Read on Twitter
Tomorrow @reason is publishing the 1st of my 4-part documentary series about the cypherpunk movement of the ‘90s, which led to bitcoin, @wikileaks, among other things. Here's a thread about some of the participants & screenshots from my interviews.
RIP Tim May. I spent most of a day with him not long before he died. He was very generous with his time. May is the father of crypto anarchy and the cypherpunks’ most influential figure.
Whitfield Diffie, the co-discoverer of public-key cryptography, came by Reason’s DC office for an afternoon.
On @laurashin's podcast about cypherpunks, @AaronvanW (the best writer in bitcoin IMO) mentioned May's unnamed friend who started a company for selling information. A thesis of my project is that that friend, Phil Salin, was really important. Here he is with Hayek.
Salin, founder of the American Information Exchange, or AMIX, is also a character in Finn Brunton’s recent book. Salin’s prescient 1991 essay on “costs and computers” from @edyson's newsletter is a must-read: http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/radar/r1/11-91.pdf
Salin died of cancer in 1991, but I got to talk to his widow and business partner, the entrepreneur Gayle Pergamit.
Interviewed the brilliant @marksammiller, a pioneer in Project Xanadu with @TheTedNelson, who co-wrote groundbreaking papers on decentralized computing in the '80s and ‘90s, which influenced @NickSzabo4. https://agoric.com/papers/
Mark was also been an influence on @zooko, who I interviewed in NYC about his early cypherpunk days.
I also talked to Jim McCoy, co-founder of the cypherpunk startup Mojo Nation, where he employed Zooko and @bramcohen. I’ve seen some online theorizing that he’s Satoshi. He’s not. But wrote some great posts on the cypherpunks email list.
AMIX’s smart contracting system was designed by @DeanTribble, another computer scientist who did a lot of pioneering work. Check out, for example, his 1995 idea for digital money with Norman Hardy ( https://bit.ly/3iHDngk ).
Interviewed AMIX’s head of software, @epopt, whose prior stint was as project leader for Lucasfilm's Habitat. Channeling Ludwig von Mises, Chip wrote provocatively that when building a virtual world in software "detailed central planning is impossible; don’t even try."
Interviewed the pioneering cryptographer @adam3us, creator of Hashcash, cited in the bitcoin white paper.
Interviewed economist David Friedman (son of Milton, father of @patrissimo). His writings influenced Tim May and visa versa. Friedman cleverly argued that public-key encryption is a virtual Second Amendment for the information age.
Interviewed Paul Rosenberg, whose cypherpunk novel, “A Lodging of Wayfaring Men,” influenced Ross Ulbricht. I recommend this 2017 talk about cypherpunks presented by his daughter @hmichellerose
Wish I could have interviewed Eric Hughes (who I talked to for several hours but I never made it to Utah), David Chaum (who showed up for our interview but backed out for complex reasons), and Szabo (whose Q&A with @PeterMcCormack on cypherpunks etc. is one of my favorites).
And here's a trailer for the series.
And, of course, can't forget John Gilmore, co-founder of @EFF, who did more than anyone to protect software and cryptography as free speech. Interviewed him in his SF basement. The computer behind him hosted the cypherpunks list.
Part 1 is up on YouTube:
