Before Bitcoin Pt.1— 70s “Public Key Saga”

the original Bitcoin whitepaper describes a system where bitcoins were received to public keys (pubkeys) and spent with signatures (sigs). The public key defined who was authorized to spend the bitcoins (whoever controlled the corresponding private key) and the signature provided authentication that the spending transaction came from someone who co

Chaum’s research is said to be a direct inspiration for “cypherpunks”. The term was coined by Jude Milhon (or St Jude, as she was sometimes referred to),6 a civil rights activist and cyber-feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, to mean computer users who were dedicated to online privacy through encryption. In 1992, a small group of cryptographers and ear

To view Bitcoin solely through the lens of economics, say, or cryptography is to miss the forest for the trees. Bitcoin lies at the intersection of, at the very least, these two, as well as financial theory, history, political philosophy, theoretical computer science, distributed systems theory, game theory, and network and protocol design.