Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
17 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.
Bitcoin chose a hard 21M cap; b-money (1998) proposed elastic supply; fiat runs central-bank discretion. The cypherpunk debate, Wei Dai's 2013 regret, and 15 years of cryptocurrency variants.
Adam Back's first reply: the Hashcash citation looks fine, and Satoshi should look at Wei Dai's b-money proposal as somewhat related work.
On November 20, 2011, Bitcoin v0.5 shipped with the Crypto++ SHA-256 subset removed and replaced by OpenSSL. Wei Dai's library, a direct codebase dependency since v0.1, was gone.
b-money is whitepaper reference [1], his Crypto++ shipped inside Bitcoin v0.1, and he was the second person Satoshi contacted. The evidence for Wei Dai as Satoshi, weighed.
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.'
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.
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.
On LessWrong, Wei Dai clarifies he did not create Bitcoin — "only described a similar idea more than a decade ago" — buys a Radeon 5870 to mine, and warns Bitcoin lacks cryptographer security review.
Wei Dai LessWrong post revealing Satoshi emailed him about Bitcoin v0.1 in early 2009, but Dai ignored it because he was more interested in Less Wrong than Cypherpunks at the time.
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.
Wei Dai LessWrong comments: Bitcoin's monetary policy has failed due to volatility, and he never replied to Satoshi's 2008 review email — regretting he could have dissuaded the fixed-supply choice.
Wei Dai's LessWrong Q&A reflections: Satoshi did not read the b-money paper before reinventing the idea, and Dai had grown disillusioned with cryptoanarchy by the time he wrote it up.
Adam Back reflects on his August 2008 email exchange with Satoshi, his regret at not reading the whitepaper carefully, and his COPA v Wright testimony where the complete chain became public.
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.