This is a speech delivered by Gong Ming, a well-known entrepreneur and investor in the blockchain industry, in the fifth class of Wanxiang Blockchain Honeycomb Academy. Gong Ming introduces the evolution of blockchain technology by taking more than ten important legendary figures in the history of modern computer, cryptography and blockchain as clues.
From Turing to Satoshi Nakamoto, from the cryptpunk movement to the diversified development of technology, we are not only paying tribute to the pioneers who made significant contributions to blockchain technology in 2019, which is a key historical point worth remembering in the development of Blockchain in China. It reminds us of the original intention of blockchain technology and the belief of a group of people. Remind us of our predecessors’ mission: to use blockchain technology to truly make the world a better place.
Perhaps we are now used to the changes and convenience brought by the Internet to our life, but have you ever thought that the development of technology did not happen overnight, and it is the wisdom, exploration, dedication and resistance of how many people that bring mankind from the industrial age to the information age. Similarly, blockchain technology did not fall from the sky. It is the wisdom crystallization of countless computer scientists, cryptographers, mathematicians, economists and even philosophers. It is the reflection and achievement of their unremitting exploration and dedication.
Everybody is good! My name is Gong Ming. My net name is prince Gong. Today I want to analyze how blockchain has developed to this stage through some typical people and stories in the development process of blockchain.
Let’s start with a familiar figure: Alan Masthison Turing, who you probably know from watching The Imitation Game, is not only a mathematician, but also considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. But his story remained buried for a long time, only coming to light after world War II.
Turing made a lot of contributions, but one of the biggest was in cryptography. He had a very interesting idea of using machines against machines in World War II. The idea seems simple now, but at the time it was breathtaking. Turing brought World War II to an early end by cracking the German code. Some believe Turing brought world War II to an end at least two years earlier, saving millions of lives. He made everyone aware of the importance of cryptography to the world, even the importance of the nuclear bomb.
There are many stories about Turing. He was persecuted by the British government after World War II, which led to his suicide. There are also some conspiracy theories that he killed himself. We all know that Turing died from eating an apple dipped in potassium cyanide. A lot of people think that apple’s LOGO, an Apple with a bite taken, is a tribute to Turing. But it’s a rumor, just a beautiful coincidence. Apple didn’t think about this when they designed the Logo.
Turing’s contribution made governments around the world pay attention to the development of cryptography, but it also caused some problems. The government’s strict control over cryptographic tools. Many hoped that the tools of cryptography should not be kept in the hands of the government alone, and tools for cracking codes began to develop rapidly. This led to the CRYPTO WARS that led to the rest of our story.
Ralph C. Merkle is one of the inventors of asymmetric encryption. Early on, he was a member of the Xerox PARC Laboratory, which invented the mouse, GU, IPU, Ethernet, super-scale robot circuits, OOP, and more. Legend has it that When Jobs and Bill Gates visited PARC LABS, they saw the graphical interface provided by the lab, and then Bill Gates launched Windows, and Jobs founded NeXT.
In the history of computer technology, it was Merkle who first proposed the concept of asymmetric hashing. Hash algorithm is one of the most used in block chain algorithm, hash can turn any arbitrary field through a series of algorithms to short strings, the original text or code, just changed a byte, through hash calculated string is not the same, so popular as “fingerprint” data. The most common use of hash algorithm is that when you log in to a website, you need to enter a user name and password. The system will turn the user password into a hash string and upload it to the Internet, and the other website can save your hash string. In this way, even if the system is breached, the user name and password will not be disclosed. This is a relatively common and simple application of hashing, which has since been used by almost all cryptographic protocols.
Diffie and Hellman jointly published the paper “New Directions in Cryptography” in 1976, which proposed the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm and won the 2015 Turing Prize. Diffie was modest enough to say that Merkle also came up with a very important idea in this, which he thought should be called the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle algorithm. They are not only the founders of modern cryptography and asymmetric cryptography, but also the enlightenment experts of modern currency and modern cryptography.
David Lee Chaum is a well-known cryptography expert in the United States, and also a pioneer of cryptography thought and movement. He has made great contributions and influenced many people with interesting ideas on cryptography and privacy. In 1983, he proposed the development of Ecash, a form of electronic money based entirely on cryptography, and the first form of electronic money to propose how cryptography could be integrated into the monetary system. In 1995, he founded DigiCash. He influenced many later cryptographers in the United States, the most famous of whom was Tim May.
Tim May also pioneered cryptography. He worked at Intel until he retired in his 30s, having achieved financial freedom with stock. He spent much of the rest of his time in cryptography, exploring how to use cryptography tools to protect the “right to privacy” that everyone is born with.
John Gilmore, shown above, is also an expert in cryptography. If you’ve ever done network management or IP address configuration, you’ll know that there is a protocol called DHCP — the standard protocol for automatically assigning IP addresses across a LAN. DHCP was written by John Gilmore. Eric Hughes is also a well-known cryptographer.
