The Origin of BTC: Cypherpunk - One of the Secret History of Blockchain
Jointly produced by Tongzhengtong Research Institute × FENBUSHI DIGITAL
Text: Song Shuangjie, CFA; Tang Hao
Special Advisors: Shen Bo, Rin
guide
Text: Song Shuangjie, CFA; Tang Hao
Summary
Special Advisors: Shen Bo, Rin
guide
In the 1990s, personal computers and the Internet were in the ascendant. In order to protect the privacy of individuals in the online world, the Cypherpunk movement was born. Its members call themselves Cypherpunks. Their creation and invention laid an important foundation for the birth of BTC.
Summary
The idea and technology of BTC mainly come from the cypherpunk movement in the 1990s. The BTC white paper "BTC: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 announced the birth of BTC. In the white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto heavily cited papers written by members of the cypherpunk mailing list. To a certain extent, the BTC system has inherited the ideas and technologies produced in the Cypherpunk movement and carried them forward.
2) Technically: asymmetric encryption, hash cash, time stamp server, distributed accounting. These technologies emerged as the cypherpunks defended individual online privacy from large central bodies. Most of its inventors are members of the cypherpunk list.
Table of contents
Cypherpunks were defenders of personal online privacy in the early Internet age. In the early days of the Internet era, due to the inability of traditional encryption methods to act on electronic files on the Internet, personal privacy cannot be adequately protected on the Internet.
The core idea of cypherpunk is to defend the privacy of personal network. Cypherpunks believe that the loss of privacy of individuals means that the control ability of large central institutions will increase, and people will face great threats from large central institutions. Thus, the cypherpunk movement was born. They are committed to developing high-strength encryption technology in the Internet age for ordinary individuals and defending their right to privacy online.
In addition to the field of cryptocurrency, the results of the cypherpunk movement are still affecting all aspects of society. The World Wide Web (World Wide Web), SSL protocol, Facebook (Facebook), torrent downloading and other projects led or participated in by Cypherpunk members have been integrated into the daily life of ordinary people and become an inseparable part of people's lives.
Table of contents
1 Cypherpunk is an important source of BTC ideas and technology
1.1 BTC was created by the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto
1.2 BTC's ideological and technical origins
2 Cypherpunks - Defenders of personal privacy
2.1 The background of the birth of cypherpunk - personal network privacy crisis
2.2 The core concept of cypherpunk - defending the privacy of personal network
3.1 The BTC white paper cites a large number of papers by cypherpunk members
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3.2 The ideas of the BTC system and the cypherpunk movement are highly overlapping
3.3 A large number of technologies used in the BTC system come from the cypherpunk movement
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4 Cypherpunk - never far away
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A specter, the specter of crypto-anarchism, haunts modern society.
——Timothy C. May, father of cypherpunk
Cypherpunks are an important source of BTC ideas and technology
On November 1, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published an article entitled "BTC: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", which created the concept of blockchain and BTC. On January 3, 2009, the first BTC was born .
1.1 BTC was created by the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto
BTC was created by the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto. BTC has inherited the thought and technology produced in the cypherpunk movement in terms of thought and technology. It creatively combines asymmetric encryption technology and time stamp server technology, and creates an incentive mechanism through hash cash technology. Since its inception, without the maintenance of a centralized specialized organization commensurate with its scale, BTC has not only not died out in the ten years since 2008, but its influence has grown.
Satoshi Nakamoto created BTC for two main purposes: one is to protect individuals from shrinking assets in the inflation caused by the government’s excessive currency issuance, and the other is to ensure the privacy of individuals in online transactions.
In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released the BTC white paper "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". In the BTC system he built, Satoshi Nakamoto mainly made the following three contributions. First of all, the trust problem of both parties to the transaction is solved by broadcasting transaction information. The transaction information is public, but the trader is anonymous. This method not only solves the trust problem, but also protects the privacy of both parties to the transaction. Secondly, the double payment problem of unofficially issued digital currency in the past is solved by means of UTXO and time stamp. Finally, in terms of issuance, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the "mining" mechanism. According to a specific algorithm, a limited amount of newly issued BTC is generated through a large number of calculations. This mechanism solves the potential inflation problem in traditional currency issuance.
