Daniel Paramo is an experienced account and business development executive, data scientist, and engineer. A former account executive at Learning Machine and a former business development manager at Bell Helicopter, Daniel has founded several startups in blockchain technology and the sharing economy. He holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington.
In the previous chapter, we presented how the free software and open source communities influenced the emergence of self-sovereign identity (SSI). In this chapter, we explain how SSI also stands on the shoulders of cryptography giants. These cryptography pioneers of the 1970s inspired a movement known as the cypherpunks, which subsequently inspired the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency movement based on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Understanding the cypherpunks—and their unique motivations—sheds light on the larger trend to decentralization, Web 3.0, and SSI.
In his landmark 2001 book Crypto, Steven Levy explains how cryptography in the United States of America evolved over 50 years [1]. What began as a “monopoly” controlled by the National Security Agency (NSA) ended with the progressive dismemberment of that monopoly, led by the academic community—a community in which many of the Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain pioneers were involved.