As his Hungarian parents had fled post-war Soviet regime to settle in the United States, Nick Szabo came to call the Californian Bay area of the 1990s his home. Here, he was among the first to frequent the in-person “Cypherpunk” meetings organized by Timothy May, Eric Hughes and other founding members of the collective of cryptographers, programmers and privacy activists centered around the ’90s mailing list of the same name.
Like the other Cypherpunks, Szabo was concerned with the receding guarantees of privacy in an upcoming digital age and took action to stem the tide where he could. For example, on the Cypherpunks mailing list, Szabo led opposition to the “Clipper chip[1],” a proposed chip that would have been embedded in phones, allowing the NSA to listen into calls. Szabo had a particular knack for explaining the risks of such privacy infringements in a way that resonated with non-technical people, sometimes giving talks on the topic or even handing out flyers. (The chip would eventually be rejected by manufacturers and consumers.)
But like the more libertarian-oriented Cypherpunks, Szabo’s interest in digital privacy was part of a bigger picture — it was not just about privacy alone. Inspired by Timothy May’s vision as laid out in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto[2], Szabo saw the potential to create a “Galt’s Gulch” in cyberspace: a domain where individuals could trade freely, as described libertarian author Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. The pseudo-physics force field of the story, May and Szabo believed, could be substituted with the recently invented magic of public key cryptography.
“If we step back and look at what many cypherpunks are trying to achieve, a major idealistic theme is a Ghandian cyberspace where violence can only be make-believe, whether in Mortal Komat
