Wei Dai's original b-money announcement alongside PipeNet 1.1

This post is historically significant because it reveals that b-money — later cited as reference [1] in the Bitcoin whitepaper — was not Wei Dai's primary project. It was announced as a side note to PipeNet 1.1. Adam Back later forwarded the full b-money text to the mailing list on December 5, 1998, which sparked broader discussion.

From the Cypherpunks mailing list, November 26, 1998:

“I’ve discovered some attacks against the original PipeNet design. The new protocol, PipeNet 1.1, should fix the weaknesses. PipeNet 1.1 uses layered sequence numbers and MACs. This prevents a collusion between a receiver and a subset of switches from tracing the caller by modifying or swapping packets and then watching for garbage.

A description of PipeNet 1.1 is available at http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai.

Also available there is a description of b-money, a new protocol for monetary exchange and contract enforcement for pseudonyms.”

[The b-money proposal — which would later become one of the most cited precursors to Bitcoin — was introduced in a single sentence at the end of a post primarily about PipeNet, an anonymous routing protocol. Wei Dai’s main interest at the time was clearly PipeNet, not digital currency.]

Wei Dai's original b-money announcement alongside PipeNet 1.1

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