Tatsuaki Okamoto explains why his “digital money” patent may need offered an impediment to Hal Finney in his ambition to create his personal digita
Tatsuaki Okamoto explains why his “digital money” patent may need offered an impediment to Hal Finney in his ambition to create his personal digital forex.
Six key patents
Someday earlier than Dec. 6, 2004, Hal Finney did a search in a patent database on “blind-signature primarily based money techniques”. On his web site he posted a listing of six such patents:
“This is likely to be helpful for these contemplating implementing digital money.”
4 of the patents are authored by David Chaum, the opposite two by Okamoto and his colleague at Nippon Telegraph Kazuo Ohta.
Ecash patents by Dr. Okamoto & his Nippon Telegraph colleague Dr. Kazuo Ohta. Supply: finney.org (through WayBack Machine)
Okamoto presently serves as director of the Cryptography & Data Safety Lab at NTT Analysis and holds over 100 patents. We requested him to elucidate why his patent may need offered an impediment to Hal Finney and different cypherpunks of their ambition of making a decentralized forex, contemplating that his patent entails an middleman.
Okamoto’s ecash & Nakamoto’s Bitcoin
Okamoto kindly ready diagrams elucidating the variations between the ecash system outlined in his patent and Bitcoin (BTC).
Diagram: Digital Money described in Patent 49775595. Supply: NTT Analysis
Diagram: Bitcoin. Supply: NTT Analysis
Each options use public keys as pseudonymous identities and personal keys to authorize transactions. Nonetheless, in Okamoto’s proposal, a trusted occasion varies transactions, whereas Bitcoin is trustless, with all nodes verifying transactions.
Trustless system — no trivial achievement
Contemplating this key distinction, one may ponder — why Finney and different pioneers had been so paranoid about patent infringement? One apparent reply is that Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin proposal was the primary profitable framework for a trustless digital money system. Developing with it was not a trivial achievement; virtually 30 years handed between the introduction of Chaum’s DigiCash and Nakamoto’s Bitcoin.
Did “Okamoto” give concepts to Finney for “Nakamoto?”
Many imagine Finney to be Satoshi Nakamoto or not less than a part of the staff that was behind the moniker. Moreover his pursuits, experience and early Bitcoin involvement, one other truth strongly helps this concept — being a neighbor of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. Contemplating that Google can’t return a single question for Satoshi Nakamoto earlier than the Bitcoin proposal was publicized, this coincidence is eerie. If Finney, certainly was behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, his familiarity with the works of Tatsuaki Okamoto may need additionally performed a job within the alternative of the alias.
Okamoto advised Cointelegraph that he was by no means part of the well-known cryptographic mailing lists and didn’t know Hal Finney personally.