All concepts
Concept
Precursor
b-money
First appeared Nov 1998
Why it matters
b-money sketched a money created by computation and tracked by a distributed set of bookkeepers — a recognizable ancestor of Bitcoin's design that Satoshi cited first.
What it is
Wei Dai's 1998 proposal for anonymous, distributed electronic cash in which all participants keep a collective ledger of who owns what and are rewarded for the computational work of maintaining it. Reference [1] in the white paper.