In recent years, more and more Internet people have begun to migrate to Web3, trying to establish a new land in this new land, looking for the next era of opportunities. The origin of all this can be traced back to the birth of "blockchain" technology 14 years ago. The decentralized, distributed network concept of blockchain is the cornerstone of the birth and development of various Web3 applications today, and is considered to be one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st century.
Many people know that blockchain technology was put forward by a mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto. His paper titled bitcoin: A Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System published in 2008 marked the formal birth of blockchain technology.
What many people don't know, however, is that The underlying idea of blockchain was not first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Ten years before bitcoin was born, a Chinese cryptographer named Wei Dai put it into his research called B-Money.
In the process of writing his thesis on Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote to Wei Dai many times to discuss bitcoin and made it clear that bitcoin is a supplement and extension of B-Money's idea. Today, when you look at the Bitcoin white paper, the first reference is from Wei Dai's "B-Money" published in 1998.
As an important pioneer of blockchain, Wei Dai has been in a very high position in the field of encryption, and has influenced a large number of young people including V God. But at the same time, Wei Dai is also extremely mysterious in real life, there are very few personal information about him on the Internet, his story is also controversial, and some people even suspect that Wei Dai is actually Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
So who is Wei Dai, the Chinese cryptographer? This time, we're trying to piece some together from various sources.
An important spiritual forerunner of blockchain
Before Bitcoin, many of the underlying technical concepts of blockchain actually came from Cypherpunk, a mysterious mailing list group founded in 1993.
Password punk is one advocates the use of strong encryption algorithm to keep personal privacy "geek", its members have a lot of us now familiar computer bosses, including its founder, Julian him, "father" of the world wide web, Tim berners-lee, Facebook founder Sean parker, and so on, of course, Wei Dai and Satoshi Nakamoto.
In the late 1990s, cypherpunk produced many of the basic ideas and technologies that would shape blockchain in the future, including Adam Baker's PoW algorithm, Stuart Harper and Scott Stornetta's time-stamped protocol for securing digital files, Wei Dai proposed an anonymous, distributed electronic cryptocurrency system. Therefore, to some extent, blockchain technology is not the original invention of Satoshi Nakamoto, but the integration of a series of cryptopunk technologies.
Among them, b-Money concept proposed by Wei Dai can be said to be an important spiritual pioneer of blockchain.
B-money's design is very similar to bitcoin in many key technical qualities. It pioneered the concept of distributed ledger, requiring all account holders to jointly determine and agree on the cost of computation, and introduced PoW mechanisms, digital signatures, P2P transactions, smart contracts, authentication and other concepts for the first time.
However, as an incomplete idea, B-Money at that time was shallow in many aspects, and did not put forward detailed solutions in consensus model, reward and punishment mechanism, currency creation and other aspects. Therefore, b-Money stayed at the design level but did not put into practice, and did not cause great splash at that time.
By 2008, Satoshi nakamoto had started designing Bitcoin based on previous ideas. After compiling the paper, he first sent the article to Adam Baker, the inventor of PoW algorithm. After reading it, Adam Baker found that the operation mechanism of Bitcoin has many similarities with B-Money proposed by Wei Dai many years ago, so he suggested that Satoshi nakamoto should cite B-Money. Then, After studying B-Money carefully, Satoshi was surprised to find that Wei Dai had almost the same idea with him ten years ago, and perfected bitcoin by referring to some mechanisms in B-Money.
The story was captured in several email exchanges between Mr Nakamoto and Mr Dai. "Bitcoin will expand your vision into a complete working mechanism," Nakamoto told Wei Dai in the emails. "I think it achieves almost all of the goals you outlined in B-Money."
After the advent of Bitcoin, it has gradually aroused more and more responses in the science and technology circle, and B-Money, as the first cited literature, has attracted a lot of attention again. Wei Dai has also become a heavyweight blockchain pioneer in the eyes of many people.
However, Mr Dai was humble enough to comment in a forum discussion that Bitcoin, despite its similarities to B-Money, was entirely created by Satoshi Nakamoto and had little to do with him. Since then, he has gradually withdrawn from the Internet and rarely appeared in public.
