Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 15

In the mid-1990s, people were streaming online and for various reasons many didn’t want to, or couldn’t, use credit cards (see preceding section). Checks were even more difficult (unless you wanted to mail it), and cash was out of the question. (Though — and here’s a joke for the older geeks among you — I do recall a friend telling me to UUENCODE the $10 I owed him and email it to him. Again, this is Peter talking; I’m betting Tyler is too young to know what UUENCODE is.)

But back in 1983, a guy called David Chaum had written a paper called “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Transactions.” Chaum was a cryptographer (someone who works with cryptography) and professor of computer science. His paper described a way to use cryptography to create a digital-cash system that could enable anonymous transactions, just like cash. (Modern cryptography is the science of securing online communications; we’ll come back to this later.) In fact, Chaum is often referred to as the Father of Digital Currency as well as the Father of Online Anonymity.