Timothy C. May

Timothy C. May was born on December 21, 1951, in Bethesda, MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry; the Engineering and Technology History Wiki biography states that he grew up in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry and France. Reason’s obituary gives the same birth date in its correction note.⁠[1][2]

Reason’s obituary states that he grew up in a suburb of San Diego until his family moved to Washington, D.C., when his father, a naval officer, was transferred; at 12, at his father’s urging, he joined a local gun club.⁠[2]

The same obituary describes him as a loner, a science prodigy and a voracious reader of science fiction; in the summer of 1967, as he was entering his junior year of high school, he picked up a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.⁠[2]

The Engineering and Technology History Wiki biography states that he attended the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara on a Regents Scholarship and received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1974. Reason’s obituary states that he also took graduate physics classes there.⁠[1][2]

The Engineering and Technology History Wiki biography states that he joined Intel in 1974, intending to try solid state physics for a while, and from 1974 to 1976 studied the reliability physics of MOS chips, especially problems tied to the high-temperature glass sealing of NMOS RAMs; the biography states that he was a staff engineer in Intel’s Memory Products Division in Aloha, OregonOregonOregon (officially the State of Oregon) is a state on the Pacific coast of the western United States; its capital is Salem and its largest city is Portland. It was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, as the 33rd state. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 4,237,256.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

The Engineering and Technology History Wiki biography states that in February 1977 he found that trace radioactive elements in device packages caused random, single-bit “soft errors,” and then identified the cause as alpha particles passing through memory storage nodes; he continued to research the problem thereafter.⁠[1]

His paper with Murray Woods, “Alpha-particle-induced soft errors in dynamic memories,” appeared in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, volume 26, issue 1, pages 2–9, in January 1979. Its abstract states that uranium and thorium are present at parts-per-million levels in packaging materials, and that an alpha particle emitted by their decay can, on penetrating the die surface, create enough electron-hole pairs near a storage node to cause a random, single-bit error; the paper reports experiments and measurements of the alpha activity of materials, develops a physical model of the soft error, and discusses the implications for the future of dynamic memories.⁠[3][4]

The Register states that at Intel he solved the problem of bit-flipping caused by alpha particles and that he and Murray Woods received the annual W.R.G. Baker Prize of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for the paper. The Engineering and Technology History Wiki biography states that co-authored papers of his received Best Paper and Outstanding Paper awards at the 1978 and 1979 International Reliability Physics Symposiums, respectively, and that he shares a device patent on using semiconductor potential barriers to reduce soft error rates.⁠[4][1]

Reason’s obituary states that he retired from Intel in 1986, at the age of 34, cashing in his stock options, and never had to work again. In a 2018 piece for CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry he referred to this retirement with thanks for the “100-fold increase” in the stock price; The Register states that the hundredfold increase in his Intel stock options gave him more time to devote to writing.⁠[2][5][4]

A 2020 article in Reason states that in 1986 a friend gave him a photocopy of Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names, and that he combined its “Other Plane” with the “Galt’s Gulch” of Atlas Shrugged, with cryptography providing protective cover.⁠[6]

Reason’s obituary states that he was struck by David ChaumDavid ChaumDavid Chaum is a cryptographer who introduced mix networks, blind signatures and the electronic cash system eCash, initiated the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and founded DigiCash in Amsterdam; he later developed voter-verifiable voting systems and leads the blockchain project xx network.Open the full entry’s 1985 article on untraceable payments, which he called “an epiphany”; he saw Chaum’s scheme as “deeply flawed” but became convinced that a decentralized, non-governmental digital money system was possible. The article adds that he came to believe that public-key cryptography combined with networked computing would break apart social power structures, and he compared the resulting virtual space to the “Galt’s Gulch” of Atlas Shrugged. CoinDesk’s obituary states that after retiring from Intel he was influenced by David Chaum’s early work on cryptocurrency.⁠[2][7]

A 2020 article in Reason states that in 1987 he belonged to a small community of science fiction–obsessed West Coast technologists interested in a decentralized, global information network; in December 1987 his friend Chip Morningstar, a computer scientist, introduced him to the economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin. He drove to Redwood City, California, to hear Salin’s pitch for the American Information Exchange (AMIX); the article describes AMIX as one of the first e-commerce startups, started by Salin in 1986 and envisioned as a global marketplace for buying and selling local expertise.⁠[6][2]

The article states that he grasped the AMIX idea at once but found it dull, saying that people would not be selling meaningless stuff “like surfboard recommendations”; he did not consider AMIX a scam but did not expect it to change society much. He suggested that Salin turn AMIX into an anonymous market for trade secrets, “such as plans for that B-1 Bomber” or a process for a technology, and in a pretend advertisement called the idea “BlackNet,” which would make nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like “relics of the pre-cyberspace era.” In personal notes written after the meeting he described BlackNet as a “technological means of undermining all governments”; he shared these notes with Reason before his death.⁠[6]

Reason’s obituary states that this meeting led him to develop the concept of “crypto anarchy”; its correction note clarifies that the account of the 1987 conversation is May’s own paraphrase.⁠[2]

