History of Blockchain Part 3: Wei Dai (1998)
By Gregory Snelgar on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
Wei Dai is a Chinese computer engineer and University of Washington alumnus who worked for the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft in the late 1990’s and early 2000's.
Two different cryptocurrencies have been named after him, the “Dai” coin used by the Maker organization, and the “Wei”, which is the smallest unit of the Ether currency. While at Microsoft, he was involved in the study, design and implementation of cryptographic systems. Prior to that he was a programmer at TerraSciences in Massachusetts.
In 1998 he released an informal whitepaper titled “B-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system”, on his personal website WeiDai.com
Just like under Cynthia Dwork’s system, B-money requires a complex mathematical equation to be solved in order to generate the value token implemented by the system. The value of one unit of B-money created is equal to the cost of the computing time required to solve the equation. For example if the equation takes 100 hours of computing time to solve, and it takes $6000 to purchase 100 hours of computing time on…
