What happened before bitcoin?
1929: Box tops were coupons that were printed directly onto product packages that could be later redeemed for premiums or rewards. Betty Crocker introduced their box top program in 1929, laying the framework for loyalty programs as we know them today.
1949: The theory that underlies computer viruses was first made public in 1949, when computer pioneer John von Neumann presented a paper titled “Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata.”
1950: The origins of cyberpunk are rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement [1960–1970]. New Wave authors attempted to present a world where society coped with a constant upheaval of new technology and culture, generally with dystopian outcomes.
1976: In 1976, an asymmetric key cryptosystem was published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman who, influenced by Ralph Merkle’s work on public key distribution, disclosed a method of public key agreement. This method of key exchange, which uses exponentiation in a finite field, came to be known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. This was the first published practical method for establishing a shared secret-key over an authenticated (but not confidential) communications channel without using a prior shared secret. Merkle’s “public key-agreement technique” became known as Merkle’s Puzzles.
1980: Cyberpunk is a science fiction short story and novel written by Bruce Bethke in 1980, published November 1983 in Amazing Stories magazine.
How did I actually create the word? The way any new word comes into being, I guess: through synthesis. I took a handful of roots — cyber, techno, et al — mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out the various combinations until one just plain sounded right.
1982: eCash software on the user’s local computer stored money in a digital format, cryptographically signed by a bank. The user could spend the digital money at any shop accepting eCash, without having to open an account with the vendor first, or transmitting credit card numbers. Security was ensured by public key digital signature schemes. The RSA blind signatures achieved unlinkability between withdrawal and spend transactions. Depending on the payment transactions, one distinguishes between on-line and off-line electronic cash: If the payee has to contact a third party (e.g., the bank or the credit-card company acting as an acquirer) before accepting a payment, the system is called an on-line system
1983: Bethke says he made two lists of words, one for technology, one for troublemakers, and experimented with combining them variously into compound words, consciously attempting to coin a term that encompassed both punk attitudes and high technology.
The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly “speaking computer.”
During the same time, The video game crash of 1983 (known as the Atari shock in Japan) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985, primarily in North America, because of market saturation. Revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent). The crash was a serious event that brought an abrupt end to what is retrospectively considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America. At the smae time study of distributed computing became its own branch of computer science in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
1990: On 12 November 1990 to build a “Hypertext project” called “WorldWideWeb” (one word) as a “web” of “hypertext documents” to be viewed by “browsers” using a client–server architecture.
1991: In 1991 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication was developed by Phil Zimmermann.
1995:Bookending the Cyberpunk era, Bethke himself published a novel in 1995
…full of young guys with no social lives, no sex lives and no hope of ever moving out of their mothers’ basements … They’re total wankers and losers who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to dialing up the scatophilia forum and downloading a few disgusting pictures. You know, cyberpunks.”
Cyberpunk can be intended to disquiet readers and call them to action. It often expresses a sense of rebellion, suggesting that one could describe it as a type of culture revolution in science fiction.
In the words of author and critic David Brin:
…a closer look at cyberpunk authors reveals that they nearly always portray future societies in which governments have become wimpy and pathetic …Popular science fiction tales by Gibson, Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite.
Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The earliest descriptions of a global communications network came long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, though not before traditional science-fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and some social commentators such as James Burke began predicting that such networks would eventually form.
Crypto++ (also known as CryptoPP, libcrypto++, and libcryptopp) is a free and open source C++ class libraryof cryptographic algorithms and schemes written by Wei Dai.
1997: Hashcash is a proof-of-work algorithm that requires a selectable amount of work to compute, but the proof can be verified efficiently. For email uses, a textual encoding of a hashcash stamp is added to the header of an email to prove the sender has expended a modest amount of CPU time calculating the stamp prior to sending the email. In other words, as the sender has taken a certain amount of time to generate the stamp and send the email, it is unlikely that they are a spammer. The receiver can, at negligible computational cost, verify that the stamp is valid. However, the only known way to find a header with the necessary properties is brute force, trying random values until the answer is found; though testing an individual string is easy, if satisfactory answers are rare enough it will require a substantial number of tries to find the answer.
The hypothesis is that spammers, whose business model relies on their ability to send large numbers of emails with very little cost per message, will cease to be profitable if there is even a small cost for each spam they send. Receivers can verify whether a sender made such an investment and use the results to help filter email.
1998: Hawaiian resident Bernard von NotHaus dabbled in a fledgling form of currency called “Liberty Dollars” to disastrous results: He was charged with violating federal law and sentenced to six months of house arrest, along with a three-year probation.
B-money was an early proposal created by Wei Dai for an “anonymous, distributed electronic cash system”.
