On the Cypherpunks Mailing List through the 1990s, Hal Finney, Adam Back, and Wei Dai discussed digital cash proposals like b-money before Bitcoin existed.
60 entries / 5 threads
Asked how to stop a present event being passed off as a past one, Assange answers that you need a trusted time-notary who publishes hashes somewhere hard to undo, such as a newspaper.
Wei Dai replies to Adam Back on Cypherpunks, conceding b-money would be at most a niche mechanism and revealing his shift toward viewing the government monopoly of force as a net benefit.
Adam Back replies to Wei Dai on Cypherpunks, identifying seven monetary-design issues in b-money and proposing Hashcash as the minting mechanism — a substantive analysis ten years before Bitcoin.
Adam Back reposts the full text of Wei Dai's b-money proposal to the Cypherpunks list, with comments to follow — the message that opened the December 1998 b-money design discussion.
Wei Dai announces b-money on the Cypherpunks list as a brief addendum to PipeNet 1.1, pointing readers to his eskimo.com page — the proposal later cited as reference [1] in the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Wei Dai announces b-money on the Cypherpunks list as a secondary item alongside PipeNet 1.1, his primary focus. The proposal later cited in Bitcoin appears in a single sentence at the end of the post.
Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, pitched as a stopgap until digicash spread or a fallback if it failed.
Adam Back announces Hashcash: partial SHA-1 collisions as postage for remailers and spam control, costly to compute and instant to verify, and a stop-gap until digicash spreads.
Jim Choate rejects a central majordomo: he envisions a fishnet of remailers where each node links to two others. "There should be no 'one main' anything on this project."
Adam Back proposes one main majordomo feeding many mail exploders, an architecture he credits John Gilmore with suggesting as the simpler alternative.
Jim Choate reports the first link between cypherpunks@ssz.com and cypherpunks@algebra.com and hopes a three-way link will be ready for prime time.
Lance Cottrell, author of Mixmaster, opens cypherpunks@cyberpass.net and says he favors a multi-node list, where no one site can censor it and losing any one node is not catastrophic.
Adam Back welcomes Sten Drescher's plan for a network of majordomos to carry a new Cypherpunks list and suggests mail exploders behind a central majordomo as a simpler design.
John Gilmore says he will no longer host the Cypherpunks list: unless the community builds a new home by February 20, the list will cease to exist.
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.
John Gilmore announces that Sandy Sandfort will moderate the Cypherpunks list for a one-month test, with unedited and flames lists for those who want everything.
Jim Byrd forwards Johan Helsingius's press release closing anon.penet.fi, a remailer with over half a million users, because Finnish law on the privacy of Internet messages was still unclear.
Rich Burroughs forwards a signed Usenet report: on August 22, 1996, a Helsinki court ordered Johan Helsingius to reveal the address the police wanted within 30 days or face fines and jail.
Wei Dai announces Disperse/Collect 1.0 on the Cypherpunks list and says he built it with his own Crypto++ library, a sign that he wrote code himself.
Henson tells the Cypherpunks list over 500 munitions T-shirts have shipped, 25% of U.S. profits go to Phil Zimmermann's legal defense fund, and buyers arrested for wearing one get a refund.
Don Henson reports over 350 RSA/Perl munitions T-shirts shipped by July 27, 1995: under ITAR, wearing one where a non-U.S./Canadian citizen can see it counts as exporting cryptography.
Hal Finney posts a recorded Netscape order session encrypted with SSL's exportable 40-bit RC4 and challenges the list to break it and recover the fake name and address he entered.
Mike Duvos asks whether anyone has obtained DigiCash's software: it is for sale on Chaum's web page but apparently only for electronic money. "A classic chicken and egg situation. :)"
DigiCash's press release, forwarded to the Cypherpunks list: David Chaum demonstrates software-only electronic cash payments over the Internet at the first World Wide Web conference in Geneva.
Timothy Newsham forwards an anonymous "Introduction to BlackNet": a group that buys and sells information of every kind, paying in cash, bank deposits, or its own "CryptoCredits."
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.
Paul Ferguson reviews Levy's "Crypto Rebels" in Wired's May/June 1993 issue, bought off a newsstand; the cover shows May, Hughes, and Gilmore in white plastic masks behind a flag.
Eric Hughes answers the Clipper chip announcement the same evening in four lines: he will say much more in the coming weeks, but for now only one thing. "No compromises."
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!"
Eric Hughes posts A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, dated March 9, 1993, to the list: privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself, and "Cypherpunks write code."
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.
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.
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.
Eric Hughes posts the Perl script for a hopping remailer he wrote that morning, tests it with three hops, and names the next project: encrypting each message so the route stays hidden.
A tongue-in-cheek notice signed "Mr. Crypto": mail sent to hughes@soda.berkeley.edu with a Request-Remailing-To header is stripped of its headers and resent, though rumor says he saves everything.
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.