I read every single 1990s Cypherpunk email. Here's what you should know. | Devcon SEA

[Music] thank you I'm super excited to share this with you I actually have like 40 emails that I want to get through in 20 minutes so we're going to have to keep moving this is mostly not about me um it's going to be about the cipher punks but I will have one slide for zky uh a quote from the ZK Credo the unwavering long-term remains advancing personal freedom for all let us remain Resolute in championing digital self-ownership onward uh you could read the full ZK s like mission statement in kredo online we believe in it a lot um all right moving on this talk started because I got annoyed there were too many people on like crypto Twitter who were discussing cyer punks and had clearly like no idea what they were talking about and so instead of badgering them I'm just politely informing everyone now of what the cipher were really like so I read every Cypher Punk email I will now pick the best emails and highlight The Cypher Punk ideas culture and worldview so you can see it for yourself and we're going to read them and learn them together uh what the cyberp punks really like so here's the format for my talk first of all shout out to crypto Anarchy Wiki um you can read all of the the archived history there if you'd like uh the subject line will be at the top author day month year at the bottom and then uh in the middle mid will be a screenshot I I'll try to narrate it over it if you can't read all of the text if it's too small so let's begin first email how to make an automated remailer in your copious spare time with easy to find and inexpensive software tools you may have lying around and then the email goes it's actually this is just a clip of it but partway through it says the Pearl script in summary strips off the mail headers saving the subject line rewrites a new header and pins the body of the previous message here's the script and then just puts the full Pearl script in the email so when cyppher punk say like cyppher Punk's write code they like from the first email were already just sharing with each other tools on like how to build this stuff like this literally was like one of the first emails because the next email I have like a week later is I've had a bunch of people ask me about this group and what it's up to accordingly I drafted a small statement of purpose please comment Eric and the full thing you've probably seen before this is like the first draft of what becomes the cypherpunk manifesto there's like eight different slight variations of all of this you've probably seen it a bunch of times u in fact this is probably the only Cipher Punk email you've ever actually seen the like was an email um the the line I like the most from this one is cyppher Punks know that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down very true now so I'm I'm the L of this talk is just me highlighting a bunch of emails so they're going to kind of be random but it's going to overall get across like all of the points so let's go we appear to be entering a long awaited crypto Singularity Tim C May in November uh 1992 listed a bunch of reasons why he thought a crypto Singularity was imminent uh there was incredible excitement at these topics at hacker conferences there were several journalists there were articles in Scientific American on digital cache and Quantum cryptography there's a firestorm of over 500 comments about cryptographic keys and all these points are accelerating situation things may get very interesting and very sticky in the next several months uh so 1992 may maybe there wasn't quite a crypto Singularity yet uh but now today like I think it's funny because we have like all the same topics thoughts on digital cach from Mark Horwitz um about a month later said i' I'd really like to see some sort of digital cach system set up three days after that Carl Baris replied with uh digital banking file formats Etc here's what I Envision a digital bank would work digital Bank working like uh and how any summary of the bank protocol and then just starts going through the math Alice chooses X and R Alice computes Bal R Cub time F ofx mod in like three days later they're just going straight to building digital money right away they're not messing around uh electronic money legality uh the question came up uh whether it would be legal to issue electronic money or regular money for that matter halny says he got a couple history books out of the library to try to learn something on the history of private big notes and then the email is like him doing like seven different book reviews that he clearly like all read over the weekend one of them is uh George San's book The Theory of Free banking as they called the return to situation competitive note where each bank would print its own money and people would use all these different monies freely according to their preferences I just think it's funny that Howen he read a bunch of books and then emailed everyone his thoughts and summary uh White House letter uh they were discussing whether they should like contact the government at all or just like keep building on their own um there's a suggestion from Dr zapod that we should simply send our stance on encryption and why it shouldn't be regulated I think this is a common goal among all Cipher Punks on this list that is except NSA folks who are listening in uh Timothy C May uh nonetheless I will never desire censorship for its own sake and I will always fight to remove conditions which make censorship exent in the first place uh yeah the problem is like who decides like who gets to be censored and so veryy against it from the beginning of the mailing list um another uh email about a White House encryption idea they are not passing out the algorithm I don't trust