Ur-Cypherpunk Tim May has died
Tim May (left) and the Cypherpunk co-founders Eric Hughes and John Gilmore.
Tim May died at the weekend. Hardly anyone dealt with digital cash as early as the co-founder of the Cypherpunk movement. He found Bitcoin great, but eyed the course of the cryptocurrency rather critically.
“I got the news that my dear friend Tim May, co -conspirator in many things for many years, and my companion in the fight for freedom, this week in his house in Corralitos, California, died,” says a Lucky Green on Facebook. “The cause of death was natural circumstances, even if the autopsy is still pending. Tim did not die in a hail of bullets, as so many would have expected, who did not know him, but above all through his writings.”
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Tim May was a co-founder of the Cypherpunk movement. It is one of the primeval rocks of the intellectual layers from which Bitcoin was created. Much of what shapes the discussions about the Internet and digital cash today goes back to what May already discussed in the 90s.
Cypherpunks: In the eye of the hurrican
May, the son of a marine officer, only grew up in Washington, then on the east coast of the states. He has already discovered his love for firearms as a teenager, writes Thomas Rid in his book “The Rise of the Machines.“He dealt with cryptography early on and was also inspired by science fiction, such as the famous author Vinge. As an engineer at Intel, he earned enough money to no longer depend on gainful employment in his early 40s and instead devote himself to his own interests and studies. He was obsessed with typical American individualism and will to freedom.
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Together with Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, he organized meetings in a office building in San Franzisco in the early 1990s to talk about cryptography, the Internet, politics and freedom. This group quickly became famous as “Cypherpunks”. From the meetings, the legendary Cypherpunk mailing list, about the hundreds of people around the world, discussed topics that were still futuristic during this time, but today shape the everyday life of digital life. There is the Internet, freedom, privacy, laws, politics, economy and money. About how life will be in the electronic age.
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The fascinating discussions of this mailing list are included in online archives, which are still an excellent historical source for cryptography and the early days of the Internet. Tim May described these days a few years later: “During this time, a lot was written about cryptography, key faithowers, the network, the data highway, cyber terrorists and cryptoanarchy. We found ourselves in the eye of a hurrican “. This note comes from his book Cyphernomicron published online in 1994.
Cyphernomicron mixes cryptography, culture and politics in a way that is unique then and today. It tells the history of the Cypherpunks, describes technologies such as PGP, email remailers and their consequences for law, monitoring, reputation and more. With this work and many other writings, May became a radical individualistic and libertarian philosopher, which, like no other, managed to bring information technology and politics together. He took up a mentality that was in the Silicon Valley of this time, and put it into clear words that should shape the political attitude of entire generations of computer scientists.
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Relentlessly, but enthusiastic
It shows the writings of May that he relentlessly named all the consequences of the future called “cryptoanarchy”: “And many of us who thought about the topic of cryptoanarchy were horrified at the consequences that appear inevitable,” said May published in a 1994 Paper. He predicts that the state will try to prevent cryptoanarchy and be referred to “reasons of national security”, such as combating drug trafficking and tax escape or, abstract, social disintegration. According to May, many of these worries are entitled in his famous “Manifesto of the crypto anarchists”: “Cryptoanarchy will enable state secrets, forbidden goods and thiefs to be traded. An anonymous computer -based market will even make it possible for hideous marketplaces to arise for blackmail and order murders.”
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The high art of May was to be aware of all the problems of what he called “cryptoanarchy” – but at the same time relentlessly adhered to her as his utopia. He writes in his manifesto: “Computer technology is about to give individuals and groups the opportunity to communicate and interact in an absolutely anonymous way. Two people can exchange messages, do business and negotiate electronic contracts without their real names, their legal position and other things… ”As the invention of the barbed wire made it possible to fence and ranch, the discoveries of cryptography“ The barbed wire for intellectual property will be reduced.“Then May puts on the manifest’s final sentence:“ Awaked, you have no more to lose than your fences made of barbed wire.”
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May had already predicted in the 90s that there would be a digital cash and that it would be a kind of key to cryptoanarchy. The technologies were there. In the Cypherpunk-Mailing List, he observed and commented on any attempt to create such cash. When no variant had still established itself at the end of the 90s, he stated a bit frustrated: “Ten years and still no useful digital cash. I wrote my cryptoanarchist Manifesto almost eleven years ago. I met Chaum 1988. I knew digital cash would not come so quickly, but I hadn’t expected that nothing more useful would be there more than ten years later.”
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“The biggest hype I’ve ever seen.”
When Bitcoin finally became a digital cash for the success story, May watched it carefully without significantly getting into the discussion and development. In an interview with Coindesk a few months ago, he commented on the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. On the one hand, he calls Bitcoin “Perhaps the most important development since the development of the double bookkeeping.“He also thinks that Bitcoin does what it should do – to transfer values.
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On the other hand, he looks at a lot of what happens, with great skepticism. “I can’t say what Satoshi was up to, but I think it was not about stock exchanges have draconian Kyc rules and freeze accounts.“He fears that the transparency of Bitcoin in association with the supervision of the stock exchanges can lead to a surveillance state. Even the great confusion in the markets does not like him. “What I see are hundreds of millions in programming errors, thefts, scams and initial coin offer based on windy ideas …” Satoshi realized a brilliant idea, but “the narrative is lubricated.“Cryptocurrencies have become the greatest“ hype wagon ”that he had ever seen.
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