🛡️ Secure your crypto properly with a Ledger hardware wallet

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Before Bitcoin ever existed, most of its core ideas were already on the table. Proof of work. Cryptographic scarcity. Decentralised ledgers. Peer-to-peer networks. In this third part of our series on the true origins of crypto, we explore the concepts that came painfully close to solving digital money — and why they still fell short.

This episode tells the story of Hashcash, b-money, and bit gold — proposals that weren’t companies, weren’t products, and weren’t designed to make anyone rich. They were attempts to answer a harder question: how do you create money on the internet without trusting banks, vaults, or institutions, and without assuming people will behave honestly?

We break down why these ideas mattered, what they got right, where they broke down in the real world, and why incentives — not just cryptography — turned out to be the missing piece. By the end, you’ll see that Bitcoin wasn’t a sudden invention, but the moment decades of unfinished ideas were finally ready to snap together.

Leave your thoughts in the comments, hit follow if you’re new, and join us next time as the series moves from theory into execution — the launch choices, timing, and design decisions that turned Bitcoin from an idea into something that couldn’t be shut down.

We will see you at the top.

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