Tim May, Father of 'Crypto Anarchy,' Is Dead At 67

Tim May, co-founder of the influential Cypherpunks mailing list and a significant influence on both bitcoin and WikiLeaks, passed away in mid-December at his home in Corralitos, California. The news was announced last Saturday on a Facebook post written by his friend Lucky Green. Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes Reason: In his influential 1988 essay, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," May predicted that advances in computer technology would eventually allow "individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other" anonymously and without government intrusion. "These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation [and] the ability to tax and control economic interactions," he wrote... Running 497 words, it was his most influential piece of writing... May became convinced that public-key cryptography combined with networked computing would break apart social power structures...

In September 1992, May and his friends Eric Hughes and Hugh Daniels came up with the idea of setting up an online mailing list to discuss their ideas. Within a few days of its launch, a hundred people had signed up for the Cypherpunks mailing list. (The group's name was coined by Hughes' girlfriend as a play on the "cyberpunk" genre of fiction.) By 1997, it averaged 30 messages daily with about 2,000 subscribers. May was its most prolific contributor. May and Hughes, along with free speech activist John Gilmore, wore masks on the cover of the second issue of Wired magazine accompanying a profile by journalist Steven Levy, who described the Cypherpunks as "more a gathering of those who share a predilection for codes, a passion for privacy, and the gumption to do something about it...."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was an active reader and participant on the list, contributing his first posts in 1995 under the name "Proff."
The article notes that May "recently expressed disgust with the current state of the cryptocurrency community, citing its overpriced conferences and the advent of 'bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police.'"

In his last published interview he told CoinDesk "I think Satoshi would barf."

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[account_deleted]

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[110010001000]

The Gettysburg address was 272 words.

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[account_deleted]

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[swillden]

There are not many people I've met who trusted government less than I do. Tim and Hugh are the first two who spring to mind.

Tim did a lot of good for his friends, for our industry, and for our freedom. Very sad to see him go.

-jcr

+1. I got my start in security by reading sci.crypt and then the cypherpunks mailing list. As much as the technology fascinated me, the ideas about radical freedom, a freedom built by simply, peacefully constructing an alternative world that didn't want or need government force, really resonated with my young libertarian self. Tim May's mission wasn't to destroy Hobbes' Leviathan, but just to make it obsolete.

As it turns out, the real world is much messier and more complicated than we all though back the

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[arglebargle_xiv]

The only regret is that I get the feeling he would he liked to have gone out in a hail of bullets, not peacefully of natural causes...

Visionary

[110010001000]

Visionary, but like a lot of those types they don't understand inertia and how greed and control will eventually win out. We could have had decentralized services a long time ago, but they weren't profitable enough. In 2018 the Internet is more centralized than ever before. Eventually it will become just another system, like cable TV. You will have your issued "internet access device" and will only run approved services and software and be fully monitored. Most internet access is like that already (mobile devices).

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[110010001000]

I'm not hopeful at all. The vast majority of end user internet access at this point is from closed devices running god-knows-what-code from closed app stores to centralized systems. It only takes the ISPs/networks to disallow all other uses via traffic blocking, in the name of copyright protection, or terrorism, or whatever. Ironically these systems were all built upon open source technologies, but everyone ignored GPLv3 and this is what we get.

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[jythie]

Heh. People did not ignore GPLv3, it is operating exactly as designed. GPLv3 prioritized people working in IT, protecting what they developed but opening up anything they liked playing with. Embedded developers were furious with the process since they were locked out, while people who made their living developing web applications and services were thrilled because the committee was made up almost exclusively of them.

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[tepples]

Embedded developers were furious with the anti-TiVo provisions themselves.

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[110010001000]

None of that matters because the endpoints are being monitored. What is strange to me is how people think just because something is encrypted, it is secure. It isn't. The endpoints are where the monitoring/data access is going on. There are no spies sitting on a room desperately trying to MITM/crack SSL connections. They simply call up the corporations and ask for access to their endpoints. The corporations gladly hand it over because they don't want the gravy train to stop. And the "dark web" isn't dark at

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[110010001000]

Yes I do think they are monitoring VPN endpoints. No, they are not breaking crypto (I just said that). They are monitoring the endpoints.

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[110010001000]

Nope they aren't catching everything. I'm sure you are fine.

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[jythie]

I think when the person is talking about endpoints, they are referring to the websites and services that people connect to in order to do things or buy things... so the amazons and the facebooks of the world.