anyone to tell me it's secure uh sent from treason at gnu uh I'm not a cryptographer so it help wouldn't help me if they gave me the code but you know open source like adds more trust so is Rush limo reply is Rush limo giving Clinton about wiretap chip uh so someone sent an email to the cypherpunk mailing list that's said well I work for a major airline and it'll be happy to get you his home address if he has a frequent flyer number and Mark replied excuse me are you completely missing the point here we're fighting for privacy misusing your position in whatever Airline you work at for broadcasting someone's home address is like completely une aesthetical to what we're trying to do so like I I'm showing you the best of the best emails but there's also people sending emails who have like almost no alignment with what the cyppher punks like you would think of today like some somebody's like working an airline company trying to dox people and like mailing the cypherpunk mailing list some for some reason uh reply on digital cach uh I thought this email was super funny so someone sent uh a question what's to keep someone from opening a digital bank and taking the money and running and Duncan fris scho replied nothing so I think this is the first example of like cryptocurrency rugging um but yeah good luck uh radical paranoia this one just kind of felt relatable the the end question am I being paranoid or is there valid issue here uh it's about cryptographic key signing and with pgp back in the 90s you would like physically meet someone in person and then like sign that their pal their public key actually belongs to them and then he has a problem with like doing this online because you can't be completely sure you're talking to the right other person and so I I kind of appreciate like the thought analys of like being like super paranoid about how these things are going to work secure software uh secure voice software issues uh there there are problems yet to be solved I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the only way around the SLI PPP modem buffer delay problems is to speak raw synchronous data to into the modems even to the point of implementing v42 bis and hdlc in the host computer instead of using the MOs implementation I have no idea what most of that means but it kind of sounds like a lot of cord devs when they talk about stuff and so yeah I just thought that was like a fun parallel to today of like yeah I'm coming to this conclusion guys I think everyone agrees on here right uh digital Warfare uh L Detweiler sent an email uh that we may see the creation of virtual governments in which geographical location of an individual is irrelevant to the choice of government and perhaps for the first time in history the individual can choose freely among all that exist to those uh to that which best suits his preferences and the so-called social contract between the citizen and his government is made explicit for the first time this will happen on all levels and we are beginning to realize what communication truly entails now L deweer is kind of a bit of a character he's going to come back in a in a few seconds um Paul Ferguson sent uh first Don Henson I guess sent an email said if there's no cyer punks cause or movement please let me know being able to interact with people who believe in the cyer Punk's cause is the only reason I subscrib to this list and if there is no cause I'd like to unsubscribe and spend my time elsewhere and the reply is just what the hell are you talking about because like imagine being like in Peak cyppher Punk mailing list like you know Tim May and Hal finny and Nick Zabo are sending emails like every single week and there's somebody in here who's just like is there a cause does anyone know is there a movement and the reply is just like what are you talking about cuz like you know some people just like can't get the point I don't know uh this is uh LD is L deweer just a Li to L's last flame of me I won't say that he's insane or deranged since I know that does no good I won't say that he is raving or frothing at the mouth since that does no good either that so some of the emails kind of like get a little bit heated um and deweer is basically mad that everyone starts thinking that everyone hates him and curses him and I continually sent out some of my most masterful and Brilliant postings when still had respectable reputation despite that P meter was continually attacking and dogging me in the most vicious way a human being at least I think he's a human being so they're they're really like it sounds like crypto Twitter it's ridiculous it's hilarious uh and a non replied but this is probably elet Wier again uh to Nick Zabo who Nick Zabo nicely wrote no Mr deweer I'm not pseudo spoofing it's not clear what this term means deweer just kind of like made it up and got paranoid uh but de wer replied and said that to Nick Zabo frankly I think you're a bald-faced liar are you intellectually challenged or am I going to have to root up all the archives to Pro it prove it I think this is very entertaining to ask Nick Zabo himself if he's intellectually challenged uh so all of this drama with de deweer kind of came to a bit of a conclusion with Timothy see writing a a summary email of who is El Detweiler he joined the cipher Punk's list about a year ago showed great enthusiasm and energy volunteering to write an FAQ on anonymity in the internet and privacy and anonymity he put this out very quickly um email Goes On by the end of it he has to be removed from the cipher Punk's list and was uh he created his own group the cipher won's list with fascist list of rules and regulations about true identities the evils of pseudo spoofing Etc I gather from reports that's now more bu I didn't join for obvious reasons and so this this