Wei Dai

Wei Dai published b-money in 1998, a short and influential proposal for anonymous, distributed electronic cash that needed no central mint. After Adam Back pointed Satoshi at that work, Satoshi emailed Dai on 22 August 2008 asking for a publication year and sending the same early draft paper. The finished whitepaper cites b-money next to Hashcash. Dai later stayed mostly quiet through Bitcoin's loudest political years.

He did not become a Core maintainer, an exchange founder or a conference circuit regular. The b-money note itself did the lasting work: it remains one of the clearest cypherpunk ancestors of a peer-to-peer cash system, and historians still read it beside Hashcash and Bit Gold when they map Bitcoin's pre-history.

Dai's later public comments have been sparse; when he has spoken, it has usually been as an engineer reflecting on prior art rather than as a product builder inside the Bitcoin industry. This archive keeps the short published correspondence and the citation trail. It does not invent a larger private relationship.

Dai matters here because Bitcoin's public design document openly stands on his prior art, and because Satoshi chose to write to him before the mailing-list announcement. That sequence still shapes how careful histories tell the weeks before the whitepaper.