On February 11, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out in the discussion thread "Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency" (Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency): "The most fundamental problem with traditional currency is the trust required to make it work. Central Banks have to give people trust that they won’t debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”
Satoshi Nakamoto believes that currency issuance under the monopoly of the central bank will plunder people's wealth through currency depreciation. Satoshi Nakamoto technically realized the first complete digital currency system. It can be seen from the notes left by Satoshi Nakamoto when he released the BTC white paper and the citations of the BTC white paper that the ideas and technologies of BTC are different from those of a group Highly coincident with technology, this group is the cypherpunks who were active in the early Internet era.
1.2 BTC's ideological and technical origins
Cypherpunks are committed to protecting the privacy of individuals, and believe that large central bodies are not trustworthy, and BTC inherits this idea.
In addition, most of the key technologies required by BTC, including asymmetric encryption, time stamp servers, hash cash, and distributed accounting, can be traced back to cypherpunks.
In 1993, Eric Hughes (Eric·Hughes) released "Cypherpunk Manifesto" ("A CypherpunksManifesto"). So far, the idea of personal network privacy and encryption anarchism (Anarchism) entered the public view for the first time. Leading more cypherpunks to fight for it.
In 1977, Ronald L. Rivest invented the first public asymmetric encryption technology. The theory of this technology guarantees the security of BTC accounts.
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In 1991, Hubble proposed the timestamp server technology in his paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document", which guarantees the immutability of the BTC system.
In 1997, Adam Back developed the Hash Cash system, which is the predecessor of the proof-of-work of the BTC system and solved the problems of BTC issuance and incentives.
In 1998, Wei Dai proposed the electronic encrypted currency system - B-money, which clarified the concept of distributed accounting for the first time.
In the citations of the BTC white paper, except for one author of a probability textbook, the authors of the rest of the papers are members of the cypherpunk mailing list. Therefore, BTC can be regarded as the collective creation of cypherpunks to a certain extent.
Cypherpunks - Defenders of personal privacy
"Cyberpunks write code. We realize that someone needs to write software to protect privacy, and we can't keep ourselves private without someone having privacy, so we're going to develop that software. At that point, we're going to open source our code." , so that our cypherpunk comrades can use it. Our code is free to anyone in the world who uses it. If you try to block the software we write, we don't care. We know that software cannot be destroyed, and it is completely distributed The system never stops."
— Eric Hughes, The Cypherpunk Manifesto
2.1 The background of the birth of cypherpunk - personal network privacy crisis
In the 1990s, computer and Internet technologies were in the ascendant. In order to resist the infringement of personal privacy in the Internet age, cypherpunks were born.
In this decade, the Berlin Wall fell, East and West Germany merged; Gorbachev announced his resignation, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Cold War ended; in the Gulf War in 1991, the US military defeated the Iraqi army. The whole western world is filled with joyful atmosphere.
Technology companies in Silicon Valley and the United States are still basking in the utopian afterglow of the 1980s, witnessing the rise of a new economy and dizzying growth rates. The computer and the Internet may be the most important inventions of this era. Personal computers gradually entered ordinary people's homes, and more and more people with personal computers connected their computers to the rapidly expanding Internet, and the speed of network connections skyrocketed.
However, people have gradually discovered that large central bodies are trying to strengthen their monitoring and control of individuals through the Internet. On the web, central entities with data can track the individuals they want to know more easily than ever before. Large companies use users' performance on the Internet to portray users' portraits and push targeted advertisements. Not only do large central bodies have no motivation to maintain personal network privacy, but they hope to obtain as much personal privacy as possible on the network. Because they can get what they need from it.
