Wei Dai
The cypherpunk behind b-money, one of the proposals cited in the Bitcoin white paper, and the Crypto++ library.
In 1998 Wei Dai posted a short essay to the cypherpunks list describing b-money: an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system in which money is created by computational work and the participants keep the ledger themselves. It was never built, but the ideas resurfaced a decade later – the 2008 Bitcoin white paper lists b-money as its first reference.
Dai also wrote Crypto++, a C++ cryptography library that has shipped in countless products since the 1990s. The smallest unit of ether on Ethereum is called a wei after him, making him one of very few people with a unit of currency to their name.