Wei Dai

the b-money paper is very well worth reading even today. appendix A hints at what we call today proof of stake. the property club in b-money is more of a political organization than the participants in the Bitcoin network:

"community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange"

"I hope this is a step toward making crypto-anarchy a practical as well as theoretical possibility."
http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

amazing how mute Wei's reaction was and still is. b-money was a nice idea, but it seems he was never too much interested in impelementation. the request is obviously fake. Nakamoto was clearly well versed in the history of this topic and was very likely to be around in 1998.

other than that, gwern is still the authority on Bitcoin. "What’s wrong with Bitcoin is that it’s ugly."

http://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better

PipeNet is also the name of the scheme independently invented by Wei Dai contemporaneously with USNRL's Onion Routing: http://www.weidai.com/pipenet.txt Onion Routing is what Tor is based on. I'm not sure if the original Tor author(s) knew about PipeNet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were familiar.

PipeNet was conceived in 1996 (https://cryptome.org/jya/pipenet.htm), before the USNRL work was made public in 1997 (IIRC), so definitely independent, in as much as these things are ever truly independent. Both are derivative of Chaum Mixes (1979), which had become popularized as anonymous e-mail remailers in the 1990s.

P.S. Not a comment about project name clashing, just thought it would be interesting to point out. Wei Dai's PipeNet is all but forgotten these days. But I had came across it (on sci.crypt?) before stumbling on the Onion Routing web page.

Crypto in this case does mean cryptographic currency, and it is indeed part of an Cypherpunks wet dream, which is a movement since the 80s to 90s[0][1], and Bitcoin was largely enabled by people of this movement[2][3]. They basically strive to build society with cryptographic methods.

Cyberpunk on the other hand is just a science-fiction genre, which mostly play in futuristic orwellian dystopias and people like to draw comparisons to them.

[0] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
[1] https://www.chaum.com/ecash/
[2] http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt
[3] http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

The only problem here is that Proof-of-Work is the evolution of Proof-of-Stake, not the other way around.

PoS is how Paxos and RAFT work, and it was described in Wei Dai's b-money in 1989 [1]. But it didn't work for an adversarial byzantine network, and so it wasn't until Satoshi invented a Proof-of-Work based solution in 2008 that we had a crypto-currency.

1. http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

"Each server is required to deposit a certain amount of money in a special account to be used as potential fines or rewards for
proof of misconduct."

> First of all, I wouldn't be surprised if you had reasons to try to discredit my claims :).

Well, if I were Satoshi, wouldn't I be encouraging you to fixate on Wei Dai...?

> I don't know. His website says that he's a lecturer at 'Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus'.

It does? Are you sure you are looking at the right Wei Dai, the Wei Dai of http://www.weidai.com/ ? It's not a unique name. There's more than one of them.