Goodbye To The Man Who Predicted Our Future: Tim May
Goodbye To The Man Who Predicted Our Future: Tim May
In December 2018, at the age of 67, Tim May passed away. He was one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement and predicted the future through his Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. The movement began in 1992 when Tim wrote an open letter:
Within his Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Tim could see a new world which was increasingly untrusted and where true online identities would mean much more than credit ratings:
Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today.
For him a new digital world was taking over and it was one where governments and regulations would struggle to perform the roles they had played over centuries:
These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.
His message to governments was that they had to change and that their whole existence and power-base would have to shift. He could see a world where it would be difficult for governments to keep anything secret, and where they could not control their economies in the same ways they had in the past.
Almost to the word, Tim predicted our current Information Age, and the world we now increasingly live in. While it has taken over 20 years to move into this world, we are now at the start of the building of the world that Tim predicted.
This new world — to him — would lay out the Information Age, and it would be one which had public-key encryption, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and authentication and verification at its core:
The technology for this revolution — and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution — has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification.
While at the time many of the methods he foresaw were difficult to implement and were costly, we now live in a world which is increasingly built around cryptography. Why must I fill in a form on a piece of paper and add my wet signature, when a proper signature can be applied with my private key? Why should I give Google my password each time, when I could simply show them that I still know it?
Tim predicted a new world — a more citizen-focused world before anyone else. He wanted to break down the power of governments to control and manipulate and wanted the power to be taken away from the large corporations who could control their customers by storing secret information on them, and which cared little about their rights.
Tim could see a world where citizens took control of their own world, and which would break down the controls that governments had on them. For him, he foresaw all the pointing of fingers towards ‘well only drug dealers and tax evaders use Bitcoin’, and even admitted that the concerns were valid:
The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded.
But — he argued — that the move towards an anonymised world of transactions shouldn’t halt a crypto revolution:
An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.
Tim saw the resistance from the past in the adoption of methods which completely destroy existing ways, such as with the advent of the printing press, and could see a world where cryptography changed everything:
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.
For him, cryptography is the wire-cutter in taking down an old world:
Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.
From there on, Tim fought against attempts to ban cryptography, and in supporting citizen rights through the use of strong cryptography. His work even appeared in a story in Wired on Crypto Rebels.
So What?
Read every word of Tim’s statement. Our old world is rapidly changing, and governments cannot continue to apply their old ways into a world where every single citizen exists within their own digital space. It is a digital world that does not respect the false borders that we have erected. It is a digital world that has been allowed to grow out of control and now needs a new foundation. That foundation will not be created by governments, and they need to adopt the new worlds and build their economies in a way that every single element is trusted.
Our legal system, our governments, and our public sector all need to change and stop just converting their existing methods into an online version. They need to truly respect citizen identity and their rights to privacy and consent. As long as there is still one wet-signature left in our world, we will not have properly entered the information age. Our digital world needs to be rebuilt with trust and put the citizen at the core.
Our world has been build around governments, and corporations having complete control and defining laws which are always in their favour. Those who are strongest will always win. The failure of audit/compliance regimes is a perfect example of old ways being applied to the modern world. Only with GDPR do we see a new world evolving, and it’s one which puts the rights of the citizen at its core. Many governments will rain against this drive but will fail as they risk becoming isolated in an increasingly connected world.
Governments can only see hard borders and want to check things that come in and out. But in a digital world, these borders are firewalls, and digital tunnels can be built under these borders. Our governments need to understand that a new world is being crafted, and they need to support it by changing their laws to accept public-key encryption, electronic ownership of tokens, and other crypto methods, as ways of building a new world.
The revolution is starting, and who knows who it will finish. But one thing that is for sure, is that governments, large corporations, and the state are quickly losing their powers to control, and need to find new ways in supporting their citizens.
We are building a tokenized world, and it is a world where I own a car because I have a crypto asset. This defines that the car exists as a provable entity and that it was purchased by me, as someone who previously owned it has signed it over with their private key. Our existing way is that our government keeps a secret ledger of car registrations and it has a vague reference to my name and address. I then have to apply to them to update their ledger if I sell the car. An online form to do this is still the equivalent of filling in a piece of paper but done online. If I need to show that I own the car, I have a piece of paper which has a name on it that looks like mines on it. But my son has the same name as me … does he own it?
That is the 19th Century!
Thanks to Tim, we now welcome the 21st Century!
As Bob said:
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.