Wiki

At the time, Wikipedia wanted to remove the page. There wasn’t anything good that had been published which detailed and described Bitcoin other than the white paper. Wikipedia requires referencing, and the only thing I could find to try and link it to is what’s in the references there. Then, people would take away the wrong concept.

I dropped off the “Cypherpunks” list and backward economic theory around 2002. Consequently, I didn’t even know about b-money and all the work Wei Dai had done until mid 2008 or so. I referenced Adam Back not because he was the inventor of proof-of-work but for his help at the time. It wasn’t until much later that I even realised that the working version of hashcash came from Hal Finney and that the code Adam Back had put out there didn’t work.

I had emailed other people. In 2007, I had emailed Aurora and a few others. People either couldn’t help me or did not get back to me. Adam Back was well down my list, but he responded.

What I did get from Adam Back was Wei Dai. I didn’t even know of b-money before Adam pointed me to a link. I definitely had no idea about Nick Szabo. Unlike many people I talked to, Wei did not come across as a complete anarchist. Then, I didn’t spend that much time talking to him.

It was Wei I believe who pointed out Szabo’s bit gold boondoggle.

So, I was trying to get people who could help me more, remaining private to some extent. Bitcoin isn’t Adam’s hashcash invention as he puts it. It doesn’t use the code, and is not even similar to what Adam had released. It came from the Aurora paper, for he couldn’t get onto them and they didn’t respond. It was when I was talking to Hal that I discovered he had taken Adam Back’s code and made it work.

So, Wei is referenced as he helped. Adam Back is referenced as he pointed me to Wei.

The problem with Bitcoin that I had at the time was that it was very hard to see anything like it and put it into words, but the people who were coding it with me would understand.

I had a few references, and we were trying to keep Wikipedia from deleting Bitcoin as an entry. It did not say that Bitcoin was like b-money, but it was referenced more as a way to compare a cart and a car. The paper had initially started with the title “Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party,” which is important. It remains primarily cash. But to be money, it needs to also be a commodity. That is, an informational commodity that takes data and commercialises it.

Hal knew much more of Wei and the other attempts post DigiCash than I did.