Part one of a four-part documentary series about the cypherpunk movement of the 1990s, which led to the creation of bitcoin.
Written, shot, edited, narrated, and graphics by Jim Epstein.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed)

𝐅𝐔𝐋𝐋 𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐏𝐓:
In the early 1990s, a group of mathematicians, misfits, hackers, and hobbyists calling themselves "the cypherpunks" came together around a shared belief that the internet would either demolish society's artificial walls or lay the groundwork for an Orwellian state. They saw cryptography as a weapon against central planning and surveillance in this new virtual world.

The philosophical and technical ideas explored on the cypherpunks' widely read email list, which launched in 1992, influenced the creation of bitcoin, WikiLeaks, Tor, BitTorrent, and the Silk Road. The cypherpunks anticipated the promise and the peril that lay ahead when the internet went mainstream, including new threats to privacy and the possibility of building virtual platforms for communication and trade that would be impervious to government regulators.

This first episode looks at a clash of ideas over how the internet could lead to a more free society, which was a precursor to the formation of the cypherpunk movement. It took place between the economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin, and the former Intel physicist Timothy C. May, who became known as the father of "crypto anarchy." (Salin died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 41, and May passed away in 2018 at the age of 66.)

Salin was part of a community of young computer scientists in Silicon Valley, who the George Mason University economist Don Lavoie dubbed the "High Tech Hayekians" because of their efforts to blend the insights of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek with computer science. The group included the pioneering technologists Mark S. Miller, Chip Morningstar, and E. Dean Tribble; Salin's wife and business partner Gayle Pergamit; the software developer and science fiction writer Marc Stiegler; K. Eric Drexler, who is best known for his pioneering work in nanotechnology; and Christine Peterson, who later co-founded the Foresight Institute with Drexler.

Salin believed that personal computers linked up in a global communication network would make it possible to build a borderless, frictionless, global marketplace that would improve human coordination in the economy. May thought this would have negligible impact, positing instead a new world in cyberspace similar to what the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge had described in his novella True Names: an "other plane" completely shielded from government surveillance and control.

When May met Salin in 1987, it was before the release of the World Wide Web, but home computer hobbyists were already getting online in limited ways. Users could dial into servers through their phone lines to post to message boards, check their horoscopes, read the news, or go shopping.

While the e-commerce services from this period, such as CompuServe's "Electronic Mall," were basically digital versions of the old mail-order catalog, in a prescient 1991 essay published in Esther Dyson's influential tech-industry newsletter, Salin foresaw how the internet would change the world by 1995, 2000, and beyond. The static roles of store and shopper, seller and buyer, author and reader—systems defined by their "one-way information flows"—would be replaced by new forms of media, he argued, enabling "two-way information flows."

"The ability to buy or obtain exactly the information you need, when you want it, in the form you want it, is about to explode at a speed unmatched since the invention of printing," Salin predicted.

But Salin was more than just a theorist. In the mid-1980s, he founded a dialup e-commerce startup called the American Information Exchange (AMIX). Users could buy or sell advice about the real estate market, writing software, or what companies to invest in.

Though it was similar in ways to services that would launch a decade later, AMIX was more than just an idea before its time. What set it apart was its grounding in political philosophy and its lofty goal of elevating individual decision making over central planning. Salin envisioned AMIX as a tool for improving human coordination that could lead to new levels of local knowledge sharing. It would help reduce transaction costs in the economy and serve as an alternative to central planning.



This post is for educational purposes only ; it is not an investment advice.
- 𝐎𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐑𝐃

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