JOHN Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cygnus Solutions and the Cypherpunks mailing list – the first mailing list Satoshi Nakamoto shared the idea of Bitcoin with in October 2008.
But what’s the story behind John Gilmore and how important was he in the creation of Bitcoin?
Who is John Gilmore?
John Gilmore was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania.
He was first introduced to computer science in his senior year of high school and went on to start his career as a programmer at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) in 1982.
As one of the company’s first employees, while there Gilmore created a workstation that worked on the TCP/IP protocol (a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet).
This then led Gilmore to his second and most famous creation, the Bootstrap protocol.
This protocol allowed a computer to obtain an IP address without having to start an operating system – making the operating system unnecessary and able to operate without a hard disk.
Gilmore left Sun Microsystems in 1985 with $10,000 and company stock, meaning when the company went public in 1986, he became a millionaire.
This enabled him to focus on the causes he was genuinely passionate about.
Gilmore founded the domain name toad.com in 1987, which is one of the 100 oldest active .com domains.
Gilmore started a mail service with an anonymous relay.
This allowed anyone to use its mail service without censorship.
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He then created the ‘alt hierarchy’ “which was a forum for discussions that the mainstream internet refused to handle, such as sex, drugs, and gourmet cooking,” according to Gilmore.
In 1989, John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace then formed a partnership and founded Cygnus Support – later Cygnus Solutions. It aimed to provide commercial support for free software.
Gilmore wanted the software and technology to be available to everyone, not under the control of big corporations and central governments.
John Gilmore’s Cygnus Solutions was purchased by Red Hat Inc in November 1999 for $675 million.
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By 1990, not only was Gilmore a multi-millionaire but was renowned when it came online freedom.
John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor then founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project, a foundation dedicated to defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights.
The formation of the EFF was a reaction to the US Secret Service and FBI cracking down on hackers in the early 1990s.
Gilmore gave significant financial support critical to the organization’s survival and growth over the years and helped initiate the filing of Bernstein v DOJ, which resulted in a court ruling that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment.
While at the University of California at Berkeley, Bernstein developed an encryption algorithm called Snuffle.
But the law at the time meant he needed to submit his ideas about cryptography to the government for review and to obtain a license to publish them.
So Bernstein sued the government with the help of EFF.
After four years and one regulatory change, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.
Ultimately, the decision made it legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites, and software like PGP (an encryption system used for both sending encrypted emails and encrypting sensitive files) and Signal (communications on Signal are end-to-end encrypted, which means only the people in messages can see the content of those messages — not even the company itself) to use the encryption of their choice.
But in 2021, the EFF Board of Directors made the decision to vote to remove Gilmore from the Board.
The board said: “Since he helped found EFF 31 years ago, John Gilmore has provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we advocate for today. But in recent years, we have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best communicate and work together, and we have been unable to agree on a way forward with Gilmore in a governance role.”
How did John Gilmore contribute to Bitcoin’s creation?
In late 1992, Eric Hughes a mathematician from the University of California, Berkeley, Tim May, a retired businessman who worked for Intel and John Gilmore invited twenty of their closest friends to discuss some of the world’s most vexing programming and cryptographic (cryptography provides secure communication in the presence of malicious third-parties) issues.
The initial meeting evolved into a monthly meeting held at John Gilmore’s company, Cygnus Solutions.
The group became known as the Cypherpunks (a cypherpunk is a person who uses encryption when accessing a computer network to ensure privacy, especially from government authorities).
As the group became bigger, they set up a mailing list that would allow them to reach other people globally.
The mailing list grew rapidly and soon had hundreds of subscribers exchanging ideas through encryption methods, such as PGP, to ensure complete privacy.
The basic ideas behind this whole movement can be found in the Cypherpunk manifesto written by Eric Hughes in 1993.
The manifesto is believed to include the first discussion of an anonymous transacting system or cryptocurrency as it’s known today.
The manifesto reads: “When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am.
“When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees.
“Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems.
“Until now, cash has been the primary such system.
“An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system.
“An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.”
The first attempt at an anonymous transacting system was then made by Adam Back in 1997 when he created Hashcash.
At first, it was an anti-spam mechanism which added a time and computational power cost to sending emails, making the sending of spam uneconomical.
A sender had to prove they had expended computational power to create a stamp in the header of an email before they were able to send it – similar to the proof of work (POW) used in Bitcoin.
Then a year later Wei Dai published a proposal for B-Money.
His proposal included two methods of maintaining the transaction data.
Method one was every participant in the network would have a separate database of how much money belongs to users.
Option two was all records were kept by a specific group of users who were incentivised to be honest because they’d deposited their own money into an account and would lose it they’re not.
This method became known as proof of stake (POS) and the group of users would lose all the funds they have staked if they attempt to process any fraudulent transaction.
Many cryptocurrencies now use this method of transaction verification due to its efficiency.
In 2004, Hal Finney created Reusable Proofs of Work which took inspiration from Backs’ Hashcash.
In 2005 Nick Szabo published a proposal for Bitgold which built on the ideas developed by Hal Finney and other projects.
Then in October 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown individual or group, sent a paper to the cypherpunk mailing list at metzdowd.com called: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
The paper referenced B-money and Hashcash and addressed many of the problems that the earlier developers faced including the risk that a single token is used multiple times to purchase goods.
Nakamoto mined the first block of Bitcoin on January 3, 2009.
It’s not commonly known but people have been working tirelessly on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies since the 1990s, starting with Gilmore, Hughes and May.
What is John Gilmore’s net worth?
John Gilmore is believed to be worth around $30 million which is mainly attributed to the sale of Cygnus Solutions.