was almost the end of eleter except 3 days later he responded with who is Timothy C May and he says uh first reports of my Insanity are greatly exaggerated and I think that's one of like the funniest opening lines to an email I've ever seen uh and then he he has some shots back at Timothy C May and capable of understanding the distinction between truth and satire so so the the drama goes on within the email list uh here black net is probably what we would call like a dark net today um Dark Net could remove most of the risk uh with near perfect anonymity and digital cash a tidy side income could could be created for anyone with access to classified information this is from Hal fenny digital cache anonymity at the same time Hal feny sent a lot of emails about this um another reply how feny wrote more the other issue which I know less about is the possibility of cryptographically strong obus skated code uh for the cryptographers in the audience you know that's like something we're still kind of working on today but is potentially possible but the fun part is that Timothy C May replied that the similarities with zero knowledge work are apparent in zero knowledge interactive proof systems one knows something without actually showing what one knows so sent in March 1994 cyer punks were already talking about zero knowledge proofs NSA digital cache um um yeah this brings up some serious issues I doubt it'll be long before there are some official government agencies developing official US digital cache system in fact it wouldn't surprise me if there divisions in the NSA dedicated to doing it this moment uh in April 1994 cyer Punk's goals uh bad debate drives out good debate uh Timothy C he he was kind of like a almost a moderator for the list a little bit I mean the list is unmoderated but he just send like kind of polite rants every once in a while like this said we have to stop the slide into inconsequential chatter and paranoid speculation there's work to be done I know of no other group even oneth as prepared as we are to do this work let's get on with it Tim May delayed self decrypting messages uh Paul schul asked is there a way can I I can send out a file and perhaps a tool such that the file can be decrypted only after a given date uh now we call this time lock encryption it's like barely exists now uh it's still like a very cool Tech technology that I don't see like used very much but it's another part of like cool cryptography that the cyppher punks were trying to like think about and discuss but they didn't quite have like all of the cryptography we have now so fun to see like all the ideas that are now relevant I've been showing a lot of highlights of sort of like the more chatty stuff but the whole time there's also like very technical conversations always happening uh this person has uh optimized uh the counting bits on a uniprocessor machine and it shared like the three op codes that you need for the um whichever systems those are so the the technical work did continue I'm just not showing you like lines of code in every single slide uh remailer chaining results how fenny sent an email in August 1994 I've done some calculations on the mixing properties of Chom style networks and gotten some interesting results and then wrote like four pages straight of of computations on like mix Nets and the Privacy properties and tradeoffs between different parameters and then he ends his email with now how many people have read this far not me I didn't I didn't even read it for this talk okay social punishment reputation systems uh there I think actually there's an interesting point in the first paragraph it says the decentralized system makes it very difficult for someone uh to rejoin Society to have history of reformation recognized um the channels and traditional societies include like good work and being citizen U the other is just starting a new identity and then makes proposal there's strong case for Universal sumity ban true names maybe a little aggressive uh which together with the strong voluntary reputation and social punishment systems can form the basis for cyers spatial order kind of ambitious I like the Banning true names idea uh Bruce schneer is a famous cryptographer a lot of you might recognize he wrote like the book that a lot of the cyppher punks were studying at the time he was also sending email emils on how to like help design uh cryptography systems including on fil networks sboxes and block Cipher design uh good sbox design is not an easy task and he like outlines four different ways of choosing randomly testing man-made mathade basically they're all kind of like teaching each other how cryptography works at the same time I think this was nice because this was literally like his published paper Academia used to be much easier to read back then and I wish we would have more papers that are like this level of explanation please uh cell phone security Conrad Walton I feel like this is just a very on brand of what you imagine like a cipher Punk Anarchist email would come would sound like as one who owns an a 1000 radio frequency scanner that can receive any and all cell phone conversations I would have to say that you have no security unless you have some kind of voice encryption later on I bought guns with high-capacity magazines this year after they were banned also I wish I had enough money to buy go to assault rifle before they're all overpriced parenthesis they'll never be gone just overpriced Conrad Walton so yeah super on brand um Timothy May is right uh this is that there ends up being like more drama in the mailing list Eric and Timothy May were kind of two of like the big Founders originally they're the ones like you see on the magazine cover of wired uh but basically like there's kind of a falling out aic's is maybe