Thread by @LoveaBot

The peer-to-peer decentralised world we see unfolding is a result of the relentless dedication of a group of builders, mathematicians, misfits, and hackers.

They’ve built over generations, and now the baton has been passed to us. #web3

A fascinating thread 🧵👇

1/ 1973

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn worked on the early designs of ARPANET, and then started the development of a way for all the different computers in the world to talk to each other (TCP/IP) that allowed the internet as we know it today to exist 🔗

2/ 1976

Whitfield Diffie and Mertin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution — a fundamental problem in cryptography 🔐

3/ 1978

RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) came up with a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission.

In a public-key cryptosystem, the encryption key is public and distinct from the decryption key, which is kept secret (private)

4/ 1980

While an undergraduate, Merkle devised Merkle's Puzzles, a scheme for communication over an insecure channel, as part of a class project. The scheme is now recognized to be an early example of public-key cryptography 🔑

5/ 1981

David Chaum’s paper, "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms", laid the groundwork for the field of anonymous communications research 📧

6/ 1985

Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. ECC allows smaller keys compared to non-EC cryptography to provide equivalent security .

7/ 1988

Timothy C. May wrote “The crypto-anarchist manifesto” which is a political ideology focusing on the protection of privacy, political freedom, and economic freedom 📙

8/ 1991

Phil Zimmerman created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in the world.

Also in 1991, S Haber & W S Stornetta published a paper and created a way to time-stamp a digital document ⏳

9/ 1992

CypherPunks was founded in SF by Eric Hughes, Timothy C May & John Gilmore 👨‍👨‍👧

A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change.

10/ 1992

Tim Berners lee invented the World Wide Web (www) 🌐

He also published the first website, which described the project itself.

11/ 1995

David Chaum’s company Digicash created the first digital currency with eCash 💵

Also, E-gold was launched online in 1996, a digital gold currency that allowed users to open an account on their website and buy and sell digital gold 🥇

12/ 1997

Adam Back invented Hashcash which is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks, which was later used in bitcoin as part of the mining algorithm. 🧑‍🏭

13/ 1998

Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency he called "bit gold”

(he is also the biggest suspect in being Satoshi Nakamoto due to this 😉)

14/ 1998

Wei Dai created “B-money” decentralised database to record transactions by using a type of proof of work. The smallest subunit of Ether, the wei, is named after him 🪙

In 1999, during the dot com bubble, many online retailer currencies were born like beenz & flooz.

15/ 2001

Bram Cohen launched BitTorrent protocol and later the first file-sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent 📁

16/ 2004

Hal Finney launched Reusable Proof-of-Work (RPOW) which was intended as a prototype for digital cash.

He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

17/ 2009

By building on all these advancements Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper for peer-to-peer electronic cash system 💸

Thank you @bitinning for helping us bring this thread to life 🤍