Wrote "the specter of crypto anarchy" four years before the cypherpunks had a name
Bitcoin’s own whitepaper never mentions Timothy May, and May never wrote a line of Bitcoin’s code. But twenty years before Satoshi Nakamoto published anything, May had already written the opening line of one of the cypherpunk movement’s two founding texts (as identified in the analysis of Bitcoin’s cypherpunk lineage): “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.”
May was trained as a physicist, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1974, and spent his entire engineering career at Intel starting in 1974. There he identified what became known as the alpha-particle problem: trace radioactivity in the ceramic packaging Intel used for its chips was flipping bits in dynamic memory, a discovery that changed how the industry packaged and shielded memory chips. By his own account, May worked out the problem and the solution in 1977, and Intel kept it a deep secret for the next year while its competitors struggled with soft errors; when he and Murray Woods finally presented the paper at the International Reliability Physics Symposium in April 1978, “the competitors raced for the telephones even before I’d finished presenting my paper!” The journal version of January 1979 earned the two of them the IEEE’s WRG Baker Prize in 1981.
He retired from Intel in 1986 at age 35, financially independent well before most engineers reach the middle of a career — a position that gave him the freedom to spend the next decade on cryptography and politics rather than a day job. Looking back in 2018, he wrote that in his retirement he “spent many hours a day reading crypto papers, thinking about new structures that were about to become possible”: data havens in cyberspace, new financial institutions, timed-release crypto, and digital money.
In 1988, four years before the movement he helped found had a name, May wrote The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, opening with the line borrowed and inverted from Marx: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” The manifesto argued that strong cryptography would let people trade information and value without the state ever being able to identify who was trading or what was exchanged — a vision of untraceable digital cash and anonymous markets years before either was technically possible.
In 1992, May co-founded the Cypherpunks with Eric Hughes and John Gilmore. The first meeting was held in Oakland that September, and the monthly meetings after it at the offices of Gilmore’s company, Cygnus Support; the mailing list that grew out of that first meeting ran for the rest of the decade and became, as the analysis of Satoshi’s cypherpunk lineage sets out, the channel through which Hashcash and b-money were first announced. Satoshi’s whitepaper cites both, but only Hashcash was in front of him while he built Bitcoin; he learned of b-money when his code was nearly finished. May himself was known on the list as its in-house theoretician, a prolific and often confrontational voice pushing the group’s stated principles toward their logical, sometimes uncomfortable, extremes.
On the night of August 18, 1993, Timothy Newsham forwarded to the list, without comment, a message that had come to him through an anonymous remailer the day before: “Introduction to BlackNet.” Its unnamed authors were “in the business of buying, selling, trading, and otherwise dealing with information in all its many forms,” wanted trade secrets, nanotechnology, and new product plans “from children’s toys to cruise missiles,” and would pay by anonymous bank deposit, by mailed cash, or in “CryptoCredits,” BlackNet’s own currency. Buyers and sellers were to reach it by encrypting to its public key and posting through remailers to places it watched, one of them the Cypherpunks list. About an hour later Al Billings replied, “It had to happen. Even if it isn’t real, it will happen soon enough.” On August 20 Eric Hughes ruled a PGP message encrypted for BlackNet off-topic for the list.
In February 1994, after Detweiler had reposted it to dozens of newsgroups, Hal Finney wrote that its real danger was military secrets, which could be sold with no risky meeting at all. May answered that he had written the piece, as a concrete example to hand out at a nanotechnology meeting, but had not posted it. He had coined the name in late 1987, arguing with Phil Salin over Salin’s planned information market, AMIX, and at the Crypto conference in 1988 it had been clear to him that David Chaum had thought of these uses and was deliberately steering his digital-cash scenarios around them: “He just raised his eyebrows and nodded.” May closed: “The genie’s nearly completely out of the bottle. National borders are just speed bumps on the information highway.”
May lived to see the ideas he had sketched in 1988 turn into an industry, and he was not impressed by what it had become. In an October 2018 piece for CoinDesk on the tenth anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper, which CoinDesk laid out as a Q&A, he first gave Bitcoin its due: “In the pantheon, it deserves a front-rank place, perhaps the most important development since the invention of double-entry book-keeping.” And: “Satoshi did a brilliant thing, but the story is far from over.”
