Wei Dai

Wei Dai is a computer engineer and cryptographer. He created Crypto++, a free C++ library of cryptographic algorithms first released in 1995 and widely used in both open-source and commercial software.

b-money

In November 1998 Dai posted b-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system to the cypherpunks mailing list. The proposal described participants maintaining a shared ledger of balances, money created by solving computational problems, and enforcement of contracts without a trusted authority. Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper lists b-money as its first reference, and the smallest unit of Ether is named the wei in Dai's honor.

Other work

Dai worked at Microsoft's cryptography research group, where he contributed to attacks on SSL/TLS in CBC mode, and has since written on decision theory and AI safety.

Timeline

• 1995Releases the Crypto++ library.
• 1998-11Posts the b-money proposal to the cypherpunks mailing list.
• 2008-10-31b-money is cited as reference [1] in the Bitcoin whitepaper.