Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
29 entries / 3 threads
Asked by author Dominic Frisby, Dai says he never coded b-money: the design was incomplete, he had grown disillusioned with cryptoanarchy, and he did not foresee such a system drawing wide use.
Dai judges that Bitcoin failed on monetary policy and adds that it may partly be his fault: when Satoshi asked for comments on his draft paper, he never got back to him.
Szabo on why Bitcoin took so long: the "why" was the biggest stumbling block, bit gold dated to 1998 on the same private list as b-money, and Nakamoto fixed a security shortcoming in his design.
Nick Szabo's May 2011 blog post on why digital cash took eleven years to get from bit gold (1998) to Bitcoin (2009). It names libtech as the private list where bit gold and b-money grew in parallel.
Asked to change Bitcoin's rules, Dai explains that he did not create Bitcoin, that Satoshi reinvented the idea without reading his article, and that he has started mining with a Radeon 5870.
Satoshi's final email to Adam Back thanks Back for his reading suggestions and announces the software launch. The page also includes Hal Finney's project overview from the Cryptography mailing list.
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'.
Before reading the draft, Adam Back points Satoshi to Rivest's MicroMint paper; a 2025 profile quotes him calling his failure to read the whitepaper carefully 'probably my biggest mistake.'
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 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.
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).
On August 20, 2008 Satoshi emailed Adam Back a link to a draft titled "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party." Its title and abstract survive in two emails. The PDF does not.
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 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, pitched as a stopgap until digicash spread or a fallback if it failed.
May's outline of the group's start: talks with Eric Hughes, a first meeting in the week PGP 2.0 came out, the afternoon "Crypto Game," and John Gilmore's offer of a list site and office space.
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.