From the Cypherpunks mailing list, November 27, 1998:
Quote from: Wei Dai on November 27, 1998, 12:07:43 AM UTC“I’ve discovered some attacks against the original PipeNet design. The new protocol, PipeNet 1.1, should fix the weaknesses. PipeNet 1.1 uses layered sequence numbers and MACs. This prevents a collusion between a receiver and a subset of switches from tracing the caller by modifying or swapping packets and then watching for garbage.
A description of PipeNet 1.1 is available at
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai.Also available there is a description of b-money, a new protocol for monetary exchange and contract enforcement for pseudonyms.”
The b-money proposal — which would later become one of the most cited precursors to Bitcoin — was introduced in a single sentence at the end of a post primarily about PipeNet, an anonymous routing protocol. Wei Dai’s main interest at the time was clearly PipeNet, not digital currency.
This entry is the primary-source anchor for several later analyses and articles that read b-money’s place in Bitcoin’s design lineage and in identity-hypothesis arguments: the Bitcoin design lineage, the Hayek-Extropians-Bitcoin ideological lineage, the Wei Dai identity hypothesis, the fixed-supply-vs-adjustable-money analysis, and the mining-reward-exhaustion analysis. The archive’s cypherpunk-independent-arrival analysis recontextualizes this same b-money proposal around Satoshi’s own admission that he “wasn’t aware of the b-money page” when he wrote the whitepaper. The Adam Back b-money monetary critique and the Hashcash announcement sit alongside this announcement as the same-period precursor record, and the Wei Dai biography and Wei Dai retrospective on Satoshi provide the longer participant arc. Two years earlier, Dai had posted Disperse/Collect to the same list — the earlier trace of the choice not to implement his own cryptographic proposals that recurs with b-money.
