From Their Minds to Your Wallet: Four Private Crypto Pioneers

We take private crypto for granted today, but it wasn’t always this way. BeInCrypto profiles four entrepreneurs who didn’t take our privacy for granted.

Privacy has been a critical issue from the very first days of the internet. Cryptocurrency and blockchain are no different. However, the invention of the world’s first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, presented a problem. Public blockchains are transparent and open by their very nature. Bitcoin, like most cryptocurrencies, is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Most cryptocurrencies don’t reveal their full identity. However, their transactions can still be tracked and traced back to them, so they are not completely anonymous.

Nowadays, we have plenty of options when it comes to trading privately. But getting here was no easy feat. Here, BeInCrypto profiled four people who helped us get here. (Of course, the list is far from exhaustive.)

David Chaum

Chaum is often known by names such as the “Godfather of Privacy” and the “Godfather of Cryptocurrency.” He first proposed the idea of secure digital cash in a paper in 1983. Chaum founded DigiCash in 1990 to commercialize his ideas, but the company went bankrupt in 1998.

One of Chaum’s biggest contributions to privacy was his proposal of mix networks. In 1981, Chaum proposed them as a way to communicate anonymously online.

Mix networks run on a very simple idea. You take a set of messages and re-order (or “mix”) them so that no one can tell which message came from which sender. This process repeats multiple times, with each server adding another layer of encryption. Finally, the messages reach their final destination and are decrypted in the correct order. Crypto tumblers (or “bitcoin mixers”) operate in a similar way.

Mix networks are the core of the privacy browser Tor—which uses onion routing. A technique descended from mix networks. They have been used to improve the privacy and anonymity of transactions, including cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash.

Chaum is known worldwide for his contributions to privacy technology and secure election systems.

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Author: Josh Adams

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