An anonymous mail service on the Cypherpunks mailing list from 21 years ago discusses the idea of "ecash," and the speculation in the crypto community is that it might belong to a pre-Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto.

"Cypherpunk" refers to a movement that emerged in the 1980s advocating cryptography and other privacy-enhancing technologies every bit tools for promoting social change. Many of the early Bitcoin supporters were part of the Cypherpunks mailing list, including Adam Back, Hal Finney, and Nick Szabo.

We practice not know with any certainty whether Satoshi Nakamoto was e'er office of the forum, but he surely would have been familiar with the ideas percolating there. Many of those ideas formed the basis for what Nakamoto ultimately finalized in Bitcoin.

When this erstwhile post discussing "ecash" resurfaced, it was piece of cake to connect the dots to nowadays-mean solar day Bitcoin. Remember that the full proper noun of the Bitcoin whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Greenbacks System."

The anonymous author of the Cypherpunks post discusses the necessary prerequisites of digital cash, one characteristic of which is chosen "blinding:"

"I wouldn't say ecash has to use blinding, merely I would argue it would be a misuse of the discussion "ecash", if something which was revocable were dubbed ecash."

"Blinding" probable refers to the idea of a cryptographic blind signature, introduced past David Chaum. Information technology lets people securely sign data without revealing it, and so verifies that the information has not been tampered with. This functionality has become commonplace in the wake of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The writer of the anonymous post goes on to discuss another primal obstruction that any electronic currency faces: the double spend trouble.

"One possibility is to make the double-spending database public. Whenever someone receives a money they broadcast its value. The DB  [database] operates in parallel across a large number of servers so it is intractable to shut information technology down."

He concludes his mail service by mentioning the two proposals for electronic money that were referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper: Wei Dai's b-money and Adam Back'south Hashcash:

"Another possible form of ecash could be based on Wei Dai's b-money. This is like hashcash, something which represents a measurable corporeality of computational piece of work to produce. Information technology therefore can't be forged. This could be a very robust payment organization and is worth pursuing further."

In the course of a 200-give-and-take post, the anonymous touches on every major issue facing a usable digital currency, and does and so ten years before Bitcoin pulled them all together. It'due south certainly not enough to conclude that the writer is Satoshi Nakamoto, but the resemblance is striking.