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November 1998Origins & cultureResearch & proposalsdocumented

b-money describes a currency without a mint

Wei Dai circulated a proposal for money whose creation and ownership were tracked by every participant rather than an issuer.

The scheme required participants to maintain their own copy of the ledger and to create money by performing computational work of measurable cost. Dai left the hardest problem, keeping the separate copies in agreement, largely unsolved.