Whitfield Diffie on the History of Cryptography
Interview location: Palo Alto
Interview date: Thursday 31st Jan, 2018
Company: Cryptomathic
Role: Cryptographer and Security Expert
A number of pioneers developed the cryptographic and technical foundations for which Bitcoin is built upon. Nick Szabo highlighted a number of these people in his Tweet:
“Inventors of the most important technologies in Bitcoin: digital signatures and Merkle trees (Merkle), elliptic curve crypto (Koblitz), malicious-fault-tolerant consensus (Lamport), elliptic curve crypto (independent inventor: Miller).”
Many others along the way have contributed to the success of Bitcoin, either through early work or attempts at created a digital currency, names such as Adam Back, David Chaum and Szabo himself.
Whitfield Diffie sits alongside all of these people. His work on cryptography should not be forgotten in the history of Bitcoin and I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss this, how he was introduced to Bitcoin and other such topics as privacy and security.
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