bitcoinwell on Nostr: Ten years before Satoshi published the Bitcoin whitepaper, a Chinese-American ...

Ten years before Satoshi published the Bitcoin whitepaper, a Chinese-American cryptographer wrote a short essay describing an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system.

His name is Wei Dai. The system is called b-money. The year was 1998.

b-money never shipped. The protocol was theoretical. The system needed a way to enforce its own rules without a trusted referee, and Wei Dai didn't have a solution to the double-spend problem.

Satoshi did.

Months before the whitepaper went out, Satoshi emailed Wei Dai directly. The note included a line Bitcoiners now know by heart: "I'm getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system." Wei Dai responded. The whitepaper cited him as reference one.

Sovereignty is a stack and Bitcoin is the money layer. b-money was the draft. The Satoshi didn't write Bitcoin in a vacuum. He wrote it in a conversation that started a decade earlier and never stopped.

Every line of code that lets you hold your own keys today was preceded by ten years of people trying to solve a problem the state preferred you not solve.

Reference one in the whitepaper is still reference one in the protocol.