Thanks for the pointers you gave me to Wei Dai's b-money paper and others.

I just released the open source implementation of my paper, Bitcoin v0.1.  Details, download and screenshots are at www.bitcoin.org

The main idea of the system is the generation of a chain of hash based proof-of-work to create self evident proof of the majority consensus.  Users get new coins by contributing proof-of-work to the chain.

There was a discussion of the design on the Cryptography mailing list.  Hal Finney gave a good high-level overview:

> One thing I might mention is that in many ways bitcoin is two independent ideas: a way of solving the kinds of problems James lists here, of creating a globally consistent but decentralized database; and then using it for a system similar to Wei Dai's b-money (which is referenced in the paper) but transaction/coin based rather than account based.  Solving the global, massively decentralized database problem is arguably the harder part, as James emphasizes.  The use of proof-of-work as a tool for this purpose is a novel idea well worth further review IMO.

Satoshi