“You can pay for access to a database, buy software or a newsletter by email, play a computer game over the net, receive $5 owed you by a friend, or just order a pizza. The possibilities are truly unlimited.”
This quote is not from a 2011 Bitcoin introduction video. In fact, the quote is not about Bitcoin at all. It is not even from this millennium. The quote[1] is from cryptographer Dr. David Chaum, speaking at the first ever CERN conference[2] in Geneva in 1994. What he’s talking about is eCash.
If the cypherpunk movement has a godfather, the bearded, ponytailed Chaum is it. To say that the cryptographer — now 62 or 63 years old (he won’t reveal his exact age) — was ahead of the curve is an understatement. Before most people had heard of the internet, before most homes had personal computers, before Edward Snowden, Jacob Appelbaum or Pavel Durov were even born, Chaum concerned himself with the future of online privacy.
“You have to let your readers know how important this is,” Chaum once told[3] a Wired journalist. “Cyberspace doesn't have all the physical constraints. […] There are no walls … it's a different, scary, weird place, and with identification it's a panopticon nightmare. Right? Everything you do could be known to anyone else, could be recorded forever. It's antithetical to the basic principle underlying the mechanisms of democracy.”
Chaum, who started his career as a computer science professor at Berkeley University, was not just a digital privacy advocate. He designed the tools to realize it. First published in 1981, Chaum’s paper “Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms[4]” laid the groundwork for research into encrypted communication over the internet, which