Reason’s obituary states that in September 1988 he wrote “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” on his Macintosh Plus in about an hour and a half; it ran 497 words and was his most influential writing. In his 2018 piece for CoinDesk he also wrote that he wrote the manifesto in 1988.⁠[2][5]

The manifesto opens with “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” It states that public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems and software protocols for interaction, authentication and verification will allow individuals and groups to communicate and interact in a totally anonymous manner, and it names technologies such as high-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers and encryption chips. It predicts that the State will try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, pointing to national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration; it argues that just as barbed wire, a seemingly minor invention, made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms and forever altered the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, a seemingly minor discovery out of “an arcane branch of mathematics” will become the wire clippers that dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property. It closes: “Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!”⁠[8]

The Register quotes him calling the manifesto “a pastiche of the Communist Manifesto” and states that it defined the contours and flavour of the later Cypherpunks mailing list.⁠[4]

In his 2018 piece for CoinDesk he recalled that around that time he met Eric Hughes, who visited his place near Santa Cruz, and that the two hatched a plan to call together some of the brightest people they knew to talk about these subjects; they met in Hughes’s newly rented house in the Oakland Hills in the late summer of 1992, and at that first meeting he passed out Monopoly money he had bought at a toy store.⁠[5]

In the same piece he recalled that they started to meet monthly, at times more often, that a mailing list rapidly formed, and that John GilmoreJohn GilmoreJohn Gilmore is an American programmer, entrepreneur and civil libertarian, an early employee of Sun Microsystems and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cygnus Support and the Cypherpunks; in 1998 he led EFF’s construction of the DES Cracker, which broke DES encryption.Open the full entry and Hugh Daniel hosted it.⁠[5]

Accounts of the founders differ. The Register states that the mailing list started in September 1992, that its three founders were May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, that John Gilmore hosted the list server, and that May was described as its “in-house theoretician”; CoinDesk’s obituary quotes Lucky Green as saying that he co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list in 1992 with Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, and Green called it “perhaps the single most effective pro-cryptography grassroots organization in history.” Reason’s obituary states instead that in September 1992 May and his friends Eric Hughes and Hugh Daniel came up with the idea of the mailing list.⁠[4][7][2]

Reason’s obituary states that about a hundred people subscribed within days of the launch, that the list had about 2,000 subscribers by 1997, and that May was its most prolific contributor.⁠[2]

Reason’s obituary states that he and Eric Hughes, along with the free speech activist John Gilmore, wore masks on the cover of the second issue of Wired, which accompanied a profile by Steven LevySteven LevySteven Levy is an American technology journalist and author, editor at large at Wired, who has written about the digital revolution and the people behind it for almost four decades; his books include Hackers, Crypto and In the Plex.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

His paper “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities” is dated December 1994. It defines crypto anarchy as “the cyberspatial realization of anarcho-capitalism” and explains that the “anarchy” means the absence of government, not lawlessness or chaos; it states that data havens and information markets are already springing up and can be used for the storage and marketing of controversial information, and that untraceable, anonymous digital cash is also coming, although digital money is “probably the weakest link at this point.” The paper calls Vernor Vinge’s True Names “prophetic” and credits David Chaum’s role in defining the key concepts.⁠[9]

The Register states that by the time the list changed servers in 2001, John Gilmore declared it dead. Reason’s obituary states that the list lost readers and influence after September 11, 2001; its correction note clarifies that the list “wasn’t dissolved after 9/11.”⁠[4][2]

Andrew Orlowski, the author of The Register’s article, wrote that he attended the list’s tenth anniversary at May’s house in Corralitos, California, near Santa Cruz.⁠[4]

A Bitcoin Magazine article of September 28, 2016, lists May among the speakers at that year’s Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis (HCPP16), where he was to reflect on “30 years of crypto-anarchy”; Pavol Lupták of the congress introduced him as the technical and political writer who “probably coined the term ‘crypto-anarchy’” and said that “May’s crazy predictions and visions are now coming true.” The same article credits him with the phrase “The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.”⁠[10]

Reason’s obituary states that in 2017 he saw the world heading toward one of two outcomes, Leviathan or an “anarchic-type system,” with nothing in between.⁠[2]

On October 19, 2018, CoinDesk published a piece under his byline, “Enough with the ICO-Me-So-Horny-Get-Rich-Quick-Lambo Crypto.” The editor’s introduction states that CoinDesk had asked him for his views on the tenth anniversary of the BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry white paper, that his reply was a “sprawling 30-page evisceration” of an industry he considered disconnected from reality, and that it was presented as a fictional Q&A for clarity.⁠[5]

In the piece he wrote that Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, released the first Bitcoin software and launched the blockchain in 2009, and stopped public activity around 2011; the person’s true identity has never been confirmed.Open the full entry’s white paper “deserves a front-rank place,” but doubted that Satoshi Nakamoto would have wanted exchanges with draconian rules about “KYC, AML, passports,” saying “I think Satoshi would barf”; he also said that “the story is far from over.”⁠[5]

