 Happy birthday, Bitcoin! 12 years have passed since October 31st, 2008. On that date, a pseudonymous entity known as Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper called Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The paper set the theoretical framework for a new form of money that would be fully decentralized and censorship resistant. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a mystery to this day. Still, few people have played a more significant role in the creation of Bitcoin than Professor Adam Beck. Adam is the inventor of hash cash, the proof-of-work system used in Bitcoin mining. He is also reportedly one of the few people ever directly contacted by Satoshi Nakamoto himself. His name was even mentioned in the Bitcoin White Paper. For Bitcoin's birthday, we asked Adam to bring us back in time to the years where Bitcoin's roots were founded. Well, to get started, you'll need to get connected to the internet. You do that through an internet service provider. What's that? The origins of Bitcoin traced back to the 90s when Adam Beck was a member of the CypherPunk movement. It was a group of hackers, programmers and geeks that used cryptography as a tool to protect people's privacy from government surveillance. Typically, there were regulations and rules providing rights to privacy that were created over hundreds of years and started to get eroded by the online world. The CypherPunk's viewpoint was if you wanted privacy rights, you should build technology to obtain them. If you have these rights, you have to assert them otherwise you will lose them. Web privacy, email privacy and electronic cash was a big one. That was kind of the Holy Grail application that was much more challenging to achieve. Back then, the public use of cryptography was heavily regulated. The US government even imposed a ban on the export of this technology. As a way to protest against these restrictions, Adam Beck started promoting t-shirts with cryptographic code written on them. And so they were t-shirts, they were tattoos, people were using it as a signature at the bottom of their email saying that this is not exportable, of course they're exporting it while they do it. You can get a magnetization picture, it's all the Apple laser right now. The CypherPunk's dreamt of creating a new form of internet money that could evade government control. In May 1997, Adam Beck invented hash cash, one of the earliest proof-of-work systems. It is used to limit email spam and DDOS attacks by requiring a certain amount of computational power to be sent along with each email. This makes it unprofitable and difficult to send a large amount of emails. Who would have thought that the precursor to decentralized digital money was actually a frustrated response to spam emails? No, it was a fascinating thing because you create in fact, it turns out, create a cost, even though there wouldn't be a reusable value. Email, I heard that's really neat. My cousin has a 10lb Sweden and they write back and forth and it transmits right away and doesn't cost anything. Despite its name, hash cash is still far from being a functioning electronic cash system. The value of transactions cannot be reused by the recipient, it is essentially a one-way street. Still, the proof-of-work system deployed by Beck became the founding principle of cryptocurrency mining. Proof-of-work became an interesting and important building block, a system to create value by individuals directly mining coins, so they didn't need a partnership with the bank to move value into the system. The internet is revolutionizing business. From egghead.com to eBay. After hash cash, other prototypes of digital money were invented, such as Wadeye's B-Cash and Nick Szabo's BitGold. Eventually, only Satoshi Nakamoto found a way to transform the proof-of-work concept into a fully trustless digital cash system. Previous electronic cash systems were central servers and you had to trust the server to some extent. I think one of the clever things that Satoshi invented in the Bitcoin system is reusing the proof-of-work as well for bringing new coins into creation and processing transactions in arbitrating this race condition, which basically allows the system to be decentralized and self-sustaining. So if one person leaves, another person can join. So the system has this fabric property that it just keeps operating without any central plan. The invention of Bitcoin represents a milestone in the evolution of currency. That is why the 31st of October is a day worth celebrating for more than just Halloween. Actually, it is rather curious that Satoshi specifically chose Halloween to release Bitcoin's white paper. We would love to hear your theories on that decision in the comments below. Still, the journey towards the democratization of money doesn't end with Bitcoin. On one side, governments and big corporations still seek to impose control on cryptocurrencies. On the other, privacy advocates look for increasingly sophisticated ways to hide transactions from undesired third parties. We will further delve into this long-lasting struggle around privacy and money in our upcoming documentary about the history of cryptography. So stay tuned for more Cointelegraph content.