5 entries
Hal Finney's essay on LessWrong, written approximately two months after his ALS diagnosis in August 2009. Despite facing a terminal illness, Finney expressed hope and determination, dreaming of contributing to open-source software even from within an immobile body.
Wei Dai's comments on the LessWrong 'Making money with Bitcoin?' thread. He clarified that he did not create Bitcoin but 'only described a similar idea more than a decade ago' and that Satoshi independently reinvented the concept. He revealed purchasing a Radeon 5870 GPU for mining after this thread, and warned that 'not many other cryptographers have analyzed its security.'
Wei Dai's comments on the LessWrong post 'Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks,' in which he argued that Bitcoin has 'failed with regard to its monetary policy' due to price volatility, and revealed that he never responded to Satoshi's 2008 email asking for comments — regretting that he 'could have dissuaded him (or them) from the fixed supply of money idea.'
Wei Dai's reflections on Satoshi Nakamoto and on why b-money was never implemented, from a LessWrong Q&A thread. Dai stated that Satoshi 'didn't even read my article before reinventing the idea himself,' and later explained that b-money 'wasn't a complete practical design yet' and that he had 'grown somewhat disillusioned with cryptoanarchy' by the time he finished writing it up.
Wei Dai's LessWrong post revealing that Satoshi Nakamoto emailed him personally in early 2009 announcing Bitcoin v0.1, but he ignored it because he 'was more interested in Less Wrong than Cypherpunks at that point.' He later started mining in 2011 after seeing a LW article, turning ~$300 into six figures.