He warned that current trends could produce “a surveillance state, a dossier society,” argued that under “know your customer” rules crypto monetary transfers would not be like ordinary cash transactions, or even wire transfers, today, opposed an “Internet driver’s license” style of identity credential, and wrote that China already uses massive databases to compile citizen trustworthiness ratings while social media firms are helping to build “the machinery of the Dossier Society.”⁠[5]

Looking back, he wrote that his friend Nick SzaboNick SzaboNick Szabo is an American computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer who developed the term and concept of smart contracts and in 1998 conceived bit gold, a design for digital money often described as a precursor of Bitcoin; he has repeatedly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, and in January 2025 he became chief scientist of JAN3.Open the full entry had mentioned some of the topics around 2006–2008 and that his own reaction to the white paper Satoshi Nakamoto released in 2008 was “only mild interest”; he wrote that Hal FinneyHal FinneyHal Finney (1956–2014) was a software engineer and cryptographer, an early developer of the PGP encryption software, who released the reusable proof-of-work system RPOW in 2004; in January 2009 he ran the Bitcoin software released by Satoshi Nakamoto and received the first Bitcoin transaction.Open the full entry had the first Bitcoin transaction with Satoshi Nakamoto, that when Bitcoin was first being exchanged around 2009–2011 it looked like play money to most people, and that “The infamous pizza purchase shows that most thought of it as basically toy money.” He considered Bitcoin no longer just toy money but not yet a replacement for money, for folding money, and said “I’ve never seen such hype, such mania. Not even during the dot.com bubble.”⁠[5][4]

Jim Epstein, the author of Reason’s obituary, wrote that in his last exchange with May, in November 2018, May said he was done granting interviews with reporters and was burned out on the space.⁠[2]

In December 2018 May died at his home in Corralitos, California. CoinDesk’s obituary states that his friend Lucky Green announced the death on Facebook on a Saturday, saying that May had passed away earlier this week at his home in Corralitos, California, and that Green wrote: “Death appears to be from natural causes pending autopsy.” The Register, in its report of December 17, 2018, wrote that he died of natural causes at his home in California “on Friday.”⁠[7][2][4]

On his age at death, The Register and CoinDesk gave 67; Reason’s obituary first gave 67 and then, in its correction note, changed it to 66 on the basis of his birth date of December 21, 1951, and a 2020 article in Reason also states that he died suddenly in 2018 at the age of 66.⁠[4][7][2][6]

CoinDesk’s obituary states that Lucky Green called him a “dear friend.”⁠[7]

The Register states that in The Cyphernomicon he recounted the list’s origins and noted that Vernor Vinge’s True Names was as much an inspiration as the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. In his December 1994 paper “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities” he wrote that he had also written and compiled a very large FAQ of 1.3 megabytes on these issues, the Cyphernomicon.⁠[4][9]

Reason’s obituary describes him as a deeply private person whose aversion to outside intrusion defined his outlook, and quotes his words as recorded by the journalist Andy Greenberg: “My political philosophy is keep your hands off my stuff.”⁠[2]

Reason’s obituary states that from his boyhood membership in the gun club he became a lifelong collector of firearms; The Register quotes Lucky Green: “Tim leaves behind a very large firearms collection.”⁠[2][4]

Reason’s obituary ends with an epitaph from ancient Roman gravestones that he had quoted: “I was not. I was. I am not. I don’t care.”⁠[2]

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” does not mention Timothy C. May, crypto anarchy or the Cypherpunks in its text or references; its eight references include Wei DaiWei DaiWei Dai is a computer engineer and the original author of the open-source cryptography library Crypto++. In 1998 he proposed b-money, a scheme for anonymous digital money that the Bitcoin paper lists as its first reference, and the smallest unit of ether, the wei, is named after him. He also writes on LessWrong about decision theory and AI safety, and proposed the decision theory that came to be called Updateless Decision Theory.Open the full entry’s b-money, three time-stamping papers by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta (one of them with a third co-author), Adam BackAdam BackAdam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist, the inventor of the proof-of-work system Hashcash, and a co-founder and the chief executive of the Bitcoin technology company Blockstream.Open the full entry’s Hashcash and a paper by Ralph MerkleRalph MerkleRalph Merkle (born 1952) is a cryptographer and nanotechnology researcher regarded as one of the inventors of public-key cryptography: as an undergraduate he devised Merkle’s Puzzles, a method of key exchange over a public channel, and he later worked with Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, with whom he shares the public-key patent; the Merkle tree he proposed is used in the Bitcoin white paper. He has since worked for many years on molecular nanotechnology and is a director of the cryonics organization Alcor.Open the full entry.⁠[11]

Jim Epstein, the author of Reason’s obituary, judges that the core components of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention incubated in the Cypherpunks list’s voluminous technical correspondence; the article states that May himself brought a digital time-stamping system developed by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta to the attention of his fellow cypherpunks, calls it a primitive version of a blockchain, and states that Wei Dai cited May as a major influence when proposing b-money on the list.⁠[2]

Intel: Official website: https://www.intel.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]