Bitcoin was not the First Cryptocurrency

Deer Steemit Friends,

I was reading today about the history of cryptocurrencies and found it very interesting. Before my research today I had thought Bitcoin was the first online currency to be used. I was wrong. There has existed online currencies since the 1980's.

In 1983, David Chaum was researching into how to create an electronic currency that could be easily exchanged between people. He wanted it to be safe and private. As a result he created a blinding algorithm (an extension of the RSA algorithm) to ensure encryption. This allowed someone to send a signature to another person, and that signature would be modified by the receiver. Then when the receiver went to deposit the coin, it still had the original marking from the mint, but just not the same signature. This allowed the currency to be almost untraceable.

Skip to the 1990's and the attention of online currencies switched from Europe to Northern America. Two factors led to this: Venture Capitalist interest and Europe regulation. As a matter of fact prepaid cards and web-based monies almost wiped cryptocurrencies out. First Virtual was the first web-based money and was quickly replaced by Paypal. As a result of the rise of Paypal and other online web money services, cryptocurrencies were for the most part forgotten in the West. However, in Russia the tradition was kept alive by WebMoney.

E-gold rose in popularity in the late 1990's as it offered customers the opportunity to send in physical gold and silver and get credits of e-gold. However, where e-gold went wrong was allowing anyone to open an account. In 2005, the Fed raided e-gold's offices and effectively closed down e-gold for good as well as any competitor of e-gold (this was partially do to the post 9/11 opinions).

Then came around 2008. Bitcoin was published. Created by Satoshi Nakamoto*. And since then the cryptocurrency market has blown up in market value and media coverage. Finally it must be stressed, most all successes and missteps we see here in the growing Bitcoin sector have been seen before. History is not just humming and rhyming, it's singing loudly.

*He is just a surname. No one is officially accredited with creating bitcoin.