100k emails from the 90s Cypherpunk listserve

I created a GUI to read the email archives from the legendary Cypherpunk listserve of the 1990s. These archives cover the period from 1992-1998.

The Cypherpunk listserve is a great time capsule of the encryption wars and the early days of the internet, when encryption was still considered a 'weapon' by the US government. The Cypherpunks fought for internet privacy, self sovereignty and security. Notable cypherpunks include Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Julian Assange, and many many others you'll recognize.

Hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did!

Wow, I was looking for my emails. I remember going to HOPE in 1994 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. Among all the talks I remember Eric Hughes' talk on cryptography. Talks of working with banking and others to bring cryptography and anonymous transactions to fruition almost 2 decades before the Satoshi paper and blockchain. I attended several 2600 meetings at the food court in the Citicorp building before then. Amazing times! There was also a talk at HOPE on controlling the world with your parallel port. This launched me into doing controls for animatronic and window display circuits - the Christmas windows at Saks and Lord & Taylor later in the 90s. Red boxing with tape recorders at payphones and then Radio Shack came out with an affordable speed dialer. Simply replace a crystal on the circuit and program 1,2,3, or 4 quarter tones on it, and voila, free calls from payphones. I wrote a simple OTP in C back then. I'll have to wade through this. I don't think I posted on this group, but I was teaching myself cryptography at the time. I bought a hardcover of Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier around 1995/96...I grew up at the poverty line in the late 60s in Brooklyn, and hacking and the potential of computers and programming enthused me and instilled a sense in me that I could not only be a part of the larger world outside of my parochial surroundings, but possibly be a creator of change in it for the good of the world at large.

This is fascinating. Email from Marc Horowitz, dated 12/1/1992:

"Does anybody have any contact information for David Chaum or DigiCash?

I think it's worthwhile to find out if any of the problems we've been discussing have been previously solved. It's possible that our experiment could increase visibility of digital cash to the point that a real commercial venture could work, in which case he may even be interested in helping us.

Email me personally, I'll summarize.

Marc"

If not for that missed connection, we might be living in an alternate universe where Bitcoin was invented in 1993-1994 and became the default mechanism for Internet payments, and PayPal never existed.

I was on that list but had to quit. The idiocy level was insane.