Satoshi Nakamoto referenced b-money when creating Bitcoin. In his essay, published on the cypherpunks mailing-list in November 1998, Dai proposed two protocols. The first protocol is impractical as it requires a broadcast channel that is unjammable as well being synchronous.
In the first protocol in the essay, the use of a proof of work function is proposed as a means of creating money. Dai’s B-Money was proposed in the context of cypherpunks mailing-list discussions relating to possible applications of Hashcash, the first symmetric proof-of-work function, which was itself also published on the same mailing-list, the previous year — May 1997. (Like the B-money proposal, bitcoin itself also uses the hashcash cost-function as the proof-of-work during coin minting). In B-Money, money is transferred by broadcasting the transaction to all participants, all of whom keep accounts of all others. Contracts can be made with possible reparation in case of default, with a third party agreeing to be the arbitrator. If there is no agreement, each party broadcasts arguments or evidence in its favor and each of the participants determines the reparations/fines in his accounts for himself.
The second protocol has only a subset of the participants (the “servers”) keeping accounts, which they have to publish, and the participants who do transactions verifying their balances by asking many of them. The participants also verify that the money supply is not being inflated. An amount of money as bail is required to become a server, which is lost if the server is found to be dishonest.
An alternate method of creating money is proposed, via an auction where participants bid on the solution of computational problems of known complexity.
In 1998, Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency he called “bit gold”.
1999: GnuPG encrypts messages using asymmetric key pairs individually generated by GnuPG users. The resulting public keys may be exchanged with other users in a variety of ways, such as Internet key servers. They must always be exchanged carefully to prevent identity spoofing by corrupting public key ↔ “owner” identity correspondences. It is also possible to add a cryptographic digital signature to a message, so the message integrity and sender can be verified, if a particular correspondence relied upon has not been corrupted. GnuPG does not use patented or otherwise restricted software or algorithms. Instead, GnuPG uses a variety of other, non-patented algorithms.
2001: The term, “Deep Web,” was coined in 2001 by BrightPlanet, an Internet search technology company that specializes in searching deep Web content.
Military origins of Deep Web — Like other areas of the Internet, the Deep Web began to grow with help from the U.S. military, which sought a way to communicate with intelligence assets and Americans stationed abroad without being detected. Paul Syverson, David Goldschlag and Michael Reed, mathematicians at the Naval Research Laboratory, began working on the concept of “onion routing” in 1995. Their research soon developed into The Onion Router project, better known as Tor, in 1997. The U.S. Navy released the Tor code to the public in 2004, and in 2006 a group of developers formed the Tor Project and released the service currently in use.
2002: Scottish computer hacker Gary McKinnon gained access to 97 American military networks between 2001 and 2002, even leaving the military a message on its website: “Your security is crap.” His hack has been called the “biggest military computer hack of all time.”
2003: The hacktivist group Anonymous was formed.
Long-standing political question that has gone unanswered with often tragic consequences for social movements. This is an Internet-based, non-extremist, socialist community movement that looks for answers to questions that are unanswered.
“Broadly speaking, Anons oppose Internet censorship and control, and the majority of their actions target governments, organizations, and corporations that they accuse of censorship.”
Because Anonymous has no leadership, no action can be attributed to the membership as a whole. The group’s few rules include not disclosing one’s identity, not talking about the group, and not attacking media. Members commonly use the tagline
“We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
2004: Counter-Strike was first launched on November 1, 2004. What’s so difference between other games and counter-strike. Counter-strike unlike any other computer games of those times had the capabilities to create a separate private PAN(Private Area Network) for inviting fellow gamers to join in and play along side. Gaming started its journey to grow beyond and evolve into a new market.
2005: In the United Kingdom losses from web banking fraud — mostly from phishing — almost doubled to GB£23.2m in 2005, from GB£12.2m in 2004, while 1 in 20 computer users claimed to have lost out to phishing in 2005. Similarly, when the first spate of phishing attacks hit the Irish Republic’s banking sector in September 2006, the Bank of Ireland initially refused to cover losses suffered by its customers.
2006: Banks dispute with customers over phishing losses. The stance adopted by the UK banking body APACS is that “customers must also take sensible precautions … so that they are not vulnerable to the criminal.” Phishers are targeting the customers of banks and online payment services. Emails, supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service.
2007: The Storm botnet’s operators control the system via peer-to-peer techniques, making external monitoring and disabling of the system more difficult.There is no central “command-and-control point” in the Storm botnet that can be shut down.The botnet also makes use of encrypted traffic. Efforts to infect computers usually revolve around convincing people to download e-mail attachments which contain the virus through subtle manipulation. In one instance, the botnet’s controllers took advantage of the National Football League’s opening weekend, sending out mail offering “football tracking programs” which did nothing more than infect a user’s computer.
