Wei Dai Source: steemkr.com and Blockwhat?
And again, our cosplaying con man just can’t keep a Bitcoin origin story straight.
Let’s have a quick look at the, pretty limited, email exchanges between Satoshi Nakamoto and cypherpunk Wei Dai that we know about. And then we dive into what Craig Wright ‘remembers’ of his contacts with Wei Dai.
August 22, 2008: First email from Satoshi Nakamoto to Wei Dai.
In July or August 2008 Adam Back received an email from Satoshi Nakamoto about an “e-cash whitepaper” (the name Bitcoin didn’t exist yet).
Adam suggested Satoshi should look into b-money, which Satoshi didn’t seem to know about yet at that time.
On August 22, 2008 Satoshi contacted Wei Dai for the first time about b-money as he wanted to cite b-money in his e-cash whitepaper.
“From: "Satoshi Nakamoto" [email protected]Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 4:38 PM To: "Wei Dai" [email protected]
Cc: "Satoshi Nakamoto" [email protected]
Subject: Citation of your b-money page
I was very interested to read your b-money page. I'm getting ready torelease a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system.Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to yoursite.
I need to find out the year of publication of your b-money page for thecitation 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 athttp://www.upload.ae/file/6157/ecash-pdf.html
Feel free to forward it toanyone 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 allowonline payments to be sent directly from one party to another without theburdens of going through a financial institution. Digital signaturesoffer part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trustedparty is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solutionto the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The networktimestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain ofhash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed withoutredoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof ofthe sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largestpool of CPU power. As long as honest nodes control the most CPU power onthe network, they can generate the longest chain and outpace anyattackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages arebroadcasted on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin thenetwork at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof ofwhat happened while they were gone.
Satoshi”
Wei Dai’s reply:
“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 letyou know if I have any comments or questions.
January 10, 2009: There were no comments or questions though, so Satoshi Nakamoto send another, his second and last, email to Wei Dai.
“From: Satoshi Nakamoto
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 11:17 AM
Subject: Re: Citation of your b-money page
I wanted to let you know, I just released the full implementation of thepaper I sent you a few months ago, Bitcoin v0.1. Details, download andscreenshots are at www.bitcoin.org
I think it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in yourb-money paper.
The system is entirely decentralized, without any server or trustedparties. The network infrastructure can support a full range of escrowtransactions and contracts, but for now the focus is on the basics ofmoney and transactions.
There was a discussion of the design on the Cryptography mailing list.
Hal Finney gave a good high-level overview:
| One thing I might mention is that in many ways bitcoin is two independent
| ideas: a way of solving the kinds of problems James lists here, of
| creating a globally consistent but decentralized database; and then using
| it for a system similar to Wei Dai's b-money (which is referenced in the
| paper) but transaction/coin based rather than account based. Solving the
| global, massively decentralized database problem is arguably the harder
| part, as James emphasizes. The use of proof-of-work as a tool for this
| purpose is a novel idea well worth further review IMO.
Satoshi”
More about these emails in this pretty good article by Deniz Tutku on CoinMonks: “Satoshi Nakamoto’s Email to Wei Dai”.
To recap, Satoshi Nakamoto and Wei Dai only exchanged three (3) emails, according the information on Gwern.net.
Now what does Craig Wright remember of this era, when he allegedly contacted Wei Dai? Quotes taken from my article “Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie”, but originally these statements were outed by Craig Wright on November 22, 2021 during the afternoon session of the Kleiman v Wright trial on that day. The court transcript of this trial day can be found here.
Those who were around at that time to follow the trial closely will remember this day as “BombShell Monday”, as Craig Wright was supposed to reveal a lot of Satoshi evidence. According his fan club, that was.
“And Wei Dai, way before this, like in the middle of the year, had sent me code for like some of the cryptographic algorithm, SHA and ECDSA.”
[…]
“One of those [10-page whitepaper drafts] went to Wei Dai. […] There were a couple [of comments] I discussed with Wei Dai. He was more interested in how the code would work. Wei pointed me to a project he had been running called b-money. Wei discussed how b-money was very similar to what I was talking about, but he thought that my project wouldn’t scale. So he thought it would fail.”
[…]
“I had a FTP site on upload.ie in Australia. That was — it hosted it going back till May. So it was technically there, and I pointed people out to the link, like Wei Dai and things, in May.”
We immediately notice several discrepancies between the Wei Dai emails and Craig Wright’s memory.
- Wei Dai did not send any code to Satoshi.
- Wei Dai never said that he thought Bitcoin wouldn’t scale and would fail.
- Nothing happened in May 2008 between Satoshi Nakamoto and Wei Dai, it only happened in August 2008 (2 emails) and in January 2009 (1 email).
- No comments were discussed between Satoshi Nakamoto and Wei Dai.
- It wasn’t Wei Dai who pointed Satoshi to b-money, it was Adam Back who pointed Satoshi Nakamoto to Wei Dai’s b-money project.
So I asked Wei Dai what he thinks of these statements of Craig Wright, roleplaying as Satoshi Nakamoto. Wei Dai was very brief, but very clear.
“The entirety of my communications with Satoshi consists of 3 emails, all posted on Gwern’s website.”
Boom. Case closed. Thanks for reading.