Bitcoin History: Who was James A. Donald? The man who predicted the Lightning Network and Fedimint

James A. Donald was an anonymous Canadian cypherpunk.

He was among the first people to critique Satoshi’s white paper and theories. Donald argued with Satoshi about scaling on more than one occasion and detailed that he believed Bitcoin needed a layer of account. “We will need a layer of account money on top of the bitcoins, supporting transactions of a hundred-thousandth the size of the smallest coin, and to support anonymity, Chaumian money on top of the account money,” Donald wrote on November 8, 2008.

On November 17, 2008, Nakamoto sent Donald the Bitcoin source code for his review. “I sent you the main files (available by request at the moment, full release soon).”

Here is the original email correspondence between Satoshi and James A. Donald on November 17, 2008.

Within a week of the Bitcoin whitepaper being published, Hal Finney also talked about the idea building protocols like Lightning and Fedimint on top of bitcoin arguing for “building light-weight anonymous payment schemes on top of heavy-weight non-anonymous systems, so Bitcoin could be leveraged to allow for anonymity even beyond the mechanisms discussed in the paper.”

Other notable cypherpunks who believed in layering protocols are Nick Szabo and Adam Back.