By Steven Levy - Crypto - Tells The Cypherpunk Story Behind Public-Private Key Cryptography

This is a story about the godfathers of modern cryptography. If you enjoyed Bitcoin books like The Blocksize Wars, or Digital Gold, you will love this one.

Published in 2001, this book may have helped motivate Satoshi Nakamoto in building Bitcoin.

Levy narrates the early "Crypto Wars" with tales of the birth of public key cryptography (Diffie-Hellman, RSA), the clash with government over export controls of cryptography - at the time, designated as a munition of war. Stories on the Clipper Chip, and the rise of PGP - authored by Cypherpunks like Phil Zimmermann. With side quest stories featuring Hal Finney and Adam Back, who ran distributed rainbow table crypto searches for low entropy keys used by Netscape to secure network traffic, insecurely!

There's even a quick mention of cryptographic timestamp server innovation by Haber and Stornetta in this book, which is a fundamental pillar of Bitcoin. (Bitcoin itself is a globally distributed timestamp server). Levy also spotlights legends such as Whitfield Diffie, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and David Chaum (an early "digital cash" visionary).

Bitcoin's ideals rest on the same crypto-libertarian ethos Levy describes: embedding mathematical privacy and trustlessness into internet and personal computing infrastructure for the privacy, protection and freedom of all. Cypherpunk ideology underpins Bitcoin's philosophy - freedom and privacy through code, not just law. In many ways, this book is part of Bitcoin's legacy.

The achievements of the Cypherpunks described in this book are what laid the foundations for Bitcoin to exist in the first place!

Satoshi assembled the Cypherpunk cryptography toolkit into a censorship-resistant, self-reinforcing monetary system. Thus, Bitcoin is arguably one of the ultimate realizations of the Cypherpunk manifesto: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

Levy's "Crypto" is essential cultural and technical background for any student of Bitcoin. It tells the story of how individuals, real salt of the earth smart freedom loving people, and math geeks, fought to make cryptography widely available and embed privacy into our everyday life for free. While the book predates Bitcoin, it explains the Cypherpunk ideological DNA from Diffie-Hellman → Chaum → Zimmermann → Cypherpunks like Time May → Satoshi.

From a Bitcoiner's view, this book is not just a part of our heritage. But Our Legacy!

For more Bitcoin Books, see my recommended reading list here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c5fjhn/advanced_bitcoin_reading_list_curriculum_in_order