Correct me if I am wrong, but the prevailing thought when that article was written (1992) was that digital currency would resemble more of a transferred digital coin, with signatures representing each transaction. So if I had coin #12345, and I transferred it to you, I would digitally sign it to you giving your private key the spend capability.
With those architectures, a central authority would be required to prevent the double-spend. And with those architectures, the coins grow with each spend.
The difference with Bitcoin (which I think is totally misnamed) is that it's not a coin architecture, it's a ledger architecture. So no matter how many times the amount 1BTC is transferred, each transfer could be just the same length - the sender's address, the recipient's address, and an appropriate signature. Even 50 years from now and ten thousand transfers of that "coin" later, the "coin" doesn't get larger.
The ledger gets larger, but the coin does not (since really there's no such thing as a "bit COIN" - really what you have is a series of account numbers in the giant shared ledger.)
With those architectures, a central authority would be required to prevent the double-spend. And with those architectures, the coins grow with each spend.
The difference with Bitcoin (which I think is totally misnamed) is that it's not a coin architecture, it's a ledger architecture. So no matter how many times the amount 1BTC is transferred, each transfer could be just the same length - the sender's address, the recipient's address, and an appropriate signature. Even 50 years from now and ten thousand transfers of that "coin" later, the "coin" doesn't get larger.
The ledger gets larger, but the coin does not (since really there's no such thing as a "bit COIN" - really what you have is a series of account numbers in the giant shared ledger.)