In my somewhat educated opinion, David Chaum is the OG inventor of crypto currency aka digital cash (eCash), back all the way in 1982.

He was last seen pitching family offices in the UAE pitching AstroCool, a concept involving spraying moon dust in orbit around the earth to block some of the sun light. You won't see this referenced anywhere. I was told about it by the person who introduced him to family offices over there.

Weirdly enough, in 2008, I was so pissed about the financial crisis, I went online to promote the idea of an absolute-valued energy-exchange-based currency called the Joule Token. It had no cryptographic component (was a centralized immutable store that is co-owned and co-administered by the community) The banner I promoted it under was "P2P Programmable Currency" and I kind of spammed Michel Bowen's P2P Research mailing list and wrote a giant post on the P2P Foundation Wiki titled the P2P Energy Economy. The idea was to decouple profit/interest from exchange, so you can value things based on the energy it took to create them and transport them, and instead of profit as an incentive it was about fulfilling the need for energy: you sold things because you needed to recoup the energy and you created the good that you sold because you could, no other reason. Obviously, it was a thought experiment, not an actual implementation or anything meant to becoone real. However, after I was kicked off the list for spamming (or rather for list etiquette -- Hi Bryan! if you still frequent HN lol), Satoshi@gmx.de replied to my emails 4 times between early 2009 and late 2010, so I literally ghosted him, but without knowing. I didn't know until Bryan Bishop, who was behind my banning, I think, told me here on HN 3 years later, in 2013, if I recall correctly.

Here is what ChatGPT knows about those times (I asked it to tell me what it knew without searching online)

https://chatgpt.com/share/6893129d-1a20-8002-a08b-acd66bf91b...

If you remember me from those days, I moved from Evolving Trends on Wordpress to Substack https://understoryai.substack.com/

Good times. They're back again. (sarcasm)