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Wei Dai

From Satoshipedia, the Satoshi Mail encyclopedia

Wei Dai is a computer engineer who in 1998 published “b-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system”.[1] B-money is reference [1] in the white paper.[2]

With Satoshi

After Adam Back pointed him to b-money, Satoshi wrote to Dai in August 2008: “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.” He asked for the year of publication so he could cite it. In January 2009 he wrote again to say he had released v0.1, which he thought “achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper” (the emails). Dai later published his copies of the emails, which give their dates: 22 August 2008 and 10 January 2009.[3]

In October 2023, answering questions from the solicitors for COPA in COPA v Wright, Dai said he had never sent Satoshi any code, that Satoshi had learned of b-money from Adam Back after drafting the paper, and that these emails were the whole of his correspondence with Satoshi.[4]

Crypto++

Dai also wrote Crypto++, a C++ cryptography library first released in 1995.[1] In 2010 Satoshi added part of it to Bitcoin for a faster SHA-256 (SVN r114).

In the archive

1 messages in 1 conversations with Satoshi.

See also

References

  1. Wei Dai, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Retrieved 20 October 2026.
  2. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, bitcoin.org.
  3. Satoshi Nakamoto's emails to Wei Dai, Wei Dai's copies, hosted on Gwern.net.
  4. Email exchange between Bird & Bird and Wei Dai, 13–20 October 2023, hearsay statement in the COPA v Wright trial documents.

Primary sources

The messages and commits this article draws on, in Satoshi Mail and where they were first published.

  1. Citation of your b-money page, Private email with Wei Dai, 22 August 2008. Original source
  2. added a subset of Crypto++ 5.6.0 with 48% faster ASM SHA-256, combined speedup 2.5x faster vs 0.3.3, thanks BlackEye for figuring out the alignment problem, commit by Satoshi Nakamoto, 27 July 2010. Original on GitHub

Published by Tyler Howell for Satoshi Mail. Written with AI assistance from the sources listed above and checked against them. Last updated 22 October 2026. Spotted an error? Email itstylerhowell@gmail.com (how articles are made).

Categories: People · Cypherpunks · Correspondents