In July 1992, the U.S. National Security Agency learned through espionage technology that American citizen Gilmore possessed the manuscripts of cryptography expert Friedman. In its letter to Gilmore, the NSA referred to 18 USC, Section 798. The statute makes publishing classified cryptographic information a federal crime. Later, NSA lawyers and spies threatened Gilmore to hand over the documents in his possession or face lawsuits or what the letter called "some other terrible thing."
In April 1993, the White House proposed the Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES), which would cover all encryption processors on the market collectively known as "Clipper chips." It is designed to enable encrypted communications, especially voice transmissions on mobile phones. When two devices establish a secure connection, law enforcement agencies still have the keys used to decrypt encrypted data. Communications are protected when using devices equipped with the chip, but the FBI can read encrypted emails or listen in on calls if they want.
The continuous occurrence of such incidents has gradually aroused people's vigilance. Distrust creeps in among the first Internet users. In late 1992, Timothy May established the cypherpunk mailing list to provide a platform for people all over the world who are committed to protecting the privacy of personal networks to exchange ideas and technologies. In 1993, Eric Hughes released the "Cypherpunk Manifesto", officially announcing the beginning of the Cypherpunk movement to protect personal network privacy rights through cryptography.
2.2 The core concept of cypherpunk - defending the privacy of personal network
The core idea of cypherpunk is to defend personal network privacy and encryption anarchism.
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Eric Hughes, one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement, wrote in the cypherpunk movement's programmatic document "Cypherpunk Manifesto" that "in the electronic age, privacy is essential for an open society. Privacy is different from secrets. .Privacy is something that someone doesn’t want to make public. A secret is something that he doesn’t want anyone to know. Privacy is a power. It gives someone the right to decide what to make public and what not to make public.”
Cypherpunks believe that large central bodies cannot be trusted. In the Internet age, large central bodies will not take the initiative to protect personal privacy, and will continue to try to obtain private data on personal networks.
Cypherpunks foreseeably realized that with the improvement of Internet speed and the popularization of personal computers, the world will gradually enter the Internet age. At that time, the network will become an indispensable part of everyone's life, and entering the network world will greatly increase social productivity. However, for ordinary people who are not proficient in network technology, entering the network era will also cause them to encounter the risk of privacy leakage and its complications.
Cypherpunks believe that in order to ensure the freedom of individuals in the Internet age, it is necessary to protect the privacy of individuals. This requires the use of cryptography to ensure the anonymity of individuals on the Internet. They believe that the cash transaction system is by far the best anonymous transaction system. Before the web, cash transactions left no trace in the financial system. During the rapid development of the network, more and more transactions will take place on the network. It is foreseeable that the space for cash transactions will be continuously compressed in the Internet age. As a price, individual privacy and freedom will be compromised. In order to prevent this kind of situation from happening, cypherpunks will establish a network anonymous transaction system by mastering strong encryption technology and providing it to ordinary network users.
Cypherpunk and BTC have a strong origin
The early members of the cypherpunks were quite elitist. In the process of protecting personal privacy on the Internet, Dimson May, Eric Hughes, Levist, Wei Dai, Harbor and others have made the most direct contributions to BTC.
3.1 The BTC white paper cites a large number of papers by cypherpunk members
In the BTC white paper "BTC: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", Satoshi Nakamoto added eight citations. Most of the solutions to the technical problems that anonymous currency systems need to solve come from cypherpunk papers.
The distributed accounting technology adopted by BTC refers to the content in the B-money white paper. When explaining how to prevent the double payment problem, Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out, "If you want to exclude third-party intermediaries in the electronic system, then the transaction information should be publicly announced (publicly announced)". When the transaction information is publicly announced, it needs the common recognition of most nodes in the system before the transaction is established. Here Satoshi Nakamoto added the first citation of the full text. That is, the B-money white paper published by Wei Dai on his personal website http://www.weidai.com/ in 1998. According to cryptoanarchy.wiki, Dai Wei is a cypherpunk who was active in the 1990s and is proficient in cryptography.
