#Cryptography
11 entries tagged Cryptography.
People (7)
- Adam Back Adam Back is a British cryptographer who invented the Hashcash proof-of-work scheme cited in the Bitcoin white paper, was the first person Satoshi Nakamoto is known to have emailed, co-founded the blockchain company Blockstream, and is a recurring Satoshi candidate that he denies.
- David Chaum David Chaum is the American cryptographer who invented anonymous digital cash, devised the mix network and the blind signature, wrote a 1982 dissertation that anticipated the blockchain, and built the DigiCash eCash system whose 1998 bankruptcy left the cypherpunks to pursue trustless money.
- Hal Finney Hal Finney was a cryptographer who developed Pretty Good Privacy and reusable proof-of-work, received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto, and was cryopreserved by Alcor after his death from ALS.
- Nick Szabo Nick Szabo is a computer scientist and legal scholar who proposed the digital-cash scheme bit gold, coined the concept of smart contracts, and is recurrently and consistently denied to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
- Phil Zimmermann Phil Zimmermann is the programmer and anti-nuclear activist who wrote Pretty Good Privacy and released it for free in 1991, became the target of a three-year US criminal investigation that treated strong encryption as an exported munition, and went on to build the encrypted-voice tools Zfone and Silent Circle.
- Timothy May Timothy May was a former Intel physicist who wrote 'The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,' cofounded the cypherpunks mailing list, and devised the BlackNet thought experiment.
- Wei Dai Wei Dai is a computer engineer who proposed the b-money digital-cash scheme cited in the Bitcoin white paper, created the Crypto++ library, and posts in the rationalist community.
Concepts (4)
- Cypherpunks The cypherpunks were a cryptography-and-privacy movement organized around a mailing list founded in 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy May, and John Gilmore, whose advocacy of strong encryption and digital cash against state control ran forward into Bitcoin and WikiLeaks.
- Hashcash Hashcash is the 1997 proof-of-work scheme that Adam Back devised to price email and deter spam by forcing a sender to compute a partial hash collision, and which the 2008 Bitcoin white paper cited as the model for the proof-of-work that secures the network and issues new coins.
- Pretty Good Privacy Pretty Good Privacy is the email-encryption software Phil Zimmermann released for free in 1991, whose international spread triggered a three-year US criminal investigation that treated strong cryptography as a munition and that the cypherpunks made a central front of the crypto wars.
- Satoshi Nakamoto Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous author of the 2008 Bitcoin white paper and the developer who launched the network in January 2009, mined roughly 1.1 million bitcoin that have never moved, and stopped public communication in 2011.