What he could not stomach was the industry that had grown around it, which he saw as a betrayal of the manifesto’s own premise: “bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts,” and “the greed and hype and nattering about ‘to the Moon!’ and ‘HODL.’” He warned: “There’s a real possibility that all the noise about ‘governance,’ ‘regulation’ and ‘blockchain’ will effectively create a surveillance state, a dossier society.” He died at his home in Corralitos, California, on December 13, 2018, at 66, of natural causes.
| Contribution | Started | Status today |
|---|---|---|
| Alpha-particle soft-error research | 1977 | Standard consideration in chip packaging design; won the 1981 IEEE WRG Baker Prize |
| The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto | 1988 | Foundational cypherpunk text, cited alongside Hughes’s 1993 manifesto |
| Cypherpunks mailing list | 1992 | Moved off Gilmore’s toad.com to several hosts in 1997; where Hashcash and b-money were first announced |
May never wanted credit for Bitcoin, and by his own account near the end of his life, he wasn’t sure Bitcoin had actually delivered what he’d spent his manifesto imagining. What he built instead was the room the conversation happened in — a mailing list and a set of stated principles that Hashcash and b-money were published into. Satoshi is not in that room; the record has him reaching the same core from outside it. That’s a stranger kind of influence than authorship: May did not write the code that mattered, and nothing shows that the person who did ever read him, but he wrote the sentence that told the list what such code would be for.
18 entries
May asks why random number generators draw dozens of Cypherpunks posts while Hal Finney's work on a fully encrypted remailer has drawn none: anonymous remailing is where cypherpunks need to be.
Answering May, Finney tells how PGP led him to Chaum's papers, which held the technologies to make Vinge's True Names work, and calls remailers the ground floor of making Big Brother obsolete.
Timothy May forwards the White House announcement of the Clipper chip and its key-escrow system: "it's not a spoof...I can't check the White House's signature!"
Timothy May reads the Clipper Chip as the "cc" chip: an automatic carbon copy for Big Brother. He bets the "Wiretap Chip" will be used for more than voice.
Timothy May explains why he left the Cypherpunks list when moderation began: John Gilmore may run his machine as he wishes, but no host owns the group, and censorship makes the list worse.
May dates his thinking on crypto and the state to late 1987, when public-key crypto, anonymous digital cash and information markets struck him as the end of governments as we know them.
May recalls how Jude Milhon's quip at the earliest meetings, "You guys are just a bunch of cypherpunks," became the group's name, and why the link to cyberpunk fiction felt natural.
May explains the list's slogan "Cypherpunks write code" as a clarifying statement rather than an imperative, and estimates how few members actually wrote code.
May notes that he devised the "Big Brother Inside" slogan against the Clipper chip himself, at a Clipper meeting.
May tells newcomers that the list has no debate about the Clipper chip because it was thoroughly trashed within hours and days of its April 16, 1993 announcement.
May's outline of the group's start: talks with Eric Hughes, a first meeting in the week PGP 2.0 came out, the afternoon "Crypto Game," and John Gilmore's offer of a list site and office space.
May recalls three days of talk with Eric Hughes in May 1992 about how slowly academic cryptography became working code, and the aim to get actual running code for digital cash and mixes.
May explains the group's attachment to PGP: its first meeting in September 1992 fell within days of PGP 2.0's release, and PGP was a practical tool hobbyists could actually use.
May notes that PGP 2.0 arrived the same week as the Cypherpunks' first meeting in Oakland in September 1992, and just six months before the Clipper announcement.
May admits writing BlackNet but not posting it, dates the name to 1987 and Phil Salin's AMIX, recalls an alpha-particle secret Intel kept a year, and ends: "National borders are just speed bumps."
How a 1992 Oakland meeting became the Cypherpunks mailing list: the name, the remailers, the Clipper fight, the 1997 split, and the Hashcash and b-money posts the Bitcoin whitepaper later cited.
Timothy May posts the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto to the Cypherpunks list: written in 1988 and read at the group's September 1992 founding meeting, it predicts anonymous markets beyond state control.
Three primary-source clues to Satoshi's place among the cypherpunks: he had not heard of b-money, Wei Dai called him "not previously active," and what Satoshi did tracked Hughes's 1993 manifesto.