In order to ensure the immutability of the blockchain, timestamp server technology must be used. Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out that "each timestamp should incorporate the previous timestamp into its random hash value, and each subsequent timestamp should reinforce the previous timestamp, thus forming a chain ( Chain)". In order to form an immutable chain, the BTC system needs a technology that can add modification time to electronic documents. This technology existed before the publication of the white paper. The second, third, fourth, and fifth references of the white paper are four articles published by H·Massias, X·S·Avila, J·Quisquater, S·Haber, W·S·Stornetta and D·Bayer on timestamp servers and How to Efficiently Timestamp Essays to Electronic Archives. In the 1990s, the cypherpunk trend of thought swept across the elite circles of information technology. However, we have not been able to find credible evidence to prove whether these six information technology experts are members of Cypherpunk.
In order to obtain bookkeeping rights, participants must pay a certain cost. This idea has some similarities with Hashcash technology. "In order to build a decentralized set of timestamp servers on a peer-to-peer basis, it's not enough to just work like a newspaper or a worldwide news network, we need a hashcash similar to what Adam Back proposed .” The sixth citation of the white paper is Adam Baker’s technical description of hash cash published at http://www.hashcash.org in 2002. Adam Baker is not only one of the people who made the biggest contribution to the cypherpunk movement in the 1990s, but also the CEO of Blockstream, the world's first blockchain company.
In order for the full blockchain to not be too large, old blocks must be compressed without corrupting the overall random hash. Satoshi Nakamoto built the transaction information into a form of Merkle tree. The specific method comes from RC Merkle's paper on the public key cryptographic protocol in the seventh citation. Likewise, the cryptographer, born in 1952, is also a member of the cypherpunk mailing list.
The last citation of the white paper is the textbook on probability theory written by W. Feller. W. Feller is a famous mathematician, known as one of the greatest probability theorists of the twentieth century.
3.2 The ideas of the BTC system and the cypherpunk movement are highly overlapping
Cypherpunk founders Dimson May and Eric Hughes first made the idea of personal privacy online and crypto-Anarchism widely known.
As early as the 1970s, Levist had begun to study how to use cryptography to protect the privacy of both senders and senders of emails. At the time, however, the topic was limited to a small-scale discussion.
In 1992, Dimson May created the cypherpunk list. This list enables cryptographers, philosophers, and mathematicians around the world to discuss the technologies used to protect personal privacy in the Internet age.
May and Hughes called on a group of professionals in information technology, mathematics, and philosophy to launch a cypherpunk movement dedicated to using cryptography to protect personal privacy. In the cypherpunk manifesto drafted and released by Hughes, in addition to conveying In addition to the idea that personal privacy should be protected, it also predicted the birth of anonymous networks, anonymous emails, and digital currencies.
In 1993, Eric Hughes released the "Cypherpunk Manifesto", which advocated the use of cryptography to protect individual privacy in the Internet age. The article points out that personal privacy should be protected, and the right to privacy is a basic right.
Hughes mentioned in the article that "we cannot expect giant corporations, or other organizations to grant us privacy rights out of their benevolence. Violating our privacy will benefit them, and we should think that they will do so." Visible, password Punks have a natural distrust of megacorporations.
In the early days of the cypherpunk movement, May and Hughes served as opinion leaders of cypherpunk to a certain extent. Their ideas have had a profound impact on the cypherpunk movement.
3.3 A large number of technologies used in the BTC system come from the cypherpunk movement
In 1977, Levist invented RSA encryption technology, which was the first public asymmetric encryption technology. The theory of this technology guaranteed the security of BTC accounts. At this point, nearly a decade has passed since the world's first email was sent. Email has gained a large number of users. Unlike the era of paper mail, since e-mail has no entity, it is just an electronic file, and the electronic file is likely to be forged, and the e-mail may also be intercepted by a malicious third party. In order to maintain the state of the paper mail era (that is, the signature on the mail cannot be forged, and the letter in the envelope can only be read by the designated person), Levist and others jointly and independently developed the public key encryption technology. At this point, public key cryptography is no longer exclusive to the military. Public-key cryptography has been used to protect individual privacy from data-hungry corporations in the age of computers and the Internet. .
