_Hal Finney has implemented a variant of bit gold called RPOW (Reusable Proofs of Work). This relies on publishing the computer code for the "mint," which runs on a remote tamper-evident computer. The purchaser of of bit gold can then use remote attestation, which Finney calls the transparent server technique, to verify that a particular number of cycles were actually performed._

https://web.archive.org/web/20060329122942/https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

I wonder if anyone's ever noticed that Nick Szabo's so-called idea is just ecash ?

It's an ecash methodology selling Adam Backs hashcash. That is, not a set of competing systems but rather a bank or other entity who sells a solution of a particular depth. For instance, you could have different levels of coin based on the number of zeros in the useful proof of work. It doesn't actually satisfy double spends at all. More importantly, it is literally just an ecash based system with a central bank offering tokenised coins.

There is no distributed peer network here. In fact he never understood that concept. The concept is one where a shadow bank issues tokens of a particular level of difficulty. To these guys, Moore's law was actually a problem because the difficulty changed over time. This is why bit gold failed. The plan had been to create something along the lines of EGold. The central body would be able to issue a bit gold token. That would then be tradable.

The EGold all Liberty reserve type platform would be the central party dictating which particular spend had happened first in the same way that digicash did this with Banks. Effectively, the entire plan was to replicate the existing banking system without involving banks. That is, they would create a shadow bank system. Different levels of token would have been tied to different monetary amounts. The problem they had was that they could not set the value of each token so that it could be stable. No idea of economics in these guys.

It utterly fails because they fail to understand the basics of how firms develop. The concept of nobody having a specialisation and everybody doing everything is the foundation of communism. It is directly taken from Marx and the Communist manifesto. These guys are not in any way libertarian. Stalin and Lennin and Mao together a 1000 times closer to being libertarian than any of the cyberpunks.

*The one thing that they are all trying to remove in creating bit gold is a blockchain *

The argument here was that the string of zeros and ones is scarce and therefore it has value. That was literally Szabo's response to the concept of inflation. The nature of decentralisation as they saw it was that anybody could construct a proof of work token and sell it and anybody could have their own tokens. This dates back to Tim May's idea of every single person on earth having their own money. It is one of the most asinine, collectivist/Communist backward ideas demonstrating just how little knowledge of economics these guys have.

This is where lightning and other things come into it. This is why Greg Maxwell said that bitcoin was broken. To them, bitcoin is broken. It is designed as the opposite of all they sought to create. It is designed to be the anti-bit gold, not they even knew what the hell bit gold was until well into 2011. Wei Dai had pointed me towards Nick Szabo, but I still saw nothing interesting and didn't even read about it.

I only finally read about it because people kept telling me how similar it was to bitcoin. And then I started realising just how little they understood about bitcoin and how much they wanted something else.

This is where this concept of trust being distributed came from as well. It is not the trust model noted in the bitcoin White Paper. That is this sort of model :
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/1147/

CSW
Nov 1, 2019
https://metanet-icu.slack.com/archives/C5131HKFX/p1572607388248500

https://t.me/CSW_Slack/2089