Timothy May

Timothy C. May (1951 to 2018), known as Tim May, was an American engineer and writer who became the leading theorist of crypto-anarchism and a founder of the Cypherpunks movement. He wrote "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988, cofounded the cypherpunks mailing list in 1992 with Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, and authored the long crypto-anarchist FAQ known as the Cyphernomicon. He was an extropian and a radical libertarian who held that strong encryption and untraceable digital money would dissolve the power of the state over economic and personal life.¹²

Intel Career

May took a physics degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1974 and joined Intel the same year as a staff engineer in its memory products division. In February 1977 he traced random single-bit failures in dynamic memory to alpha particles emitted by trace uranium and thorium in the ceramic chip packaging, which passed through the silicon storage nodes and deposited enough charge to flip a stored bit. He and Murray H. Woods published the finding as "Alpha-Particle-Induced Soft Errors in Dynamic Memories" in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in January 1979, and the two received the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award in 1981. The "soft error" mechanism they identified became a permanent design constraint on memory and logic, mitigated through high-purity packaging materials, polyimide die coatings, larger per-cell charge, and error-correcting codes.⁷⁸

May cashed in his Intel stock options and retired in 1986 at the age of thirty-four, devoting himself thereafter to reading and writing on cryptography, physics, mathematics, and politics.¹²

Crypto-Anarchism

May wrote "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988 and distributed it at the Crypto '88 and Hackers conferences, recirculating it to the cypherpunks list in 1992. It opened "A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy" and argued that cryptographic methods would "fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions." His 1994 Cyphernomicon laid out the body of crypto-anarchist thought for the list, and he was its most prolific contributor. He summarized his own politics as "keep your hands off my stuff," with the core of libertarianism reduced to "leave me alone."²³⁴

May drew an explicit parallel between cryptography and the printing press, arguing that just as printing eroded the power of medieval guilds and the social structures around them, public-key cryptography would erode the state's power over economic transactions and the flow of information. He anticipated that this would enable not only privacy but black markets, tax evasion, and the collapse of national borders as constraints on commerce, outcomes he welcomed rather than feared. At the first cypherpunks meeting he ran a "crypto-anarchy game" assigning attendees the roles of citizens and federal agents to dramatize the contest between surveillance and untraceable communication.⁴¹²

BlackNet

May created BlackNet as a thought experiment in 1993, an imagined anonymous marketplace in which any information, including trade secrets and classified material, could be bought and sold using anonymous remailers, message pools, and untraceable digital cash, with "nation-states, export laws, patent laws, [and] national security considerations" treated as relics of a pre-cyberspace era. The seed document opened, "Your name has come to our attention. We have reason to believe you may be interested in the products and services our new organization, BlackNet, has to offer," solicited "trade secrets, processes, production methods (esp. in semiconductors)" and "new product plans, from children's toys to cruise missiles," and proposed to pay sellers in an internal currency it called "CryptoCredits." May did not post it to Usenet himself; he leaked it via remailer to the cypherpunks list, attaching a 1024-bit PGP key under the BlackNet name, and Lance Detweiler reposted it to dozens of newsgroups before May admitted authorship.⁹¹⁰

The Cyphernomicon also discussed anonymous information markets and, in its more extreme passages, assassination markets, a concept the cypherpunk Jim Bell developed separately as "assassination politics" in an essay serialized from April 1995. Bell's scheme offered a prize to whoever correctly "predicted" the death of a listed target, settled through public-key encryption and anonymous digital cash routed across a cascade of remailers, reusing the same cryptographic toolkit as BlackNet.⁴¹¹

Later Views and Death

After the cypherpunks faded in the early 2000s, May posted to other online groups and expressed racist sentiments, and the Cyphernomicon itself contained disparaging language about "nonproductive" citizens. He died of natural causes at his home near Santa Cruz, California, in December 2018 at the age of sixty-six, days before his sixty-seventh birthday.¹²

Asked by CoinDesk in October 2018 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper, May sent back a thirty-page critique of the cryptocurrency industry that had grown from cypherpunk ideas. He wrote that "I sure don't think it involved bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police," warned that the talk of "governance" and "regulation" risked creating "a surveillance state, a dossier society," and said of the speculative mania, "I think Satoshi would barf." The cryptographers around him, including Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai, produced the digital-cash designs that preceded Bitcoin, and May is frequently invoked as a forerunner of the cryptocurrency movement and the Satoshi-era crypto-libertarian politics.⁴¹³