Wei Dai

Wei Dai, or 戴维, is an open source software developer who is widely credited with some of the original ideas that led up to Bitcoin. Wei Dai published a digital monetary system proposal similar to the Bitcoin concept called b-money, and he published the well known C++ cryptographic library Crypto++.

Wei Dai holds a bachelors degree in Computer Science from University of Washington, and worked for Microsoft in Redmond Washington on cryptography research projects.

As part of his cryptographic research, Wei Dai has published major security vulnerabilities in SSH2 and against SSL/TLS, prompting quick fixes.

Wei Dai's 1998 concept for b-money proposed a system quite similar to the later Bitcoin scheme. Proof of work was used by a miner who updated a shared ledger of transactions secured through cryptographic signatures, much the same as in Satoshi Nakamoto's later system.

In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto privately contacted Adam Back with his draft proposal, before publishing it to the cryptography mailing list. Adam related in a forum post that he pushed Satoshi to contact Wei Dai and credit b-money in the Bitcoin white paper. Wei Dai mentioned that the monetary concepts were similar and Satoshi determined he had realized an implementation of b-money, however Wei stated that the ideas were originated in parallel.

• Website: http://www.weidai.com/