I email Wei Dai about b-money and electronic cash

2008 Aug 22 See all posts
I email Wei Dai about b-money and electronic cash @ Satoshi Nakamoto
Author

Satoshi Nakamoto

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https://satoshinakamoto.network

I have sent an email about b-money to Wei Dai. Adam Back told me about his b-money paper.

Here is the email:


I was very interested to read your b-money page. I'm getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system. Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site.

I need to find out the year of publication of your b-money page for the citation in my paper. It'll look like:

[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, (2006?).

You can download a pre-release draft at http://www.upload.ae/file/6157/ecash-pdf.html. Feel free to forward it to anyone else you think would be interested.


Title: Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party

Abstract: A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without the burdens of going through a financial institution. Digital signatures offer part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as honest nodes control the most CPU power on the network, they can generate the longest chain and outpace any attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcasted on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.

Satoshi


Wei Dai's reply to me:

Hi Satoshi. b-money was announced on the cypherpunks mailing list in 1998. Here's the archived post:
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/11/msg00941.html

There are some discussions of it at
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1998/12/msg00194.html.

Thanks for letting me know about your paper. I'll take a look at it and let you know if I have any comments or questions.