired by all the ideas that revolve around proof of work (notably b-money and bit gold), Hal Finney worked in the 2000s on his own system of digital tokens which he called reusable proofs of work, abbreviated as RPOW.
Hal Finney announced the RPOW system on August 15, 2004 on the cypherpunk mailing list. The announcement is also being moved to the Metzdowd.com crypto mailing list, where Satoshi Nakamoto will announce Bitcoin a few years later. Among others, RPOW attracts the attention of Ray Dillinger (bear) and Adam Back. In addition to his announcement, Finney gives a link to the site dedicated to this use, rpow.net, where he presents the different aspects of the project in detail and makes available the program code, published in open source.
The general idea behind RPOW is to allow proof of work, which has a measurable value according to an objective criterion, to be transferred from person to person. In the section called RPOW Theory, Finney writes:
"Mining and making gold takes effort and expense, which inherently makes them scarce. Gold coins can then be passed from one person to another, and each recipient can verify the authenticity of the coinage. Likewise, creating RPOW tokens requires a certain amount of effort and expense. They all start with a Hashcash collision which, in the highest degree, will take hours or even days of calculation to be created. RPOW tokens can be validated and verified upon receipt by being exchanged for a new RPOW token on the RPOW server. This allows them to be passed from one person to another just like parts. ”
Part 2: https://cryptofans.ru/cryptoplanet/hal-finneys-rpows-and-bitcoin-how-does-reusable-proofs-of-wo-xgdjwvx
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