It's not the first time I've talked here about the roots of Bitcoin and the ideas that seeded cryptocurrencies.
Several pioneers in computer science, cryptography, and political studies did their part to pave the way for this incredible invention, and without them, all of this would probably still be lurking in the shadows. One of these cryptoheroes is John Gilmore, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who had a very positive impact on the world of technology, whose fame and popularity is due to the huge number of projects he participated in and their impact on the world of computing.
John Gilmore is one of the most recognized programmers in the world for his diverse work in favor of creating and securing computer networks.
Gilmore was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, United States, where he lived until he moved to Alabama during his adolescence. His private life is a secret he jealously guards. However, his great works and the success he achieved throughout his life as a programmer are well known.
He was first introduced to computer science in his senior year of high school in a class on data processing.
In his hometown of Alabama, he was hired as a programmer after graduation, and at the age of twenty he worked on the mainframe email software that was used in Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign.
Among John Gilmore's creations are the co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the “alt” newsgroups, the Cypherpunks and the 1989 open source company Cygnus Solutions.
For years his efforts have focused on finding ways to keep encryption technology out of the control of spy agencies, always acting as a strong advocate of civil rights.
His talent for computer science and programming was quite evident and a few years later he was interviewed by Bill Gates for a position at Microsoft, but declined to accept an offer at Sun Microsystems.
Gilmore left Sun Microsystems in 1985 with $10,000 and a significant amount of company stock, so when the company went public in 1986, he became a millionaire. This opened up the opportunity for him to focus on the ideas and causes he was genuinely passionate about.
John Gilmore began his history as a programmer at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) in 1982.
There, Gilmore devoted his knowledge and experience to creating
development of software and technological infrastructure. These activities with Sun ended with the creation of a workstation that worked on the TCP/IP protocol.
The knowledge and experience gained at Sun led Gilmore to his second and most famous creation, the Bootstrap protocol. In 1985 Gilmore introduced this protocol as an enhancement and standardization of the boot process followed by Sun workstations. This protocol allows a computer to obtain an IP address without having to start an operating system, which makes the operating system unnecessary and can operate a workstation without a hard disk.
John Gilmore has always supported the libertarian and cypherpunk cause. However, his activities became public to the world when he registered his domain in 1987, toad.com.
On that site, Gilmore started a mail service with an anonymous relay. The service allowed anyone to use its mail service without any censorship.
Shortly thereafter, Gilmore participated in USENET's "Great Rename".
At that time, Gilmore created the alt hierarchy, a hierarchy designed to escape centralized control and not subject to the formalities of large companies.
It was a space for public debate whose growth was explosive and quickly became a multiplier of knowledge, critical thinking and libertarianism, characteristics of the cypherpunk movement.
Shortly thereafter, Gilmore created a mailing list called coderpunks, which would give rise to the well-known cypherpunk mailing list.
In 1989, John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace came together to form the company Cygnus Support (later Cygnus Solutions), with the aim of providing commercial support for free software.
The company's goals and objectives were in line with Gilmore's strong libertarian beliefs.
He wanted the software and technology to be available to the masses, not under the control of big corporations and central governments that already held all the power.
The company's slogan had a bit of irony, "making free software accessible."
As a programmer for BSD and UNIX systems, he was well aware of the potential that free software had.
That's why for years Cygnus Solutions has been the maintainer of several key GNU software products, including GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils.
Cygnus was also the original developer of Cygwin, a POSIX layer for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems.
The company was purchased by Red Hat Inc in November 1999 for $675 million.
By 1990, Gilmore's name was widely recognized when it came to digital freedom.
However, the fight for these freedoms seemed lost as the US government prepared to reduce them. That's how John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor decided to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation project, a foundation dedicated to civil rights and civic responsibilities online.
On this basis, a means was sought to protect digital civil liberties in every sense.
The foundation's success was immediate, when nothing more than its birth was confronted with the FBI and the Secret Service.