They were all in the Bay Area at the time, and they often organized meetings to discuss cryptography tools and future directions. They believe that cryptography tools are important and should be available to everyone, and they hope to give everyone control over their privacy again. Later, they came up with the concept of Cypherpunk.
Jude Milhon is said to have come up with the name. At the time, she was the girlfriend of Eric Hughes, a well-known female hacker who had also put forward many ideas on online feminism. A Hacker is a person who is very good at computer technology, not a Cracker. A person who attacks a network should be called a Cracker. After being translated into Chinese, it became a derogatory term because of the character “black”. Later, they called them geeks. Cypherpunk is an advocate for social and political change through the widespread use of strong encryption and privacy technologies. Cypherpunk is a political movement that aims to take privacy back into everyone’s own hands through cryptography tools.
In 1988, Tim May wrote an article called “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” which for the first time suggested how to use cryptographic tools to achieve some political goals. In 1993, Eric Hughes proposed the Cryptpunk Manifesto, which first proposed the use of cryptography, anonymous email systems, digital signatures and electronic money to defend human privacy. In 1993, the three formed the Cypherpunk Mail List E-mail List. An email list is one that can be communicated by email. They built new lists by constantly replying to emails, which was fashionable at the time, sort of like the BBS community behind it. Since then, as new people have been added to the list, more and more people have participated in the discussion and actively contributed their thoughts, forming the Cypherpunk trend.
Many of the people on this mailing list have since made a significant impact, or even change, on the industry and the world. For example, Julian Assange founded wikileaks in 2006, and Adam Back came up with Hashcash, a new digital currency, and later became a co-founder of Blockstream. Jacob Appelbaum is the founder of Tor and Bram Cohen founded BitTorrent. Hal Finney, Philip Zimmermann, Nick Szabo, and Wei Dai have promoted the development of blockchain technology.
Tim May, Eric Hughes, and John Gilmore pioneered the concept of Cypherpunk. They are pictured together on the cover of Wired magazine as a banner that led many people into cryptology.
Hal Finney was a graduate of Caltech, and he was a very good cryptographer. Some people insist that Hal Finney might be Satoshi nakamoto, but the biggest reason is that he wrote the first reusable PoW (proof of work) mechanism. He was also Phil Zimmermann’s first employee and was influenced by him. Zimmermann was a pioneer in cryptography, and one of his earliest contributions was to write PGP.
The Internet at the time had no encryption protocols, meaning that all information was “streaked,” and the U.S. government could easily look at anyone’s information on the Internet. Zimmermann is a cryptographer, computer expert and activist. He thinks the situation is unreasonable and everyone has the right to protect their privacy. But the United States had a Cryptography Protection Act. That’s why the first browser, Netscape, came in two versions: international and American. The international key is 40 bits and the US key is 128 bits. Foreigners can only use 40-bit Nectscape, and it is illegal to distribute 128-bit Nectscape to foreigners without permission.
Zimmermann wrote PGP version 1.0 in 1991 with a 128-bit key. PGP has an interesting name — Pretty Good Privacy. This tool has been an eye-opener for many people, especially those who don’t want to be spied on by the U.S. government. Zimmermann let people download PGP freely on Ftp servers, which alarmed the US government. The FBI tried to prosecute Zimmermann and stop him from distributing the tools.
Zimmermann believes it is his duty to give “weapons” to everyone who needs them, so that everyone can use them to defend their right to privacy. So, in collaboration with MIT, he wrote a book that published all the source code for PGP. Under the First Amendment, Americans have freedom of speech, and freedom of speech includes freedom of the press, and books are not weapons. Zimmermann circumvented the cryptography Protection Act by publishing his book. The book has since been sold in large numbers around the world. Throughout, Zimmermann has been resisting the U.S. government’s regulation through personal efforts, and has spread PGP to everyone around the world.
By 1993 and 1994, a large number of financial companies were using advanced password encryption tools to protect their financial privacy, leading to the complete failure of password controls at the time. Eventually, the United States eased its controls and dropped the charges against Zimmermann.
As mentioned earlier, Hal Finney was Zimmermann’s first employee, continuing much of Zimmermann’s work, and was the lead author of PGP2.0. Hal Finney got to know Satoshi nakamoto early on through a mailing list. Hal Finney was diagnosed with ALS in 2009. He continued to write code, blinking and making tiny movements from his wheelchair, and spent a long time writing a letter about how he had met Satoshi Nakamoto, how he had been lucky enough to be involved in the bitcoin network, and how he had made suggestions for the future of the bitcoin network. Hal Finney left this world in 2014. He had contacted a cryonics company to have his body frozen after his death, and perhaps Hal Finney could one day come back to life. Since he has not been seen since he was frozen, many people assume that He is Hal Finney.
