The seeds of Bitcoin were planted long ago in 1991 by Time-stamping Giants.

I'm reviewing the citations satoshi references in the whitepaper, starting with how to timestamp a digital document (1991). some relevant text from this paper related to bitcoin is in the attached picture. Fun to see these early hints of seedling ideas that were eventually incorporated into Bitcoin. The second picture has some more text that correlates well with the Bitcoin mining function, mainly the idea around a randomly picked verifier in a lottery type scheme.