Remarkable that Jakobsson and Juels, in 1999 wrote a paper 'Proof of work and Bread Pudding Protocols', building on work by Rivest and Shamir shortly before(?), that came pretty close to Bitcoin's design (see PIPOW and Section 4, quote: 'We show how to partition this task into a collection of POWs, enabling minting to be distributed among a collection of low power, untrusted entities'.
Discussion
Did it work? Proof is in the pudding I guess.
This is good supporting material for the technical determinism/inevitability argument for Bitcoin made by nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a in "Broken Money".
The cautionary part of this argument is to consider how lucky it was that Bitcoin's founder disappeared and wasn't a premine scammer or some other flavor of asshole like we saw in later projects. An honest founder/team was far from assured.
Yes, interesting thought. You could argue that anyone who would have released it completely openly, with no premine, would already have demonstrated enough.
Not sure if the opsec was essential or not. It certainly didn't hurt though, imo.