What is cryptography?
Cryptography is the science of methods for ensuring authentication, data integrity and confidentiality.
When and how did cryptography originate and develop?
Cryptography as a text protection technique arose along with writing - cryptography methods were known in the ancient civilizations of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt.
In the first period of the development of cryptography (from about the 3rd millennium BC to the 9th century), mono-alphabetic ciphers were mainly used, the key principle of which is replacing the alphabet of the source text with another alphabet by replacing letters with other characters or letters.
Mono-alphabetical ciphers were known in Judea, Sparta, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome.
In the second period (from the 9th century in the Middle East and from the 15th century in Europe to the beginning of the 20th century) polyalphabetic ciphers (a set of monoalphabetic ciphers used to encrypt the next plaintext symbol according to a certain rule) became widespread.
In the third period, from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, the use of polyalphabetic ciphers continued. In parallel, a new communication technology arose - radio communication. It allowed you to instantly transfer large amounts of information, but was not protected. The problem of reliable encryption became relevant during the First World War and particularly acute during the Second World War, since small transmitters and receivers were widely used, allowing warring parties to easily intercept enemy messages. The leading world powers actively introduced electromechanical encryption devices and competed with each other in the development of hacking methods. Thanks to these factors, cryptography, which for centuries remained the lot of spies, mathematicians and diplomats, began to take shape as an organized science.
The fourth period - from the mid to the 70s of the XX century - was marked by a transition to mathematical cryptography. By that time, such sections of mathematics as mathematical statistics, probability theory, number theory and general algebra had finally formed, the foundations of cybernetics and theory of algorithms were laid.
A key milestone in this transition has been the publication of Claude Shannon 's work on the Theory of Communication in Secret Systems, an American mathematician and cryptanalyst . It was the first to introduce an approach to cryptography as a mathematical science. Shannon formulated its theoretical foundations and introduced the concepts with which students begin to study cryptography these days.
After World War II, the governments of Great Britain and the United States created organizations designed to deal with issues of electronic surveillance and information security, the Center for Government Communications of Great Britain and the National Security Agency of the United States.
In the early 1970s, James Ellis of the UK Government Communications Center put forward the concept of public-key cryptography. In this system, for encrypting messages and verifying electronic signatures, a public key is used that is transmitted over an insecure channel that is available for monitoring. His colleague, British mathematician Clifford Cox, developed the mathematical base for this model.
Neither the British Government Communications Center nor the US NSA adopted public-key cryptography, as there was no technology that would allow this. For this, a computer communications network (Internet) was needed, however, such systems were not yet developed in the 1970s.
In the 1980s, computer scientists, and in the 1990s, with the spread of the Internet, even ordinary users were faced with the problem of protecting data in an open environment.
In the meantime, small groups of hackers, mathematicians, and cryptographers have begun work on translating public key cryptography into reality. One of them was an American cryptographer, Ph.D. David Chaum, who is sometimes called the godfather of cypherpunks .
How did the movement of cypherpunks originate?
Back in 1982, Chaum introduced the blind digital signature method - a public key encryption model. The development made it possible to create a database of people who could remain anonymous, while guaranteeing the accuracy of the information they provided about themselves. Chaum dreamed of digital voting, the process of which can be verified without revealing the identity of the voter, but first of all about digital cash.
Chaum's ideas inspired a group of cryptographers, hackers, and activists. They became known as cypherpunks - members of the movement advocating computer technology as a means of destroying state power and centralized management systems.
One of the ideologists of the movement was American cryptographer, former leading research scientist of Intel Timothy May . In 1987, May met the American economist, entrepreneur and futurist Philip Salin, who founded the American Information Exchange (AMiX), a network platform for data trading.
However, May did not like the idea of ??an electronic platform on which people (cross-border and with low commissions) could sell low-value information to each other. He dreamed of creating a global system that allows anonymous bilateral exchange of any information and resembles a corporate information system.
Subsequently, May finalized this concept in the form of a BlackNet system , the operation of which required a non-governmental digital currency and the ability to make untracked payments in it. In 1985, he read David Chaum 's article , Security Without Identification: A Transactional System That Will Make Big Brother An Anachronism. In the article, Chaum described a system that cryptographic methods hides the identity of the buyer. Acquaintance with this idea prompted May to study public-key cryptographic protection.
Soon, he came to the conclusion that such cryptography, coupled with network computing, could "destroy the structures of social power."
In September 1988, May wrote " The Cryptanarchist Manifesto " based on the "Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx: "A ghost roams the modern world, a ghost of cryptanarchy." According to the manifesto, information technology will allow people to manage their lives without governments, using cryptography, digital currencies and other decentralized tools.
In 1992, May, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Gilmore and Eric Hughes, a mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, invited 20 of his close friends to an informal meeting. During the meeting, they discussed the most pressing issues of cryptography and programming at that time. Such meetings began to be held regularly and laid the foundation for a whole movement. A newsletter was createde-mail (mailing list) in order to attract other people who share the interests and basic values ??of the founders group. Soon, the newsletter already had hundreds of subscribers - they tested ciphers, exchanged ideas and discussed new developments. Correspondence was conducted using the latest encryption methods, such as PGP. The group members led discussions on topics of politics, philosophy, computer science, cryptography and mathematics.