The debate about who Satoshi Nakamoto really is continues. Craig Steven Wright once said he was Satoshi Nakamoto. Craig Steven Wright has made a lot of explorations in the field of computer and cryptography. But Juola&Associates, a firm that grammatically compared Craig Steven Wright’s paper with the bitcoin white paper, concluded that the bitcoin white paper was 100% not written by Craig Steven Wright. Craig Steven Wright responded that the idea for Bitcoin was mine, but the white paper was written by his good friend Dave Kleiman. This brought Dave Kleiman into the public eye for the first time.
Who is Dave Kleiman? He had never been heard of in the field of cryptography. He was also an expert in cryptography. He was born in Florida, joined the army at an early age, served in Berlin, and loved computers from an early age. After leaving the army, he became a computer security forensics specialist, working as a computer security forensics specialist for the Florida State Police. Then he joined a company and wrote an “immutable security Audit log system.” Isn’t that a funny name? And bitcoin, blockchain immutable ledger system seems very similar. As a security forensics expert, Dave Kleiman also knows how to hide his tracks on the Internet. Unfortunately, he was in a serious car accident in 1996, paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, which gave him plenty of time to spend on his computer.
After extensive documentation, Dave Kleiman did work with Craig Steven Wright on computer companies and did mention bitcoin. Is satoshi nakamoto related to Dave Kleiman? This is a complicated problem that nobody knows.
You don’t really know much about Dave Kleiman. His condition also deteriorated sharply after 2013. Bedridden and poorly cared for in a nursing home, he contracted a superbug. None of the antibiotics can kill superbugs, and treatment can only delay suffering. Dave Kleiman lived in agony in a hospital bed until his death, when he was found dead in his home in April 2013. His body had decomposed. During the investigation, police even found bullet holes in his bed, speculating that he may have tried to commit suicide, whether successful or not is unclear, the main cause of death is infection.
Around the same time as his death, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared. Could he be Satoshi Nakamoto? Everyone also has different views. Dave Kleiman left behind a very strong USB drive that his brother now has. A lot of people think if he’s Satoshi nakamoto, there’s a good chance it’s on the flash drive. His best friend says if you really think Dave Kleiman is Satoshi Nakamoto, you should give up. Because as far as he knew, Dave Kleiman’s password couldn’t have been less than 40 characters long enough to be broken by brute force.
Craig Steven Wright brought out the legendary tulip Trust, claiming that he had entrusted His 1.1 million bitcoins to Dave Kleiman and that they would be returned to him at some point, death or not.
A lot of people think Craig Steven Wright may be a fraud, but it’s possible he actually knew Satoshi because he knew so many details. Gavin Andresen testified that Craig Steven Wright is the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Gavin Andresen is considered a disciple of Satoshi Nakamoto, as satoshi left a letter saying that everything was given to Gavin Andresen when he left the community. Gavin Andresen is an American computer expert who has done a lot of things. The algorithms are awesome, and most of the code in the Bitcoin system is currently done under Gavin Andresen.
Gavin Andresen is a very important link. Satoshi Nakamoto started it, Gavin Andresen really brought bitcoin to the world.
The second person important to the Bitcoin network is Jeff Garzik. Jeff Garzik is also an important developer, second only to Gavin Andresen, and has contributed more to the code of the Bitcoin network. Jeff Garzik was a kernel developer for Linux, and he wrote some code for Android, which is really cool. Jeff Garzik said that when he first saw bitcoin, he thought it was very interesting and important for the future. Jeff Garzik put all his work on hold and dedicated himself to building the bitcoin community. He has said in the past that Craig Steven Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, and that Kleiman is more likely.
“Who is Satoshi nakamoto” in the short term is difficult to have results, is not today’s topic. Whether it’s Dave Kleiman, Gavin Andresen or Hal Finney, they all contributed a lot to the code of the Bitcoin network. Blockchain has so far gone far beyond the concept of bitcoin and entered a whole new phase. But there is no doubt that blockchain technology originated from the Bitcoin network, and the world has gradually begun to accept and believe in distributed ledgers.
In the ethereum phase, a new term — Smart Contract — emerged.
The inventor of smart contracts is Nick Szabo, a mathematician and philosopher who is not really a computer expert. In 1993, he proposed smart contracts, which explored whether computers and the Internet could be used to create immutable contracts. Once you can do that, a lot of things are completely automatic.
Back in 1993, when smart contracts were science fiction, blockchain really made them possible. Now we can’t talk about blockchain without the concept of smart contracts. Without smart contracts, blockchain will face significant limitations in the future.
I always tell a joke that Satoshi nakamoto is probably Chinese and his name probably means “Chinese are inherently smart”. Cryptography, blockchain technology development to today, it seems that there is no Chinese figure. But there is, Wei Dai.
