Interview with Timothy May, Author of "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto": Crypto-Nihilism 2018
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Interview with Timothy May, Author of "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto": Crypto-Nihilism 2018
Enough with these "ICO—so exciting—get rich quick—buy luxury cars" cryptocurrencies!
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Timothy C. May
Translation: Jumps, LXDAO
01 Translator’s Preface
I chose this article because of its discussion on "crypto nihilism." A cypherpunk comment from 2018 still feels relevant in 2024. ICOs have turned into memes, and scams no longer require sophisticated designs; mainstream investment firms and presidential campaigns pump up coin prices, while crypto is supposedly no longer young.
I still don’t know what a cypherpunk is, or what crypto nihilism means. “There are many tyrants out there”—no need to remember this, because it’s how we live every day. Fortunately, seeing others working hard to overcome this gives me confidence to keep exploring and pushing myself.
02 Main Content
What did the legendary cypherpunk Timothy May think about the Bitcoin white paper? Keep the text, discard the parasites.
CoinDesk invited Timothy May, legendary cypherpunk and author of the “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” to share his thoughts on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Bitcoin white paper.
His reply was a 30-page critical essay elaborating on what he sees as an industry detached from reality.
For clarity, the original message is presented here in a fictional Q&A format. Otherwise, the content remains unchanged.
CoinDesk: Now that Bitcoin has become a historic event, where do you think the white paper stands in the hall of fame for advances in financial cryptography?
Timothy May:
First, I should say that over the past 10 years, I’ve followed Bitcoin and all its variants with a mix of interest, some amusement, and a great deal of frustration.
In the hall of fame, it deserves a front-row seat—possibly the most important development since double-entry bookkeeping.
I can’t speak for Satoshi, but I’m certain he never imagined Bitcoin exchanges would be subject to strict rules about KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti-Money Laundering), passports, account freezes, and legal requirements to report “suspicious activities” to local police. All this noise around “governance,” “regulation,” and “blockchain” could very well create a surveillance state, an archive society.
Satoshi would vomit. Or at least commit himself to developing alternatives to the Bitcoin he first described in 2008–2009. I can’t applaud the current state of affairs or write puff pieces about the great things already accomplished.
Certainly, Bitcoin and its variants—several forks and numerous altcoin spin-offs—operate more or less as originally intended. Bitcoins can be bought or mined, sent quickly in various ways with minimal fees, received by someone who can then sell them within minutes, sometimes even faster.
No permission required, no central authority, not even trust between parties, and bitcoins can be acquired and held for years.
But the tsunami sweeping through finance has also left behind much chaos and destruction. The debris of intellectual earthquakes, failed experiments, Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” It’s not ready for prime time. Who would expect one’s mother to “download the latest client on GitHub, compile it on one of these platforms, reset parameters using the terminal?”
What I see are losses of hundreds of millions in assets due to programming errors, theft, fraud, and initial coin offerings (ICOs) based on bad ideas, poorly coded, and lacking enough geniuses to pull off grand visions.
If this disrupts the narrative, sorry. But I think the narrative is flawed. Satoshi did something great, but the story is far from over. He/she/it even acknowledged that the 2008 version of Bitcoin wasn’t some final answer handed down from the gods.
CoinDesk: Do you think others in the cypherpunk community agree with your views? What attracts people to this industry—or kills their interest?
Timothy May:
Frankly, the novelty in Satoshi’s white paper (and later uses like Silk Road) attracted many into the Bitcoin world. If the project had been about “regulatory compliance” or “bank-friendly” features, interest would have been minimal. (In fact, earlier there were some dull electronic transfer projects. “SET (Secure Electronic Transfer)” was one such snooze-fest.)
It had no interesting innovations—99% legal jargon. Cypherpunks ignored it.
Indeed, when the field of “financial cryptography” truly took off, some of us were present. Aside from the work of David Chaum, Stu Haber, Scott Stornetta, and a few others, most academic cryptographers focused primarily on the mathematics of cryptography and hadn’t yet paid much attention to the “financial” side.
That certainly changed over the last decade. Thousands have poured into Bitcoin and blockchain, with major conferences almost every week. Most may be interested in what roughly began as the “Bitcoin era” around 2008–2010, but there are important prehistories before that.
History is a natural way people understand things… it tells a story, a linear narrative.
I won’t speculate too much about the future. From 1988 to 1998, I expressed thoughts on some “obvious” consequences stemming from the “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” of 1988 and the cypherpunk mailing list that began in 1992.
CoinDesk: So you’re saying Bitcoin hasn’t truly lived up to its ideals, or that the Bitcoin community hasn’t stayed true to its cypherpunk roots.
