So where did Bitcoin come from? While many continue to bid for the identity of the individual or group of people behind Bitcoin, such details are rather irrelevant for that is not what Bitcoin is about. It was never about an individual and their invention but rather the creation of something that had been long due in the making for decades. A manifestion of the movement known as the cypherpunk movement, a group that championed digital liberty and a group that had been in motion since the 70s.
In 'Before Bitcoin', we will be following the ideological narrative that 70s beginning with the work of Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie, Ralph Merkle and their creation of public key cryptography. Prior to their publication of their research around cryptography, most research were heavily regulated and monopolised by governments. Their public release of the paper “New Directions in Cryptography” ultimately broke the hold of the tight control on cryptography, opening up the field of cryptography up to the open public and inciting the first big public wave of interest into the field.
In the 80s, we will be exploring the work of David Chaum, a cryptographer who pioneered the field of privacy research and brought attention to issues of technological centralisation as well as concerns surrounding digital privacy such as meta data. Despite the immaturity of the internet, through his research, he forecasted issues which were decades a head of his time and ultimately seeded the mission of digital liberty that would form the basis of a group in the 90s that would become known as the cypherpunks.
This group would initially rise up in resistance of the governmental abuses surrounding digital rights in the early 90s and engage the government in a decade long skirmish for cryptographic rights, personal privacy and digital freedom. They prevented an potential dystopian onset to the rest of the world and would spark world wide interest in privacy and digital liberty.
00s…
Soon after the sustainability of Bitcoin, during the early periods , we got a taste for the possibility of decentralised computing systems. Not long after, Ethereum would emerge and spark the imaginations of thousands around the world. Creators and builders around the world would also see the same vision and hold the same beliefs that the cypherpunks had: digital liberty. The group’s mission was to build a decentralised internet, web 3.0