Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
17 entries / 2 threads
Wei Dai's March 2014 LessWrong Q&A: why he never built b-money, his disillusionment with crypto-anarchy, and his reading of Satoshi's motives and background.
Computer scientist and cryptographer who created b-money (1998), one of the earliest digital currency proposals, and the Crypto++ library. Satoshi emailed him before publishing the Bitcoin paper.
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 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.
May dates his thinking on crypto and the state to late 1987, when public-key crypto, anonymous digital cash and information markets struck him as the end of governments as we know them.
Timothy Newsham forwards an anonymous "Introduction to BlackNet": a group that buys and sells information of every kind, paying in cash, bank deposits, or its own "CryptoCredits."
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.