In 1991, Hubble proposed the timestamp server technology in his paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document", which guarantees the immutability of the BTC system. Timestamp server technology provides a method for marking electronic documents, with this method, we can know the time when a certain file was modified. Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned in the white paper that "the time stamp server adds a time stamp by implementing a random hash on a set of data in the form of a block, and broadcasts the random hash. Obviously, the time stamp It can be proved that the specific data must exist at a certain time, because the corresponding random hash value can only be obtained when it exists at that moment. Each timestamp should incorporate the previous timestamp into its random hash value, and each Subsequent timestamps reinforce the previous timestamp, thus forming a chain." No one can tamper with the existing blocks and the information in them. The concept of blockchain was officially born.
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In 1997, Adam Baker developed the Hash Cash system, which is the predecessor of the proof-of-work of the BTC system, and solved the problems of BTC issuance and incentives. The mathematical basis of Hashcash is that some mathematical results are difficult to find but easy to verify whether they are correct. It was originally used as an anti-spam mechanism, when someone wrote an email, the recipient hoped that they sent the email with a more serious attitude. At this time, the HashCash system requires the sender to add a HashCash token to the message header of the email. This token must be obtained through a series of complex calculations, and this process usually takes several seconds. This marker shall also contain the time information at which the marker was calculated. If the time information in the HashCash token is clearly too old, then the system assumes that a spammer is trying to reuse it, and the email is identified and rejected. Therefore, this mechanism initially realizes the function of preventing double-spending. To the average user, the extra few seconds it takes to compute a compliant token might not seem like a big deal, but to the spammer, the cumulative time adds up dramatically to the cost of sending spam.
In the BTC system, when a system participant tries to record on a new block, he must first perform a mathematical operation using hash cash technology, which will consume a certain amount of electricity and computing power, and Computational results, as enabled by hashcash technology, are hard to find but easy to check. When the result is calculated, he obtains the bookkeeping right of this block. The first transaction of each block is specialized, which produces a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This increases the incentive for nodes to support the network and provides a means of distributing electronic money into circulation without a central authority issuing the currency. This method of continuously adding a certain amount of new currency to the currency system is very similar to consuming resources to dig gold mines and inject gold into the circulation field. At this point, time and power consumption are resources consumed.
In 1998, Dai Wei proposed the electronic encrypted currency system - B-money, which clarified the concept of distributed accounting for the first time. In B-money's white paper, he describes two concepts. First of all, distributed accounting, a public account book maintained by all users, which records the balance of each account. Secondly, the server account. After improving the first version of B-money, Dai Wei stipulated that only the server can manage the account books of B-money. "Each server must transfer a certain amount of money to a special account. If If someone is found to be cheating, the cheater will be fined, and the whistleblower will be rewarded." When a trader initiates a transaction, he will broadcast the transaction information, and people on the whole network will observe that a certain account sends Another account sent a sum of BTC. All participants in the entire system have a uniquely recognized historical transaction sequence, that is, distributed accounting. As long as there are multiple nodes in the entire system confirming that this transaction is the first time, the payee can believe that there has been no double payment in this transaction. At the same time, since multiple nodes recognize the validity of the transaction at the same time, the transaction naturally has a credit endorsement.
In addition, a large number of technical inventions of other cypherpunks have also theoretically and indirectly made certain contributions to the BTC system.
Cypherpunk - never far away
In late 2006, Assange (Sarah Harrison), also a member of the Cypherpunk list, founded WikiLeaks. The group works to make publicly available documents from anonymous sources and leaked online. At present, a large number of sensitive U.S. diplomatic secrets, including statistics on civilian casualties caused by the war in Afghanistan that the U.S. government has sealed, have been released.
Note:
Due to some reasons, some nouns in this article are not very accurate, mainly such as: general certificate, digital certificate, digital currency, currency, token, crowdsale, etc. If readers have any questions, they can call or write to discuss together.