A mysterious cryptographic genius
Who the hell is Wei Dai? This question is almost as curious as "who is Satoshi Nakamoto". Despite the explosion of information on the Internet, there is still very little information about Wei Dai.
Wei Dai, a computer science graduate of the university of Washington and a former Microsoft employee, is the co-founder of Bitvise and the inventor of the Crypto++ open source library that has had an impact on cryptography to this day.
His Chinese name is described by some as David, others as Dai Wei. According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1976, which, if true, means he was only 22 when he came up with the idea for B-Money. At present, there is no official identification of Wei Dai's photo. A search by Silicon Star found that the photo previously used by many media to identify Wei Dai was actually just another Chinese biologist with the same name.
According to sources, Wei Dai joined Microsoft Cryptography Research Group in Washington D.C. after graduation, where he participated in the research, design and implementation of application encryption systems. During that time, he patented two encryption algorithms aimed at optimizing the technology stack, which were later used extensively in Microsoft's software tools.
He later left Microsoft to help found Bitvise, Windows' most powerful SSH client, and is said to have written the first version of the software. The Bitvise founding team profile gives a sense of just how understated Wei Dai is: not only is his photo blank, but the profile specifically states that he is a "Silent Partner" of the company.
Mr Dai appears to be the son of Dai Xiwei, a former Chinese Microsoft executive, according to another rumour. Who is Dai Xiwei? He was once the most technologically advanced Chinese in the US IT industry. His artificial intelligence company was acquired by Microsoft in the 1980s, and he later became a senior architect at Microsoft. When Bill Gates visited China for the first time, he was accompanied by dai Xiwei.
In Dai Xi for writing the book across the river died in 2003, he mentioned his son wear for, said he was exhibited high computer talent, 8 years old can help uncle write software processing laboratory data, 13 years old start in their writing software, middle school after the summer internship in Microsoft research cryptography research group. And these backgrounds and trajectories seem to match Wei Dai.
In the circle, there are many people also speculated that Wei Dai may be Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
Previously, some people have compared nakamoto's public release of various texts with Wei Dai's text, from the perspective of language habits, word preference and other analysis of Wei Dai and Nakamoto's similarity in all candidates ranked second. Other evidence includes that Wei Dai and satoshi nakamoto share a strong interest in philosophy, that the bitcoin client is written in C++, which Wei Dai is good at using, that bitcoin makes extensive use of the Crypto library developed by Wei Dai, and that both of them have some Oriental background and are very mysterious in real life.
Of course, the above are some guesses that have not been fully confirmed, and interested friends can study them thoroughly.
Far away from rivers and lakes, but rivers and lakes always have his legend
Today, when we search for Wei Dai, the most personal connection to him is probably his "ancient morning" homepage.
The home page lists his research, including Crypto++, and his thoughts on technical issues. It also lists some of the communities he likes to visit, including Less Wrong, a "community blog for perfecting the art of human reason," and the aforementioned Cypherpunks. But the profile has not been updated for a long time, and Mr Dai has not appeared on these forums for several years.
Although Wei Dai is not in today's bustling Web3 arena, but later blockchain pioneers have always remembered this pioneer.
For example, the smallest unit of Ethereum is called Wei, 1 Ethereum = 10 ^ 18 Wei, and this Wei is derived from the name of Wei Dai. For example, DAI, currently the fourth largest stable currency in the world, has adopted the surname Wei DAI as an important source of its name. From this, we can also see Wei Dai's important position in the field of encryption.
In fact, like Wei Dai, "mystery" is a common characteristic of many pioneers in the field of encryption. As more and more Web3 business applications emerge and more and more newcomers become famous, most of these pioneers choose to flee to the shadows.
Building a system where personal information is absolutely secure and privacy is free was the starting point for the first Cypherpunk's cryptographic research, and the old geeks seem to be sticking to that spirit.
Who Wei Dai and Satoshi Nakamoto are may not be so important. What is important is that their efforts and research in pursuit of utopia more than 20 years ago have now opened the door for the next era.