However, Barlow was a key player in what authorities believed was a software theft. However, the EFF quickly began to seek financial support for litigation and experts to dismiss such claims. The change has led characters like Steve Wozniak to support the measure and be a part of it.
Later, the EFF had other major cases of accusations of publishing unauthorized encryption software. The American prosecution lost for lack of evidence.
Gilmore's love of computer science and commitment to individual freedom led him to Timothy May and Eric Hughes, and in late 1992, along with fellow cryptographers and programmers, he brought the Cypherpunk movement to life.
The thrust of the movement, as described by The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, was to use cryptographic methods to fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and government interference in economic transactions.
The group spread their ideas by holding regular meetings at Cygnus headquarters.
They firmly believed that combining emerging information markets and cryptographic anarchy would create a liquid market for any and all material that was to be put into words and pictures.
While many saw the advent of the internet as a way to expand society, the Cypherpunks wisely saw it as another means by which central authorities could control the masses.
Gilmore himself was dedicated to privacy in communications and data protection.
In his own words, “I want an assurance – with physics and math, not laws – that we can give ourselves things like the real privacy of personal communications. Encryption strong enough that not even the NSA can break it.” For the Cypherpunks, the way to keep the government out of people's lives was through money and crypto-based communications.
In the year 1992, John Gilmore with Eric Hughes and Timothy C. May created the cypherpunks mailing list. The list was an open space for exchanging information about technology and advances in privacy and anonymity.
She quickly surpassed in activity and contributions the previous list of Gilmore coderpunks.
In late 1993, the list would become widely famous for the release of the Cryptanarchist Manifesto. A document in support of the importance of privacy. Its impact was so great that the beginning of cryptocurrencies is strongly related to this manifesto.
The list grew to about 2,000 members in 1997, with an average of about 30 messages a day from December 1996 to March 1999.
The movement continued to grow throughout the 1990s, and at the turn of the millennium, cypherpunks began experimenting with digital money. In 1998, Wei Dei posted notes on the Cypherpunk mailing list about “B-money”, a distributed electronic money system. His thoughts and ideas were directly influenced by posts by May, Hughes and Gilmore, the three original Cypherpunks. Just ten years later, the famous Bitcoin white paper was published.
In a practical sense, the Cypherpunks would not have started without Gilmore's involvement. Sure, May and Hughes could have gone on without him, but his role was essential to the growth of the grassroots movement. Not only did Gilmore's company host dozens of Cypherpunk meetings, but his work on personal communications and cryptography was also the basis for the mailing list.
Like other Cypherpunks, Gilmore emphasized the priority on individual freedom and privacy above all else. For him, cryptography was not an end in itself – the goal was (and still is) to free the masses from the control of central authorities, beliefs that underpin the philosophy of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
The axis, as the Manifesto puts it, of “altering the nature of corporations and government interference in economic transactions” aligns with the current cryptocurrency movement. Gilmore's focus on secure and private communications perfectly matches the goals of blockchain technology.
Without Gilmore's contributions to the cypherpunk and cryptography movement, who knows how things would be now!?
John Gilmore is currently active with several projects and initiatives for digital freedom. Between them:
FreedomBox, a pre-installed, ready-to-use computer dedicated to protecting its owners' privacy. Every FreedomBox has a secure installation of Debian to ensure the privacy of everything it handles.
Another initiative Gilmore manages is to prevent the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) from requiring citizens to show their identity when traveling. Gilmore has filed several lawsuits to avoid this situation, publicly demonstrating that the TSA does not have the authority to do so. A situation that the TSA itself has also publicly ratified. However, Gilmore lost each of these cases as the TSA and the US federal government did not abandon this practice. This case is known as Gilmore v. Gonzales.
Gilmore believes that the control of digital rights is capable of destroying society and the advances it can generate in the future. He continues to fight to make the internet a place of freedom.
