At the end of 1992, Eric Hughes (Eric Hughes), Timothy May, and John Gilmore founded a small group of like-minded people who met the Cygnus Solutions in the San Francisco Gulf Office. At one of the first meetings, the writer, a civil rights fighter and part-time programmer-school-taught programmer Judith Milhon, jokingly dubbed them with “cipher-francs”-with a reference to encryption and the then popular cyberpunk genre. However, the name has taken root.
“It was a kind of marketing move. A little like anonymous masks of Guy Fox, ” – later reported May.
In the same year, the famous Sending “Cypherpunks Mailing List”, which at first included several people, but gradually invited new participants. By 1994, 700 cipher -players took part in the newsletter, and the discussion branches included topics on philosophy, politics, mathematics and programming, although mostly it was still technical discussions.
One of the founders of the movement of Timothy May, a former senior researcher at Intel and one of the early ideologists of the Cryptoanarchist movement in 1988 Published Partly the joke “Cryptoanarchist Manifesto” is a parody of the famous “communist manifesto” of Karl Marx. In it, May proved the idea that the world will soon change greatly due to the development of technology, and people will be able to exchange data, while maintaining complete anonymity.
In the year of the launch of “Cypherpunks Mailing List” another founder of the group, Eric Hughes, Published “The Manifesto of the Cipher Punk.” This work complemented the ideas of May and raised the issue of creating “anonymous transactions systems”, which are designed to ensure confidentiality in the process of transmitting information. Many of these ideas will further be implemented in cryptocurrencies.
Ciphery and bitcoin
Although the cipher -panks actively discussed many different issues, in parallel with this, attempts were made to develop anonymous transaction systems that Hughes mentioned. Adam Back (Adam Back), which is still often mentioned as a candidate for the role of Satoshi Nakamoto, was one of the most striking cipheraps.
The fact is that in 1997, the BEC proposed a Hashcash system, which initially was a method of combating spam in the form of a system of evidence of work (Proof-off-Work, Pow), based on the HHA-1 drift algorithm. Simply put, BEK used the POW mechanism to get rid of spam in mail newsletters, requiring computational costs before sending each letter. It is this mechanism that will subsequently use Satoshi Nakamoto as evidence of work in mining at the HA-256 hashing algorithm. Thus, mining in Bitcoin will become one of the interpretations of the mechanism that was based on Hashcash.
Then Hal Finney (Hal Finney) Developed This idea, proposing the concept of Reusable Proof-OF-Work (multiple proof of work). RPOW allowed to create tokens with RSA signature in exchange for Hashcash tokens. These tokens could be transmitted between users and exchange for new ones at each transaction, which actually allowed their reuse. This is a big step forward compared to Hashcash, where each token could be used only once. This approach made it possible to make Pow tokens more practical and opened up opportunities for their wider use, including for creating digital money systems.
In 1998, another cipher-punk, Wei Dai, proposed the B-Money system. She in many ways anticipated Bitcoin. Let me describe the concept of a decentralized digital currency, where users could anonymously, using digital pseudonyms (open keys), exchange coins without intermediaries. But there was a problem – there was no clear mechanism of consensus. And although let me propose only a concept without technical implementation, his work gave interesting answers to a number of theoretical questions. At the same time, the question of the practical implementation of something like that remained in a limited state.
Another bright encryption, also often mentioned among candidates for the role of Satoshi Nakamoto, is Nick Sabo. Around the same time, he proposed the BitGold concept. This system of digital money solved one of the main problems of traditional finance – the need to trust the central issuer. Sabo suggested that users independently perform computational tasks, creating digital assets that are similar to gold. That is, Sabo emphasized the uniqueness of the asset itself, but a single register of transactions was not implemented in the system. Thus, users could prove that they spent computing resources. However, as subsequently celebrated Sabo himself, unlike him, Satoshi Nakamoto was able to implement a system that is sufficiently protected from the fact that the unreliable side would receive control over most of the nodes.
David Chaum
At the dawn of the creation of technologies that provide online anonymity, there were not only people directly related to the newsletter of the cipher enjoyants. So, it actively discussed the works of the famous cryptographer David Lee Chaum, which in 1982 proposed the RSA algorithm as the implementation of a blind signature technology (encryption with an open key). He is also the creator of the Ecash digital currency, which was developed in 1995 by its Digicash company.
The electronic monetary system was already conceived by Chaum as an anonymous environment that provides user confidentiality. The developments of Chauma and its cryptographic protocols influenced many ciphypances. Sometimes chauma is even called the “godfather of cryptocurrencies.”
By the way, the term “cipher-punch” itself is also found in a broader meaning-it can cover cryptographers that have been actively developing cryptographic protocols since the 1980s. Thus, the cipher -panks from the “Schifronchers newsletter” were inspired by the work of earlier researchers.
Cipher -Pan and Satoshi Nakamoto
Considering that the white book of Bitcoin was written only in 2008, and the network of the first cryptocurrency was launched in 2009, Bitcoin arose as a kind of solution that combined the technologies discussed in the environment of cipher enjoyants. It cannot be said that Satoshi invented something conceptually new, because bitcoin as a peering decentralized payment system consists of ideas, technologies and early projects that other cryptographs tried to realize.
For example, the digital currency of the Ecash chauma was created back in 1995, and by that time it was already known about encryption with an open key. But Ecash was not connected with the technology of the distributed register in the form of a blockchain and did not solve the problem of double expenses due to open data, just as it was resolved in Bitcoin.
The same can be said about the technology of Pow in Hashcash Adam Back, which initially was a method of combating spam, but in the interpretation of Satoshi Pow became a consensus for validation of transactions and the method of solving the problem of double expenses in a decentralized environment.
In the B-Money system, Vay giving was also absent from a certain common consensus on the network. Apparently, uniting different ideas, Satoshi was able to create the first cryptocurrency in the form in which we know it. By the way, that is why in White book Bitcoin we can find links to the works of Wai Dai, Adam Back and other cryptographers:
It is also interesting that in the mailing from 1999 you can find messagesent from an anonymous postal address, which states that the solution to the problem of double expenses could be the creation of a completely public registry that would simultaneously work on many devices and which could not be turned off. At the same time, the letter mentions earlier developments. There is a hypothesis according to which this message could be left by Satoshi Nakamoto himself during his active research.
Cipper and NSA
In 1996, during the period of active discussions at Cypherpunks Mailing List, the US National Security Agency (ANB) published article under the name “How to create a monetary court: cryptography of anonymous electronic cash.” The article stylistically resembles Bitcoin’s “White Book” and raises the issue of creating an electronic monetary system. The authors identified the problem of multiple expenses, and also touched on the topic of anonymity of transactions and their irreversibility.
In the text, you can also find links to the works of David Chaum. Interestingly, the HHA-256 hash algorithm, which is the basis of bitcoin, was invented by the NSA employees. It is not surprising that among different conspiracy versions of the first cryptocurrency there is an assumption that this technology is the development of American special services.
Conclusion
Bitcoin is not a sudden discovery, but the result of decades of research in the field of cryptography. Cipher -panks were looking for different ways to create an anonymous information exchange system without intermediaries. Many ideas and solutions in the form of cryptographic protocols were developed before the appearance of the first cryptocurrency, but then successfully united in it. In this sense, Bitcoin was a logical continuation of the ideas of many years of work of cipher tunes that dreamed of financial and information independence from states.
Source: Bits
I am an experienced journalist, writer, and editor with a passion for finance and business news. I have been working in the journalism field for over 6 years, covering a variety of topics from finance to technology. As an author at World Stock Market, I specialize in finance business-related topics.