Wei Dai is a very mysterious person and a very good cryptographer. He worked early on cryptography in the Microsoft research group. But to this day, we don’t know exactly who he was. In 1993, he came up with the idea of B-Money — anonymous distributed electronic cash. In addition to the name being similar to bitcoin, B-Money also mentions all the elements of bitcoin. Many people think it’s Wei Dai who probably inspired Nakamoto, but Wei Dai said in an email that he thinks Nakamoto probably didn’t see B-Money when he was thinking about Bitcoin, but saw the B-Money paper after it was finished, so Nakamoto should have built bitcoin independently. Many of B-Money’s ideas are very similar to bitcoin, and the first paper cited by Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper is B-Money. Bitcoin didn’t just appear out of thin air. It was based on countless attempts by many people.
Vitalik Buterin has put smart contracts on blockchain. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, and Vitalik wants to turn all the computers together into a supercomputer for smart contracts. Vitalik is a little genius, Russian-Canadian. I met him when he was 19 years old, new to China, a little introverted, didn’t speak Chinese at all, listened to us and flipped through the dictionary. By the second year, I could speak Chinese and send wechat messages in Chinese. This gives us a “shock”, maybe that’s what genius looks like.
Gavin Wood is the CTO of Ethereum, most of the architecture of Ethereum is produced by Gavin Wood. He wrote the Ethereum Technology Yellow Book, and many people think highly of his work. Gavin Wood is leading Polkadot, which is cross-chain.
I also admire Jed McCaleb. He is the founder of the donkey. Eddonkey is the earliest distributed download system. Jed McCaleb has been involved in many well-known projects, and has contributed greatly to the development of the industry since the early use of hash indexes in distributed systems.
So far blockchain has developed to the point where the technology is very diverse. Not only are PoW proof-of-work mechanisms, asymmetric encryption, and distributed systems like otherwise, but technologies like cross-chain, Staking, zero-knowledge proof, sharding, side chains, and MPC are becoming more and more important. The blockchain industry will be presented in a very diverse way in the future.
Everyone is talking about whether and when blockchain will hit the ground. One key factor is that many blockchain technologies are still immature and in the process of rapid development.
In addition to blockchain technology, the definition of blockchain is constantly changing, and what is now referred to as blockchain is very different from the blockchain of Bitcoin. Back then, the so-called blockchain was a chain of information connected together. Today, many technologies are not chain structures, but tree structures, network structures. Technologies like DAG are mesh data structures.
Blockchain standards are also changing. Blockchain has endless possibilities for future development. There is an attempt to merge all the technologies into WEB3 to build the next generation of the Internet. Making the so-called information Internet become the value Internet is the greatest thing.
Now the Internet is called “information Internet”. The strongest part of the Internet is the transmission and replication of information, which is also the biggest value of the Internet at present. You send an E-mail to a friend, and your E-mail is still there when it arrives. This is an inherent function of the Internet — the transmission and replication of information.
How do you transfer $1 to your friend, but make sure he adds $1 and you subtract $1 exactly? The Internet can not do, must be through intermediary agencies, such as Alipay, banks. However, this function is endogenous in WEB3, and value transfer is the most basic function of the chain, which does not need to be completed by an independent third party. This means that value transfer becomes an endogenous function, meaning that value transfer is as fast as information transfer. If value and information move at the same speed in the future, the world of finance will change dramatically.
In the WEB3 phase, you can really control everything, including your privacy. At present, all payment records, walking records and taxi-hailing records are controlled by third-party intermediaries, while WEB3 has the ability to keep all data in its own hands, which is the direction of all future technologies.
Blockchain was not a brainchild of one person. There are many great people who have made countless contributions, especially Hal Finney and Dave Kleiman. Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney probably didn’t know they were in a wheelchair when they were discussing bitcoin. These two wheelchair-bound cryptographers made remarkable contributions to the development of digital currencies and blockchains, and they contributed all their wisdom and courage in their final moments. I personally feel that blockchain has come this far because of all the efforts of the smartest people in the world. Cypherpunk came up with the idea of giving everyone control over their privacy by providing password tools in the 1990s. Since then, many cryptographic experts have used their wisdom to promote the movement. When we talk about the use of blockchain, many people may not know, have forgotten or have never heard of the original idea — blockchain is a cryptography tool that allows everyone to protect their privacy, not just to make money. The unremitting efforts of these intelligent pioneers hope that blockchain technology can play a greater value in our hands.
I’m going to share with you a story that you will forget in an hour, but I want you to remember that when you feel anxious and confused, there are so many people on your side. Some people give their whole life, make many contributions, even give their own life; When we talk about blockchain, we don’t just think about hype. I believe this is just one stage in the password wars, and blockchain, a great technology, will play a very big role in the future and have a huge impact on the world.