Before Bitcoin

The Art and Science of Cryptography

Cryptography, derived from the Greek words kryptos (hidden) and graphein (to write), is fundamentally the art and science of secure communication in the presence of adversaries. While modern usage often associates it with digital currencies and computer security, its history stretches back millennia, serving as a critical tool for military, diplomatic, and personal secrecy.

The Historical Mandate: Security and Privacy

Historically, the core purpose of cryptography has been two-fold: security and privacy.

Security (Confidentiality): This is the ability to ensure that the message, once encoded (encrypted), can only be read by the intended recipient who holds the secret key. Ancient ciphers, like the Caesar Cipher (a simple substitution cipher) or the Polyalphabetic Ciphers developed later, were primarily designed to achieve this. 

The cryptographers (or cryptologists) of these eras were often government or military officials whose job was to create unbreakable codes and, just as importantly, to break the codes of the enemy (a field known as cryptanalysis). The constant, escalating battle between cipher creation and cipher breaking is what has historically driven the field forward.

Privacy (Secrecy): Beyond just hiding the content of a message, cryptography protected the act of communication itself, allowing individuals or states to conduct sensitive business without public scrutiny. Before the digital age, privacy was largely guaranteed by the difficulty of intercepting physical mail or signals; cryptography provided an extra layer of protection against direct interception and eavesdropping.

The Cryptographer's Evolution: From Secrecy to Systems

The role of the cryptographer has undergone a dramatic transformation.

• Classical Era (Before the 20th Century): Cryptographers focused on ciphers, using mechanical tools or pen and paper to scramble letters based on a key. Their work was highly secretive and primarily concerned with confidentiality.
• Modern Era (Mid-20th Century to 1970s): The advent of large-scale, automated communication and the World Wars brought the first cipher machines (like the Enigma). Cryptographers began to incorporate more complex mathematics, and the field shifted from being an art to a more rigorous, mathematical discipline. Figures like Alan Turing were crucial in applying theoretical math to break complex machine ciphers, highlighting the immense national security role of the cryptographer.
• The Digital Revolution and Public-Key Cryptography (1970s and Beyond): This is the most profound shift. The rise of computers and the internet meant that people needed to communicate securely without having met beforehand to exchange a secret key. This challenge led to the revolutionary concept of Public-Key Cryptography (PKC), exemplified by the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and the RSA algorithm. 

The introduction of PKC fundamentally broadened the scope of cryptography beyond mere confidentiality:

• Authentication: Proving the sender is who they claim to be (e.g., using Digital Signatures).
• Integrity: Ensuring the message hasn't been altered during transmission (e.g., using Hash Functions).
• Non-Repudiation: Preventing the sender from later denying they sent the message.

In this modern context, the cryptographer is a highly specialized mathematician and computer scientist who designs, analyzes, and applies complex mathematical algorithms to build comprehensive security systems. Their primary mission shifted from guarding military secrets to securing the global digital infrastructure, making privacy and security accessible to billions of everyday users through technologies like TLS/SSL (which secures your web browsing) and, more recently, blockchain technologies.

The decades leading up to the 1970s and 80s were crucial in this transformation, laying the foundation for the mathematical theories of digital security upon which we rely today.

- 1974 Robert E. Kahn / Vint Cerf TCP/IP = Internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

- 1976 Whitfield Diffie / Martin Hellman / New Directions in Cryptography
https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf

- 1978 RSA Public Key Cryptosystem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)

- 1980 Ralph Merkle Protocols Cryptosystems
http://www.merkle.com/papers/Protocols.pdf

- 1981 David Chaum Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum

- 1982 Murray Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard

- 1983 David Chaum Blind Signatures
https://sceweb.sce.uhcl.edu/yang/teaching/csci5234WebSecurityFall2011/Chaum-blind-signatures.PDF

- 1985 Elliptic Curve Cryptography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography

- 1988 Timothy C. May The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

- 1989 David Chauman DigiCash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

- 1991 Phil Zimmermann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

- 1991 Haber / Stornetta How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00196791

- 1992 / 1993 Eric Hugues A Cyperherpunk's Manifesto

- 1992 Cypherpunk Founded
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk

- 1994 CyberCash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash

- 1994 Timothy C. May
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt

- 1996 E-Gold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

- 1996 NSA How To Make A Mint
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm

- 1997 Adam Back HashCash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Back

- 1997 Nick Szabo Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks
https://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469

- 1998 Nick Szabo Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/secure-property-titles/

- 1998 Bit Gold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

- 1998 Wei Dai B-Money
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/B-money

- 1999 Dot Com Bubble
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

- 2001 Bram Cohen BitTorrent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

- 2001 Distributed Hash Tables
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

- 2004 Hal Finney / Reusable Proofs of Work
 
- 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto / A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

- 2009 Bitcoin Launched Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

Bitcoin Pre-history
https://www.bitcoinbtc.pro/2020/11/bitcoin-pre-history.html

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

Crypto Anarchy
https://cryptoanarchy.wiki