Diffie imagined two strangers meeting via the Internet, and wondered how they could send each other an encrypted message. He also considered the scenario of a person wanting to buy a commodity on the Internet. How could that person send an e-mail containing encrypted credit card details so that only the Internet retailer could decipher them? In bot

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This presented the idea of Bitcoin, a “peer-to-peer electronic cash” representing the first public, permissionless, cryptographically secure peer-to-peer protocol.

In Part Two, I will be exploring his continued work on public key cryptography and his research on the need for anonymous communications, payments and decentralised services. His ideas would go on to seed the movement of cypherpunks, the movement that would go on to create TOR, Bit Torrent, Wikileaks and of course: Bitcoin.What is decentralized? Wh... See more