Timothy May:
Yes, I think the greed, hype, and noise about “to the moon!” and “HODL” represent the biggest wave of hype I’ve ever seen.
This isn’t just Dutch tulip-style price surges—it’s hundreds of companies, thousands of participants, endless media coverage, and hero worship. It exceeds the hype we saw during the dot-com bubble. I think speeches at conferences, white papers, and press releases receive far too much promotion, far too much “showbiz” is going on.
People and companies are scrambling for territory, some even filing dozens or hundreds of patents on obvious variations of basic concepts, even though these topics were widely discussed in the 1990s. I hope the patent system rejects some of these (though probably only when big players enter legal battles).
The tension between privacy (or anonymity) and “know your customer” methods is one core issue. It’s the clash between “decentralized, anarchic, peer-to-peer” and “centralized, permissioned, backdoored.” Understand that many in the privacy community—the cypherpunks, Satoshi, other pioneers—had a clear vision: a permissionless, peer-to-peer money transfer system, some envisioning it replacing “fiat” currency.
One key pioneer, David Chaum, was highly prescient about “buyer anonymity.” For example, a large store could receive payment without knowing the buyer’s identity. (This is clearly not the case today—Walmart, Costco, etc., record customer purchases in detail, which police investigators can buy or subpoena. In some countries, even more insidious methods are used.)
Remember, there are many reasons buyers may not want to reveal purchase preferences. But both buyers and sellers need protection from tracking: in many countries, sellers of contraceptive information may face greater risks than those merely purchasing it. There’s also blasphemy, offense against religion, history, law, and political activism. Approaches like Digicash focused on buyer anonymity (e.g., shoppers at stores or drivers on toll roads) but missed a key factor: most sellers are tracked due to their speech or politics.
Fortunately, buyers and sellers are essentially isomorphic—just reverse some arrows (“first-class objects”). What Satoshi basically did was resolve the tension of trackable “buyers”/“sellers” by making neither identifiable. Obviously imperfect, which is why so much follow-up activity continues.
CoinDesk: So you’re saying innovators in cryptocurrency need to resist existing powers rather than cooperate with them to achieve real innovation?
Timothy May:
Yes, if cryptocurrencies just become another PayPal or bank transfer system, it wouldn’t mean much to many. The excitement lies in bypassing gatekeepers, toll collectors, and intermediaries—who decide whether organizations like WikiLeaks can receive donations or whether people can send money abroad.
Trying to be “regulator-friendly” will likely kill the main uses of cryptocurrency—uses that go beyond “another form of PayPal or Visa.”
The broader use of “blockchain” technology is another matter. Many applications may be regulatory-compliant. Of course, many proposed uses—like putting supply chain records or whatever onto public or private blockchains—are uninteresting. Many point out these “distributed ledgers” aren’t even new inventions, just variants of databases with backups. Also naive to think companies want to publicly disclose contracts, material purchases, shipping dates, etc.
Remember, excitement about Bitcoin stemmed mainly from bypassing control, enabling novel uses like Silk Road. It was cool, edgy—not just another PayPal.
CoinDesk: So you’re saying we should think outside the box, creatively apply technology in new ways, instead of just reshaping what we already know?
Timothy May:
People should do what interests them. That’s how most innovations—BitTorrent, mixnets, Bitcoin—came about. So I’m not sure “trying to think in all kinds of ways” is the best phrasing. My intuition is ideologically driven people do interesting things. Corporate-minded people may perform poorly at “thinking in all kinds of ways.”
Money is speech. Checks, promissory notes, delivery contracts, hawala banks—all have served as forms of money. Nick Szabo pointed out Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies possess most, if not all, of gold’s properties—and more: no weight, hard to steal or seize, transmittable over the crudest wires in minutes, unlike gold bars requiring long-haul flights.
Yet paper bills, coins, or seemingly formal checks aren’t sacred. These are “centralized” systems relying on “trusted third parties” like banks or nation-states, whose value is guaranteed by law or royal decree.
By contrast, sending Bitcoin is equivalent to “saying” a number (mathematically more complex, but roughly so). Banning the utterance of a number is akin to banning speech. This doesn’t mean the tech can’t be stopped. There was “printing PGP code,” or Cody Wilson’s Defense Distributed, where appellate courts ruled—printed text rarely falls outside First Amendment protections.
CoinDesk: Isn’t that a good example? If we’re rebuilding entire or partial economies on blockchains, don’t we need some censorship (ability to enforce laws)?
Timothy May:
There will inevitably be some contact with legal systems in the U.S. or elsewhere. Slogans like “code is law” are mostly aspirational, not actual.
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