In 1993, Eric Hughes published the Cipherpunk Manifesto , containing key points from this movement:
“Confidentiality is essential for an open society of the digital age. [...] Confidentiality in an open society requires the use of cryptography. [...] We, cypherpunks, are called upon to create anonymous systems. We protect our privacy with cryptography, anonymous email forwarding systems, digital signatures and electronic money. [...] Cryptography will inevitably spread throughout the world, and with it the system of anonymous transactions, the existence of which it makes possible. "
The importance of confidentiality, anonymous transactions, cryptographic protection - all these ideas were subsequently in one form or another implemented in cryptocurrencies.
By 1997, the mailing list had about 2,000 subscribers and 30 messages daily. In 1995, Julian Assange, the creator of WikiLeaks, published his first post at Сypherpunk . In 2016, he published a book on the movement of cypherpunks, entitled "cypherpunks: Freedom and the future of the Internet."
The term "cypherpunk" was first used by hacker and programmer Jude Milhon to a group of cryptanarchists. Сypherpunks and cryptanarchism are not identical, but related streams that share virtually the same values. Cryptanarchism (cryptanarchy) is a kind of anarchism in which anonymization technologies, digital pseudonyms, and digital money protected by cryptography are used to free from state control - surveillance, censorship and taxation.
How did the movement of cypherpunks affect the emergence of cryptocurrencies?
In 1989, David Chaum founded DigiCash in Amsterdam. She specialized in digital money and payment systems, and her flagship product was the eCash digital monetary system with the CyberBucks monetary unit. eCash used Chaum’s blind digital signature technology. Although some banks even tested the system, and Microsoft allegedly negotiated the integration of eCash in Windows 95, the company did not achieve commercial success.
In 1997, the British cryptographer Adam Beck created Hashcash, an anti-spam mechanism, the essence of which was that it was necessary to use a certain amount of computing power to send emails. This made spamming economically unprofitable.
A year later, computer engineer Wei Dai publishedproposal to create another digital payment system called b-money. The author of the system proposed two concepts. The first was to create a protocol where each participant maintains a copy of the database with information on how much money the user has. The second concept was a modification of the previous version with the difference that not every network member kept a copy of the registry. Instead, new concepts were introduced: regular users and servers. At the same time, only servers that are network nodes stored copies of the registry. The honesty of the network participants was ensured by making deposits in a special account, which was used for rewards or fines in case of evidence of unfair behavior.
It was the first concept that was later adopted by the creator of bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto , while the second turned out to be closest to what is now known as Proof-of-Stake .
In 2004, Hal Finney cipherpunk, based on Adam Beck's Hashcash, created the Reusable Proof of Work (RPoW) algorithm . The idea was to create unique cryptographic tokens, which, by analogy with unspent outputs in bitcoin, could be used only once. The disadvantage of this mechanism was that validation and protection against double spending was still carried out through a central server.
In 2005, cryptographer Nick Szabo, who developed the concept of smart contracts in the 1990s , announced the creation of Bit Gold - a digital collectible and investment item. Bit Gold was created on the basis of Hal Finney’s RPOW proposal, but instead of using the coins one time, he assumed that they would have different values, calculated on the basis of the computing power used to create them.
In October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto sent a white paper “Bitcoin: a digital peer-to-peer cash system” to the white paper . The content of the work of Nakamoto testifies to the influence of cypherpunks and cryptanarchists. In the white paper, Bitcoin cites Adam Beck and Wei Dai. According to Nakamoto, Bitcoin “represents the implementation of Wei Dai’s b-money offer ... and Nick Szabo’s Bit Gold offer.” In turn, the manifesto of Wei Day, in which he puts forward the idea of ??b-money, begins with the words: "I admire Tim May's cryptanarchism." After the publication of the article, Nakamoto continued to work and on January 3, 2009, he mined the genesis block.
The appearance of Bitcoin was the beginning of numerous technological improvements and innovations based on an already working system, which cypherpunks enthusiastically began to expand and modify.
How is the movement of cypherpunks developing?
Modern cryptographic banks include cryptographer and smart pioneer Nick Szabo, BitTorrent developer Bram Cohen, creator of the Tor browser Jacob Applebaum, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published a book on cryptographic banks in 2016 entitled “Cryptographic Banks: The Future and Freedom of the Internet” ", As well as many other developers and hackers.
Nowadays, many processes on the Internet are influenced by the activities of cypherpunks. Torrents, VPNs, electronic signatures - these phenomena were created either directly by cypherpunks, or using their ideas and developments.
In 1993, Eric Hughes noted in the Сypherpunk Manifesto:
“cypherpunks write code. We know that someone should continue to write code in order to protect information, and since we see no other way to protect our data, we continue to do this [...] Our code is accessible to anyone on earth. We are not too concerned about the fact that some do not like what we do. We know that our programs cannot be destroyed, and the growing network cannot be stopped. ”
