Wei Dai
Wei Dai is the inventor of b-money, a very important bitcoin-predecessor. This is his main contribution to the movement; the thing he is most known for.
From the Bitcoin Wiki:
Wei Dai (戴维 in Pinyin). is a computer engineer and cypherpunk best known as creator of b-money and the developer of the Crypto++ library. Dai is listed as inventor on U.S. patents 5724279 and 6081598 which were assigned to Microsoft.
Mr. Dai graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer science and is described as an “intensely private computer engineer”. His profile as a member of the advisory board for the (now defunct) VoteHere.net indicated:
“Mr. Dai worked in the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington. While at Microsoft, he was involved in the study, design and implementation of cryptosystems for specialized applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Mr. Dai was a programmer with TerraSciences of Acton, Massachusetts. Mr. Dai holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Washington in computer science, with a minor in mathematics.”
Quotes
About Crypto-Anarchy
I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.
Regarding Speculation That He is Satoshi Nakamoto
Hi Clippy, what made you think that I might be able to? If you read the Wikipedia article, you should know that I didn’t create Bitcoin but only described a similar idea more than a decade ago. And my understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So my connection with the project is quite limited.
Links
- 1996-2003 Extropians Mailing List - Wei Dai’s List Archive
- 01-Nov-1998 Whitepaper - b-money by Wei Dai
- Unknown Date - An attack against SSH2 protocol by Wei Dai
- 1998 Whitepaper - PipeNet 1.1 by Wei Dai
- 1999/2000 - Two attacks against a PipeNet-like protocol once used by the Freedom service by Wei Dai
- Oct 2007 CFRP Working Group - (Draft Paper) - VMAC: Message Authentication Code using Universal Hashing by Wei Dai
- 07-Apr-2009-Present LessWrong.com - Wei Dai’s Posts on LessWrong.com
- 25-Feb-2011 LessWrong.com Post - Wei_Dai comments on Making money with Bitcoin?
- 11-Oct-2016 (Latest Release) - Crypto++ - Cryptography Libarary for C++
Please note that the information presented on this site was composed from publicly available materials in mainly 2017 and 2018 and has not been significantly updated since.
The information presented here may be significantly out of date or even inaccurate. In the case of inaccuracy, please file an Issue in the GitHub repo. The site should not be used as a source of truth.