Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
13 entries
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.
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.
The earliest known email from Satoshi Nakamoto: contacting Adam Back to verify the Hashcash citation and sharing a pre-release draft titled 'Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party'.
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.
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.
Satoshi thanks Adam Back for the b-money reference and reveals he was not previously aware of Wei Dai's proposal. Historically significant line: 'my ideas start from exactly that point.'
Adam Back suggests Satoshi look at Ron Rivest's 1996 MicroMint paper on k-way hash collisions. Back admits he has not yet read the draft — a decision he later called 'probably my biggest mistake.'
Satoshi writes Adam Back for the final time, thanking him for paper suggestions and announcing the Bitcoin software launch. Includes Hal Finney's project overview from the Cryptography mailing list.
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.
Satoshi Nakamoto's earliest known email. He contacts Adam Back to verify the Hashcash paper citation and shares a pre-release draft titled 'Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party' (ecash.pdf).
Adam Back confirms the Hashcash citation and suggests Satoshi look at Wei Dai's b-money proposal. This referral led Satoshi to contact Wei Dai and cite b-money in the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Nick Szabo's May 2011 blog post on why digital cash took thirteen years between bit gold (1998) and Bitcoin (2009). Names libtech as the private list where bit gold and b-money developed in parallel.
Satoshi emails Wei Dai asking for the correct b-money citation, revealing he learned of it via Adam Back. The email linked the pre-release draft 'Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party'.