In November 1998, a young computer scientist named Wei Dai published a proposal on the Cypherpunks mailing list. He called it b-money. It was only a few pages long, but it contained nearly every conceptual building block of what would become Bitcoin a decade later. Wei Dai was so far ahead of his time that when Satoshi Nakamoto finally launched Bitcoin in 2009, his whitepaper cited b-money in the very first reference.
What made b-money revolutionary? Unlike Chaum’s DigiCash, which depended on a central bank to issue and verify tokens, b-money proposed a system with no central authority at all. Every participant would maintain a copy of the ledger. Money would be created by solving computational puzzles — proof-of-work. Transactions would be broadcast to everyone. Disputes would be resolved by reputation and collective agreement.
Wei Dai actually proposed two versions of b-money. The first version had everyone maintaining the complete ledger, which was elegant but didn’t scale. The second version introduced a smaller group of servers that would maintain the ledger on behalf of everyone else — a kind of early proof-of-stake, 15 years before Ethereum would popularize the concept.
The proposal had gaps. Wei Dai himself acknowledged that b-money had “some problems with transaction verification” and wasn’t ready for implementation. He was sharing ideas, hoping others would build on them. And someone did. The gaps in b-money were exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto spent years figuring out before releasing Bitcoin.
Years later, journalists tried to track down Wei Dai to ask about his role in Bitcoin’s creation. He was notoriously private — some even speculated that Wei Dai himself was Satoshi. Dai denied it. “I was only very peripherally involved in the Cypherpunks movement,” he wrote in a rare statement. “My understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin… wasn’t even aware of my ideas when he came up with it independently.” Whether that’s true or not, b-money’s place in history is secure: it was the first nearly-complete vision of a decentralized digital currency.
Leave a Reply