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[110010001000]

And the Googles, and the Apples, and the ISPs and the wireless providers, and the VPNs, and the TOR gateways, and...

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[jythie]

I think the other big flaw of these types is that they are very selective in their view of greed, forgetting that people are people and that governments are not made up of some alternate lifeform with a different ethical drive than 'the right kind of people'. So they support the warlords, tinpot dictators, mob bosses, cult leaders, scammers, megacorps, whatever mini-state-like entity they think will give them a better deal or victimes.

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[110010001000]

Makes sense!

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[rtb61]

Not accurate. Take into account, psychopathy, with sufficient genetic cerebral function differences with regard to social interactions in a social species, we do not evolve alone but distinctly together. They represent a parasitic sub-species in social behavioural norms, they do not cooperate, the prey upon the social political body to it's detriment. Psychopaths features largely at the top of capitalism in quite the most corrupt fashion, bleeding dry the majority of our society to feed their insatiable, gr

What Might Have Been Newer Was.

[westlake]

We could have had decentralized services a long time ago, but they weren't profitable enough.

Which often translates as slow, limited, unreliable and difficult to use. Which is why the commercial, centralized, services succeed. Click on Netflix and the movie plays across all devices.

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[110010001000]

Netflix is fine for one-way services, but there is no reason two-way services like messaging shouldn't be decentralized. Netflix is cable tv.

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[tepples]

there is no reason two-way services like messaging shouldn't be decentralized.

Even if messaging is decentralized, how can finding someone to message in the first place be decentralized?

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[tepples]

DNS is centralized: someone controls the root server for . and for each major TLD.

How did one find the email address of someone interesting to talk to, or an interesting newsgroup? How did one even find a Usenet server to which to connect?

Finding other Tox users

[tepples]

Even if messaging is decentralized, how can finding someone to message in the first place be decentralized?

Tox is decentralised, utilises DHT.

Let me rephrase: Once a user has installed Tox, how would he go about finding other Tox users to message?

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[LtUoNXizqxawTj4ofx7t]

Crypto is the alternative. We are building the new internet on the principles of distributed consensus. That's why crypto is such a game changer.

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[110010001000]

We aren't building anything. Crypto isn't something recently invented. Internet 2.0 will be corporate controlled.

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[phantomfive]

We could have had decentralized services a long time ago, but they weren't profitable enough. In 2018 the Internet is more centralized than ever before.

It wasn't about profit..........it was about people not knowing how (or not being willing) to use the technologies available. Most people didn't know how to set up a personal website with RSS feeds. Then Facebook came and made it easy and took a profit.

But if the distributed protocols, etc, had been easier to use in the first place, Facebook wouldn't have been able to dissuade people from using HTTP and RSS. But it's too hard, so Facebook wins and gets to extract money. Sad.

Visionary or Paranoid Nutjob...?

[TiggertheMad]

Visionary? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was just slightly paranoid and obsessive about imagined attempts to control him. The truth is rarely black or white, but nuanced shades of grey. Just look at the quote listed in the summary:

'...bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police.'

For those who aren't versed in financial acronyms, KYC is 'Know you customer', AML is 'Anti-money laundering'. W

We have proof!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Not only will cryptocurrency bankrupt you, cryptography in general will shave 11 years off your life! Avoid anything related to privacy at all costs - it WILL kill you!

Signed, The Powers That Be

37n87L+RkPB/aT2N/7rvOffj1ZriiAtRnUG5YV9ajfg=

[Tolvor]

8ItgPz8ZHLRsj1RhEMlTXAu1d9fJMYNb69K8SNxR0DxETKzBOWZV8h4ERBwvCZzlzxRUDiJhigGY/LJ1zADy8w== :-)

Cryptocurrency exchanges

[Pinky's Brain]

How did he expect exchanges to avoid playing ball with governments if they wanted access to electronic real currency transfer? He seemed oblivious to the true power of government to me. Life is not lived online, you can't route every interaction through hidden channels ... they'll always catch you at the edges to tax/regulate you.

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[Mashiki]

Likely the way that exchanges worked prior to bank centralization for lending controls. In other words the market more or less set the monetary value of an item, vs the artificial float that's existed the last ~200 years or so.

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[110010001000]

Cryptocurrency isn't even anonymous. I don't even understand cryptocurrency nuts.

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[Pinky's Brain]

Yes, those exist too ... but without the real money exchanges bitcoins would never have gone beyond their techno nerd niche and the real money exchanges have no choice but to interact with governments.