We were cypherpunks. Well, in truth, with my zero coding skills I was never more than a hanger-on, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s I spent more time than was healthy lurking on internet communities of people who believed that cryptography would render obsolete the institutions of society. Banks, governments, even laws, would be unnecessary in a world of autonomous individuals engaging in peer-to-peer transactions secured by technology based on the uncanny asymmetry of sums involving very large prime numbers*.
'We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence,' thundered one of the movement's founders, Eric Hughes, in the 1993 Cypherpunk's Manifesto.
Hughes' scepticism was undoubtedly justified, but any hope that the crypto world could manage without real world institutions has been confounded by the sheer weight of litigation surrounding the movement's highest profile creation, the trillion-dollar bitcoin peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. One indicator: my hot-off-the-press copy of Legal Aspects of Cryptocurrency in the UK (Bloomsbury Professional) runs to 325 pages with index.
And it was the staid procedures of the High Court of England and Wales which yesterday resolved one of the most bitter controversies in the cyphersphere, the claim by Australian born and British resident Dr Craig Wright to be 'Satoshi Nakamoto', bitcoin's mysterious originator.
The trial attracted worldwide attention and, to the surprise of many, showed the England and Wales justice system at its best. Wright's claim, which he has pursued with vigorous litigation in at least three jurisdictions, was systematically destroyed with a meticulous presentation of forgery evidence. This included demonstrating that documents presented by Wright as work leading up to the 2008 bitcoin white paper were written with software that was not available at the time.
The cross examinations, including of Wright himself, who has an autism spectrum condition, were conducted with courtesy and without theatrics. Proceedings ticked along more or less to timetable, with all parties' electronic bundles seeming to behave themselves - on the days I attended, at least.
An even bigger surprise was that the court systems, with the exception of the air conditioning in Court 30 at the top of the Rolls Building, worked well. This included the audiovisual and data links to the overspill court and a worldwide audience of crypto-geeks.
All this happened under the cheerful avuncular gaze of Mr Justice Mellor from his standing desk. The clearly tech-literate judge confounded the expectations of at least one crypto blogger by not being a doddering incompetent stuck in the last century. He wasn't even wigged.
Most creditable of all was his bold and unexpected decision yesterday, after two days of closing submissions, to announce the bones of his ruling right away. Finding that the evidence brought by a consortium of US software developers to be 'overwhelming', Mellor went on to make 'certain declarations which I am satisfied are useful and are necessary to do justice between the parties'. In four crisp sentences, he then demolished Wright's claim to be 'Satoshi'.
For what happens next, we must await the written judgment, which could well contain references to perjury. There is also of course the possibility of appeal applications - Wright is apparently a wealthy man and his case has been backed by Antigua based online gambling billionaire Calvin Ayre.
As for bitcoin, it continues to ride high in value, presumably buoyed by the prospect of next month's 'halving', a regular reduction of the rate new coins can be mined on the way to the system's theoretical maximum of 21 million.
As we used to enjoy saying in the cypherpunk days, there are a lot of big numbers out there.
*It is a trivial task for a computer to multiply two numbers, even very very large ones; the reverse process, factoring, can't be done without trial and error. This is the basis of so-called dual key encryption, which secures electronic communications today.
Michael Cross is the Gazette news editor. He does not knowingly hold any position in bitcoin or other cryptoassets.
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