On the Cypherpunks Mailing List through the 1990s, Hal Finney, Adam Back, and Wei Dai discussed digital cash proposals like b-money before Bitcoin existed.
13 entries / 1 threads
Wei Dai replies to Adam Back on Cypherpunks, conceding b-money would be at most a niche mechanism and revealing his shift toward viewing the government monopoly of force as a net benefit.
Adam Back replies to Wei Dai on Cypherpunks, identifying seven monetary-design issues in b-money and proposing Hashcash as the minting mechanism — a substantive analysis ten years before Bitcoin.
Adam Back reposts the full text of Wei Dai's b-money proposal to the Cypherpunks list, with comments to follow — the message that opened the December 1998 b-money design discussion.
Wei Dai announces b-money on the Cypherpunks list as a brief addendum to PipeNet 1.1, pointing readers to his eskimo.com page — the proposal later cited as reference [1] in the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Wei Dai announces b-money on the Cypherpunks list as a secondary item alongside PipeNet 1.1, his primary focus. The proposal later cited in Bitcoin appears in a single sentence at the end of the post.
Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, framed within the digital-cash discourse as a stop-gap or fallback for digicash.
Wei Dai announces Disperse/Collect 1.0 on the Cypherpunks list, built from his own Crypto++ library. Confirms he was an active coder, relevant to why he later chose not to implement b-money.
Eric Hughes posts A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, dated March 9, 1993, to the list: privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself, and "Cypherpunks write code."
Timothy May posts the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto to the Cypherpunks list: written in 1988 and read at the group's September 1992 founding meeting, it predicts anonymous markets beyond state control.
How a 1992 Oakland meeting became the Cypherpunks mailing list: the name, the remailers, the Clipper fight, the 1997 split, and the Hashcash and b-money posts the Bitcoin whitepaper later cited.