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Why did nobody build Bitcoin before Satoshi?

Cryptographers had toyed with the idea of decentralized digital currencies since the late ‘90s. It took two whole decades more for someone to figure out how to actually do it at scale.

Perhaps some technical limitation at the node level held it back, like low memory or disk bandwidth. Or maybe it was that the slow pace of dial-up wasn’t exactly conducive to internet-based distributed computing before the dot-com boom.

Gwern, the pseudonymous internet brainiac, wondered as much in a 2011 blog — a post which immediately summoned legendary…

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