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Timothy C. May, co-founder of the cypherpunk activist movement and author of "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", passed away at the age of 67.
This information was shared for the first time on December 15 by the alleged cypherpunk member Lucky Green via Facebook. According to Green, May had probably died of natural causes last week at his home in Corralitos, California, although the results of the autopsy are still pending.
May is known as the author of "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" – published in 1988 – in which he predicted some elements of the currently existing decentralized cryptocurrencies. However, the cypherpunk ideologist was not happy about where virtual currencies and blockchain were worth, as per his last interviews.
Libertarianism, work on Intel and the "BlackNet" concept
May was born in 1951 in San Diego. She showed libertarian tendencies from an early age: reportedly, May joined a 12 year old arms club and was inspired by Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" in her final year of high school.
"He just spoke to me," he would say in an unpublished interview with Reason, filmed in 2017. "I read for three days without interruption, and because of my teachers' disdain at school, I would write articles on 39; Anti-Trust Act and ills of the Sherman Act. "
After graduating in physics from the Santa Barbara University of California, in 1974 he obtained a position as an electronic engineer at Intel. While working there, he studied memory chip functions – some of his crucial breakthroughs in that area were documented in a 1979 paper. In 1986, he retired at the age of 34 because of a significant increase in its stock options.
In 1987, May was introduced by economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin, who was founding the American Information Exchange (AMiX), an online marketplace currently for business information. While May saw "a strong libertarian like Hayek" in Salin and essentially "shared the same views", he did not like his idea of an e-commerce platform that would reduce transaction costs and facilitate cross-border trade for people things like surfboard tips. "Instead, May envisioned a whistleblowing-like platform where someone could" exfiltrate bombers for that B-1 Bomber. "He later defined that concept as" BlackNet, "where" nation-states, laws on export, patent laws, national security considerations and the like [are considered] relics of the pre-cyberspace era. "
BlackNet required a non-government digital currency to be managed. "I admitted to Phil that the big problem was untraceable payments," May told Reason. "They can be monitored when they send their Visa information." Soon, he discovered a 1985 article written by cryptographer David Chaum entitled "Security without identification: transaction systems to make the big brother obsolete". In it, Chaum described a digital currency system that used cryptography to hide the buyer's identity. He led May to study public-key cryptography, a system that allowed strangers to exchange secret messages described for the first time by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976. Soon May became convinced that public-key cryptography, combined with IT on the web could "break up" structures of social power ".
"The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" and the rise of the Cypherpunks movement
In September 1988, May wrote the essay "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", loosely based on Karl Marx's "The Manifesto of the Communist Party". Reportedly, he wrote the piece of 497 words in "an hour and a half".
"Naturally the state will try to slow down or stop the spread of this [cryptography-based] technology, citing national security concerns, the use of technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of social disintegration, "the paper reads.
However, May also noted in the Manifesto that "many of these concerns will be valid", since "crypto-anarchy will allow national secrets to operate freely and allow trade in illicit and stolen materials".
In September 1992, May co-founded an online mailing list called "Cypherpunks" with his friends Eric Hughes and Hugh Daniel. In a cover story published in 1993, Wired magazine described it as "a meeting between those who share a predilection for codes, a passion for privacy and the courage to do something about it". In his post on eulogy on Facebook, Lucky Green called Cypherpunks "perhaps the single most basic cryptocracy organization in history".
In 1997, the mailing list reported an average of "30 messages a day with about 2,000 subscribers". Their contributors included WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who wrote his first messages in 1995 with the nickname "Proff". Later, in 2016, Assange published a book on the basic movement entitled "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of Internet".
The list of Cypherpunks broke up shortly after the September 11 attack, as "a lot of people had trouble talking about these things".
May and the contemporary cryptic industry: "Satoshi would barf"
May's ideas were remembered in 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto started making waves on the internet with the original Bitcoin white paper. Interestingly, the anonymous creator of the cryptocurrency was in communication with the cypherpunk community before publishing the white paper and even communicating his ideas to them in an e-mail thread.
The concept of Bitcoin soon attracted a new generation of techno-libertarians who self-identified themselves as crypto-anarchists. In fact, as Cointelegraph reported at the beginning of this year, many believe that the criptpunk movement deserves as much credit as Satoshi Nakamoto for defining the fundamental development of cryptography.
However, May was not particularly fond of cryptocurrencies in their last stage – and, above all, the clamor around them. In November 2018, when a Reason editor contacted May and asked for an interview, the co-founder of Cypherpunks told him that he had finished with the press and that he "felt burned in space".
Prior to this, in October 2018, May wrote a long piece, which was then modified in an interview – apparently, his last one.
In it, he largely criticized the concept of compliance, stating that "regulatory" attempts to be "will likely kill the main uses of cryptocurrencies, which are NOT just" another form of PayPal or Visa ".
In addition, May recalled that many cases of use of blockchains and distributed registers "are not even new inventions, only backup database variants", also claiming that "the idea that corporations want public visibility in contracts , purchases of materials, shipping dates […] he is naive ".
He also claimed that the cryptocurrency in its current form "is too complicated":
"[…] coins, forks, sharding, off-chain networks, DAG, proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake, the average person can not follow all that plausibly. What cases of use, really? […] The most interesting cases I hear about are when someone transfers money to a party that has been blocked by PayPal, Visa (etc.), or by banks and bank transfers. The rest is hype, evangelizing, HODL, get lambo garbage. "
Finally, May criticized the industry for having "a pure number" of lectures and crypto-exchanges "that have draconian rules on KYC [Know Your Customer], AML [Anti-Money Laundering], passports, blocks on accounts and laws on reporting "suspicious activity" to the local secret police. "
"I think Satoshi can vent," he finally said.
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