By Bitcoin 雜誌 - 2 年前 - 閱讀時間：6 分鐘
的發現 Bitcoin 是一塊拼圖
Bitcoin is a fundamental discovery in a long chain of cryptographic progress.
A recurring conversation in the Bitcoin community is the question “was Bitcoin invented or discovered?” Initially this question seems simple. Obviously Bitcoin was invented, wasn't it?
No. In my opinion, Bitcoin, like any other scientific and technological “invention,” was discovered and not really invented.
The purpose of this article is to explain this and to help you understand why if Satoshi Nakamoto had never existed, Bitcoin would have eventually been discovered by someone else.
相鄰的可能
There is a figure in our collective unconscious showing the lone genius in his garage. This brilliant and misunderstood scientist is unraveling some of nature's great mysteries all by himself.
This image is totally wrong. Even geniuses like Isaac Newton recognized that "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
圖1：首頁 https://scholar.google.com/未定義這個概念起初似乎違反直覺，但歷史證據支持這一觀點。
有幾項科學發現，例如微積分和自然選擇理論，是反复獨立發生的。
對於我們大多數人來說，自然選擇理論經典地歸功於查爾斯·達爾文。 他的故事眾所周知：他乘坐 HMS Beagle 號環球航行，研究加拉帕戈斯群島的雀類，研究 1835 年智利的地震等等。 很少有人知道，如今的作者身份 自然選擇理論歸因於 達爾文-華萊士。
That's because it took Darwin more than 20 years to publish his discovery, and in the meantime a young naturalist named Alfred Russell Wallace reached the same conclusions that Darwin had reached. 華萊士 研究了亞馬遜雨林和馬來群島。 他們是兩個孤立的天才，他們發現了進化是如何完全獨立地運作的嗎？
是和不是。
這兩位傑出的科學家獲得了相同的參考資料。 兩者都引用了 詹姆斯·赫頓和查爾斯·萊爾, two geologists who discussed how changes occurred gradually over a large span of time, known as geological time or deep time. This view is known as uniformitarianism and is opposed to catastrophism, which at the time was associated with the Great Flood and the idea that the Earth's age was only 10,000 years. Thanks to these authors, the concept of deep time began to exist in the scientific community. Both Darwin and Wallace read these works.
工作也是如此 托馬斯·馬爾薩斯. 馬爾薩斯討論了資源有限的問題，甚至勾勒出了“為生命而戰”和“適者生存”的想法。 但他的工作重點是人口地理學，而不是更廣泛的自然。 達爾文和華萊士 quoted Malthus' work as a key piece in the evolutionary puzzle.
獨立發現微積分的艾薩克·牛頓和戈特弗里德·威廉·萊布尼茨也是如此。 那些數學家度過了他們的餘生 努力確定誰是微積分的真正發明者 而不是考慮它可以在短時間內開發兩次。
“相鄰可能”一詞是 1996 年由進化生物學家 Stuart Kauffman 創造的。 對他而言，生物系統能夠從增量變化轉變為複雜系統。 這有助於解釋複雜系統的起源：一次一步。
For example: the origin of life hypothetically occurred in a primitive environment known as "原湯." The atmosphere lacked oxygen, and was rich in hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water. Something caused these molecules to stick together and become amino acids. These were able to combine to form proteins and create organic material. This organic material may have eventually given rise to biological life as we know it today. Each step in this chain could not have existed before the previous step. Hydrogen, methane, water and ammonium wouldn't bond together to form proteins, but their recombined form called amino acids would.
相鄰可能是科學過程的本質，當基於可用的相鄰知識（無論是書籍還是科學文章）發現新知識時。 基本上，現有的科學知識代表了已經組裝在每個人面前的拼圖碎片。 做出發現的科學家只需找到最近安裝的部件的適合度。
“模因”的最初概念是由生物學家理查德·道金斯在《自私的基因》一書中定義的。 這本書是關於基因如何成為進化選擇單位的研究，而不是物種、群體甚至個體。 在書中，作者提出基因之於生物學就像模因之於文化信息，文化選擇的最小單位是一個模因。 換句話說，一個故事、一首歌甚至是頂部帶有文字的圖像都是模因。 類似於“基因庫,”有一個“模因池，”所有模因都在爭奪空間，被共享或被遺忘。 這些文化單位位於模因池中，所有科學家都可以在其中查閱信息。
這個模因池是共享的，使科學和文化進化的可能性僅限於這些文化信息單元所允許的相鄰可能性。 換句話說，如果沒有馬爾薩斯主義或均變論，自然選擇理論是不可能的。
圖 2 和圖 3 是相鄰可能和科學進步過程的示意圖。
艾薩克·阿西莫夫描述的虛構的心理史科學很好地說明了這個概念。 在心理史中，即使無法預測特定個體的行為，也可以使用應用於大量人群的統計數據來預測未來事件。
心理史（來自科幻小說的概念）和相鄰的可能（來自生物學的概念）都有一個共同特點：特定個體的行為與宏觀趨勢無關。
We like to think of ourselves as special snowflakes, but actually we're all quite commonplace with limited basic variations and a few possible personality archetypes, as the few categories in any personality test like the Holland Code (RIASEC）或 邁爾斯 - 布里格斯 測試證明。
這就提出了一個問題：人類可以發明一些真正新的東西嗎？
的發現 Bitcoin
"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age." - 埃里克·休斯， 密碼朋克宣言，1993
As with the image of the lone scientist, we also tend to imagine Satoshi Nakamoto in this way. But in reality, he was also on the shoulder of giants when he conceived Bitcoin.
Bitcoin may seem “new,” but in reality it is the culmination of a 30+ year process by a group of people interested in encryption and privacy. They are called "the cypherpunks." The Cypherpunk Manifesto dates back to 1993; several attempts to resolve the issue of conveying value with privacy without the need for a trusted external validator had already been made and failed. In a nutshell, we can simplify some of the puzzle pieces of the cypherpunk memetic pool used by Satoshi:
In 1997, Adam Back created Hashcash, an anti-spam instrument that made it costly (in time and computing power) to send an email, making spam economically unfeasible.In 2004, Hal Finney created the reusable proof-of-work (RPOW) based on Hashcash. RPOW were cryptographic tokens that could only be used once. Validation and double-spend protection was still performed on a central server.In 2005, Nick Szabo published the proposal for “bitgold,” a digital token based on RPOW. Bitgold did not have a token limit, but imagined that the units would be valued differently according to the amount of computational processing used in their creation.In 2008, a person operating under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, which directly cites both bitgold and Hashcash.It was by learning from all these attempts that Satoshi was able to reach the magical possible adjacent called Bitcoin. But the truth is that, as brilliant as Satoshi was, if he hadn't discovered Bitcoin in 2008, someone would have probably already discovered it by now.
Figure 4: Timeline of Bitcoin prehistory from Plan B 鳴叫.This is a guest post by Leta. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin 雜誌。
原始來源： Bitcoin 雜誌