Satoshi Nakamoto contacted this man before releasing Bitcoin He was already trying to reinvent money 10 years earlier - Wei Dai - computer scientist and cryptographer - early cypherpunk - creator of Crypto++ - proposes b-money in 1998 - What was b-money? anonymous distributed electronic cash identities represented by public keys sounds familiar 1998 - Dai publishes b-money - proposes money without banks or governments - introduces two different protocols - one uses a distributed ledger maintained by participants - another uses servers with collateral At the end b-money is never actually launched 2008: - Satoshi is developing Bitcoin - contacts Adam Back, creator of Hashcash - Adam notices similarities with b-money - tells Satoshi about Wei Dai August 22, 2008 Satoshi emails Wei Dai he tells him: “I’m getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system.” Satoshi asks when b-money was published so he can properly cite it at this point Bitcoin’s paper is still called “Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party” October 2008 - Bitcoin whitepaper is released - b-money becomes reference #1# - Wei Dai is permanently connected to Bitcoin history January 2009 Bitcoin goes live but Dai barely sees it, he later says he was focused on AI safety and didn’t realize how important Satoshi’s project would become September 2026 Wei Dai suddenly starts talking about b-money again explains the “b” came from “broadcast” and “burn” and talks about Satoshi citing his work But insane how 30 years ago Wei Dai described decentralized digital money way before Bitcoin

One problem is that China's official state philosophy is dialectical materialism (mandatory to learn it in college). Which is part of the continental philosophy tradition, whereas LW/EA/AI safety are basically branches of analytical philosophy. Not sure how hard it would be to overcome this, but it's probably one reason why they don't have their own LW-like scene.

Ironically there is now apparently a memecoin named "b-money" trying to entice users with the prospect of high financial returns, when the real b-money was designed specifically to keep a long-term stable value (relative to a basket of real goods/services).