From the Cypherpunks mailing list, February 5-6, 1996:
“To follow up on a post last year where I suggested that Rabin’s information dispersal scheme might be useful for sending large files across unreliable remailer networks, I built a shareware package called Disperse/Collect out of my own Crypto++ library. Disperse splits up files into redundant pieces and encodes them in base 64. Collect decodes them and reconstructs the original files. You can download this software from my home page at
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai.”
By early 1996, Wei Dai had already created and publicly released multiple software projects, including the Crypto++ cryptographic library. Crypto++ was later integrated into Bitcoin itself by Satoshi in v0.3.7 (July 2010), with a subset (SHA-256 plus general dependencies) added to the SVN to speed up hash computation — meaning Dai’s code became a direct dependency of Bitcoin itself. Crypto++ was also used in commercial products such as Microsoft Office Groove and LastPass.