embody the dictatorial approach he uh claims to defy via cypherpunk philosophy hypocritical and egomaniacal and so even people who Maybe started out as Cypher punks end up getting accused of like yeah being dictators and so maybe it's hard to to get along for a long time value of anonymity it's easy to imagine the sort of pin Opticon which will soon arise the internet and its descendants unless the strongest possible protections are adopted and I thought this email was funny because it's from way ey and uh he's like talking about a new encryption system and says I can try but I've never done real crypto programming before but if you know now like way is a legend in cryptography and so like even Legends started out you know at the at Simple Things uh here's a list of attempts to ban encryption and 1997 1981 1984 1986 1987 1989 19 90 in 1991 there's one I want to highlight the FBI asked Senator Joe Biden to introduce the sense of Congress to recommend back doors in all encryption telephone systems uh and the provision was removed after public outcry 1992 1993 and the email sent 1995 so it's like almost every single year they were introducing like new proposals in Congress to ban cryptography or install back doors this was like a real large threat at the time and I think like we we haven't needed to worry about it too much recently but hopefully this never like seriously comes back uh crypto could be the next wave of IPOs Timothy May 1995 uh it seems that anything involving the internet the web and digital Commerce is really really hot uh I thought this was fun just because they're talking about Fiat Shamir so I like the cryptography part if if you're into ZK still this is like not the same ZK uh not the same paper uh but still the same cryptographers on how to prove themselves uh crypto Hardware summary Douglas Barnes in 1995 pointed out that using co-processors to achieve speed and cryptography operations is probably not justifi justifiable for end users it is almost always Justified for servers with high volume uh and then people though running cryptography based transaction clients on their PCS are going to learn one way or another that having valuable secret keys on their hard diss is not a great idea this not speed is the primary motivation for Consumer oriented crypto cryptography Hardware yeah so they already thought of everything like back in 1995 uh Cypher Punk FAQ we're almost done I downloaded the cypherpunk FAQ from the cypherpunk mailing list when I decompressed it all it contained were the words yooo anybody home has the FAQ been corrupted or is this an inside joke uh yeah so apparently it was from l. Wier was a joke and then this is the the last email that I'll share is um someone invited the entire cyppher Punk mailing list to their birthday party which is a great idea in the first place and Julian Assange uh pointed out that if the party ends at 10 p.m. that's not a party that's an after school Tupperware get together cool so now you've seen The Cypher Punk emails what you do with this information really whatever you want I just wanted people to be informed on like sort of what it was like and um with that we'll go to Q&A so thank you oo big Applause for Porter um yeah for the Q&A you know how it goes you can scan that uh cure code and then register we have some questions already um what are some ideas early cryp Cipher punks had that have yet to be implemented or maybe are implemented but less popular than P2P cache or tour yeah so I think one thing is the cyppher punks were like even more paranoid than we are now and they were very concerned about verifiable hardware and like building Hardware that like you could actually like know that the code's running correctly um I think that's like one of the things besides that there were just a bunch of the cryptography ideas that are now called like time lock encryption and witness encryption and like super advanced stuff that's not even quite here today um but yeah it was cool all right next questions what are some yet to be mainstream exian proes I I'm not sure I mean they talked there's just a lot of stuff in the the emails I don't know if I have any any good like prophecies that they were predicting most of their prophecies were that like thing there there's all the way the doomers who think everything's going to get banned and we're going to need to build bunker coin and like this is yeah like our only hope is to build cryptography and surprisingly like government have somewhat gotten on board probably a little more than they expected all right then the top one it seems like people are very interested in those slides so how do can they get those slides yeah I'll post all of the slides afterwards also yeah the slides don't have like every email so maybe I'll include some extras all right and then I like that one on the bottom also um that was very interesting to see what these early people discussed so where are these conversations oh where did that go yeah here where where are those good conversations happening nowadays I mean probably like crypto Twitter like e research forums like places like this conference actually like if if you want to be discussing these topics there are tons of people yeah probably literally right here who who are happy to talk about these with you okay huh now we go to the bottom to the good questions so what everybody wants to know reading through all these emails and he guess who is Satoshi so I'm actually I'm going to cop out but I'm super against Satoshi guessing I'm I'm very like adamant that we should just leave Satoshi as Anonymous and not try and figure out who it is there there's probably like text analysis you could start doing on like his emails versus some of the cipher Punk emails and things but I'd rather not like I'd rather not know so