Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn | |
|---|---|
 Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn at 34C3 in 2017 | |
| Born | Bryce Wilcox May 13, 1974 |
| Employer | Electric Coin Company |
| Parents |
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| Website | zooko on Twitter |
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (born Bryce Wilcox; 13 May 1974 in Phoenix, Arizona), is an American Colorado-based computer security specialist, self-proclaimed cypherpunk, and ex-CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the development of Zcash. [1]
He is known for the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store (or Tahoe-LAFS), a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem [2] [3] released under GPL and the TGPPL licenses. He is the creator of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence (TGPPL). [4]
Wilcox-O'Hearn is the designer of multiple network protocols that incorporate concepts such as self-contained economies and secure reputation systems. [5] He is a member of the development team of ZRTP [6] and the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash function. [7] [8]
Zooko's triangle is named after Wilcox-O'Hearn, who described the schema that relates three desirable properties of identifiers in 2001. [9]
Wilcox-O'Hearn was founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises in Boulder, Colorado [1] where he is now an advisor. [10]
Zooko was a developer of the MojoNation [11] P2P system and lead developer of the follow-on Mnet network, [12] and a developer at SimpleGeo. [13]
Wilcox-O'Hearn worked on the first cryptocurrency, DigiCash, with David Chaum in 1996. [14] He is a member of the founding team of the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, which launched in 2016. [14] He currently serves as the CEO of the affiliated Electric Coin Company. [15] Wilcox later commissioned the Rand Corporation to study whether anonymous coins were disproportionately represented in criminal transactions; the study found they were not. [15]
Additionally Wilcox-O'Hearn was one of the co-creators of Blake3. [16]
A cypherpunk is one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change. The cypherpunk movement originated in the late 1980s and gained traction with the establishment of the "Cypherpunks" electronic mailing list in 1992, where informal groups of activists, technologists, and cryptographers discussed strategies to enhance individual privacy and resist state or corporate surveillance. Deeply libertarian in philosophy, the movement is rooted in principles of decentralization, individual autonomy, and freedom from centralized authority. Its influence on society extends to the development of technologies that have reshaped global finance, communication, and privacy practices, such as the creation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which embody cypherpunk ideals of decentralized and censorship-resistant money. The movement has also contributed to the mainstreaming of encryption in everyday technologies, such as secure messaging apps and privacy-focused web browsers. The cypherpunk ethos has had a lasting impact on debates around digital rights, surveillance, and personal freedoms in the 21st century. The movement has been active since at least 1990 and continues to inspire initiatives aimed at fostering a more private and secure digital world.
Mixmaster is a Type II anonymous remailer which sends messages in fixed-size packets and reorders them, preventing anyone watching the messages go in and out of remailers from tracing them. It is an implementation of a David Chaum's mix network.
A Cypherpunk anonymous remailer, also known as a Type I remailer, is a type of anonymous remailer that receives messages encrypted with PGP or GPG, follows predetermined instructions to strip any identifying information, and forwards the messages to the desired recipient.
Crypto-anarchy, crypto-anarchism, cyberanarchy or cyberanarchism is a political ideology focusing on the protection of privacy, political freedom, and economic freedom, the adherents of which use cryptographic software for confidentiality and security while sending and receiving information over computer networks. In his 1988 "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", Timothy C. May introduced the basic principles of crypto-anarchism, encrypted exchanges ensuring total anonymity, total freedom of speech, and total freedom to trade. In 1992, he read the text at the founding meeting of the cypherpunk movement. Most Crypto-anarchists are anarcho-capitalists but some are anarcho-mutualists.
A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a hash algorithm that has special properties desirable for a cryptographic application:
An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.
Proof of work (PoW) is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort on their part. The concept was first implemented in Hashcash by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork in 1993 as a way to deter denial-of-service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from a service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer. The term "proof of work" was first coined and formalized in a 1999 paper by Markus Jakobsson and Ari Juels. The concept was adapted to digital tokens by Hal Finney in 2004 through the idea of "reusable proof of work" using the 160-bit secure hash algorithm 1 (SHA-1).
A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service in which an attacker subverts the service's reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. The name was suggested in or before 2002 by Brian Zill at Microsoft Research. The term pseudospoofing had previously been coined by L. Detweiler on the Cypherpunks mailing list and used in the literature on peer-to-peer systems for the same class of attacks prior to 2002, but this term did not gain as much influence as "Sybil attack".
Adam Back is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the bitcoin mining process.
Tahoe-LAFS is a free and open, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, distributed data store and distributed file system. It can be used as an online backup system, or to serve as a file or Web host similar to Freenet, depending on the front-end used to insert and access files in the Tahoe system. Tahoe can also be used in a RAID-like fashion using multiple disks to make a single large Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN) pool of reliable data storage.
BLAKE is a cryptographic hash function based on Daniel J. Bernstein's ChaCha stream cipher, but a permuted copy of the input block, XORed with round constants, is added before each ChaCha round. Like SHA-2, there are two variants differing in the word size. ChaCha operates on a 4×4 array of words. BLAKE repeatedly combines an 8-word hash value with 16 message words, truncating the ChaCha result to obtain the next hash value. BLAKE-256 and BLAKE-224 use 32-bit words and produce digest sizes of 256 bits and 224 bits, respectively, while BLAKE-512 and BLAKE-384 use 64-bit words and produce digest sizes of 512 bits and 384 bits, respectively.
Zerocoin is a privacy protocol proposed in 2013 by Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew D. Green and his graduate students, Ian Miers and Christina Garman. It was designed as an extension to the Bitcoin protocol that would improve Bitcoin transactions' anonymity by having coin-mixing capabilities natively built into the protocol. Zerocoin is not currently compatible with Bitcoin.
Matthew Daniel Green is an American cryptographer and security technologist. Green is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He specializes in applied cryptography, privacy-enhanced information storage systems, anonymous cryptocurrencies, elliptic curve crypto-systems, and satellite television piracy. He is a member of the teams that developed the Zerocoin anonymous cryptocurrency and Zerocash. He has also been influential in the development of the Zcash system. He has been involved in the groups that exposed vulnerabilities in RSA BSAFE, Speedpass and E-ZPass. Green lives in Baltimore, MD with his wife, Melissa, 2 children and 2 miniature dachshunds.
Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.
A distributed ledger is a system whereby replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data is geographically spread (distributed) across many sites, countries, or institutions. In contrast to a centralized database, a distributed ledger does not require a central administrator, and consequently does not have a single (central) point-of-failure.
Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency which is based on Bitcoin's codebase. It shares many similarities, such as a fixed total supply of 21 million units.
A blockchain is a shared database that records transactions between two parties in an immutable ledger. Blockchain documents and confirms pseudonymous ownership of all transactions in a verifiable and sustainable way. After a transaction is validated and cryptographically verified by other participants or nodes in the network, it is made into a "block" on the blockchain. A block contains information about the time the transaction occurred, previous transactions, and details about the transaction. Once recorded as a block, transactions are ordered chronologically and cannot be altered. This technology rose to popularity after the creation of Bitcoin, the first application of blockchain technology, which has since catalyzed other cryptocurrencies and applications.
Dmitry Khovratovich is a Russian cryptographer, currently a Lead Cryptographer for the Dusk Network, researcher for the Ethereum Foundation, and member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
