They write the code. Their code is open to everyone and can be used for free. But they don't do it out of altruism - they know that someone in this world has to write code and create programs that help protect privacy. They are convinced that privacy, including from state structures, whose attention to people's private lives is becoming more and more close every day, is one of the fundamental rights of people. And to help them, of course, comes cryptography. Their name may not yet be legion, but at least they have it, and that name is cipherpunks.
The movement itself dates back to 1992, with Timothy May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore founding. Unfortunately, Timothy May, author of the famous "Cryptoanarchist Manifesto", which was partly the source of inspiration for the creation of the first prototypes of bitcoin, is no longer with us today.
His collaborator Eric Hughes, in turn, was the creator of the already legendary cipher mailing list, and is also known as the author of "The Cipherpunk Manifesto".
"Privacy is necessary for an open society of the digital age. Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing. Private business is something that, according to the person, the whole world does not need to know, about the secret case should not know at all. Privacy is the ability to choose what information to discover about yourself to the world," reads the Cipherpunk Manifesto.
With a deeper understanding, this idea is extremely important. Most people often say that all this does not matter to them, because they have nothing to hide. However, as security expert Bruce Schneier once observed, this argument stems from the mistaken assumption that privacy is a desire to hide something illegal. In reality, privacy is exactly how an individual interacts with the world around him.
The word "future" is in the headline of this article for a reason, because almost 30 years after the creation of the cipherpunk movement, their ideas remain no less relevant. The world around them, especially the states, is increasingly encroaching on people's privacy, making the task of creating new software solutions even more important. And what those decisions will be, will largely depend on how people interact with each other.
Next, we will consider what encryption can offer in the future in the field of encryption and cryptocurrencies, but to begin with it will be useful to recall a number of events from the past, which in many ways helped to shape the picture of today.
Cryptographic Wars of the 1990s
For much of the last decade of the 20th century, the U.S. government made significant efforts to limit the use of encryption for commercial purposes. This was due to the fact that at that time cryptography was used mainly for military purposes, and encryption technologies, hardware and software were included in the 13th category of the U.S. Arms List, whose exports were controlled Coordinating Committee on Export Control (CoCom).
Under these procedures, the sSL's "export version" was limited to 40 bits and could be easily hacked even with a home computer. At the same time, the consumer version in the U.S. involved the use of a 128-bit key.
Nevertheless, under public pressure from libertarians and privacy advocates, as well as against the backdrop of the rapid spread of software, the U.S. authorities eventually made concessions.
In 1996, for example, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order to move commercial encryption from the Arms List to the Trade Control List, which meant serious easing of export controls. The document also stated that in the context of export control rules , "software should not be considered or treated as "technology."
In 1990, a company called DigiCash was founded in Amsterdam. Its founder was David Cchaum, who is often called another godfather of cipherpunks.
DigiCash specialized in digital money and payment systems, and its flagship product was the digital cash system eCash with cyberBucks cash unit. eCash used so-called "blind signatures" - a cryptographic technology designed to improve the privacy of transaction participants.
Despite the fact that the system was even tested by some banks, and Microsoft supposedly negotiated the integration of eCash in Windows 95, the business did not achieve commercial success.
In 1997, Adam Beck, now CEO of Blockstream, created Hashcash, a kind of anti-spam mechanism, which was based on the need to use a certain number of emails computing power. This made sending spam economically unprofitable.
In fact, it was an early implementation of the Proof-Of-Work consensus algorithm, and he didn't know it at the time, so Adam Beck laid the groundwork for the creation of the world's first decentralized monetary system in the last millennium.
A year later, Wei Dai, a talented cryptographer who still has very little information about, published a proposal to create another digital payment system called b-money.
The author of the system also offered two interesting concepts that have found their continuation in today's cryptocurrencies. The first was to create a protocol where each participant supported a copy of the database with information about how much tools the user had. The second concept was a modification of the previous version, with the difference that not every member of the network kept a copy of the registry. Instead, new concepts were introduced: regular users and servers. Only servers that host the network kept copies of the registry. The integrity of the network members was ensured by deposits in a special account, which was used for rewards or fines in case of evidence of unconscionable conduct.
It was the first concept and later adopted the creator of bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto, the second was the closest to what we know today as Proof-of-Stake.
As you can see, cipherpunks almost from the beginning fed on each other's ideas, but the turning point, which can be considered the time of the first real digital money, was the 2000s.
In 2004, For example, Hal Finney created the Reusable Proof of Work (RPoW) algorithm based on Adam Beck's Hashcash. The idea was to create unique cryptographic tokens, which, similar to unspent bitcoin outlets, could be used only once. The downside of this mechanism was that validation and protection against double spending was still carried out through the central server.
In 2005, Nick Szabo, who in the 1990s developed the concept of smart contracts, later implemented at Ethereum, announced the creation of Bit Gold, a digital collector and capital investment. Bit Gold was created on the basis of Hal Finney's RPOW proposal, but instead of using the coins once, it assumed that they would have different value based on the computing power involved in their creation.
Finally, in 2008, a certain Satoshi Nakamoto publishes a white paper of bitcoin, in which he mentions Hashcash and b-money. Who exactly is behind the name Of Satoshi Nakamoto is still unknown, but in 2009 in correspondence with Wei Wede we da the mysterious creator of bitcoin mentioned that he learned about b-money from Adam Beck.
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