Cryptographer David Chaum | Layer Zero

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the cryptography community. Cryptography is, of course, built by code, but is composed by people, and each individual member of the cryptography community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because cryptography is people all the way down, and it always has been.

Now you might have noticed a little difference in that intro, and that's because I have not a member of the crypto community, not a member of the Ethereum community, but a member of the OG cryptography community. And I'll do admit it doesn't make complete sense to say that cryptography is people all the way down because actually cryptography is one of the few things that is strictly math through and through and through. Today on the show, I have on David Chom. If you don't know who that is, you need to do a little homework because we live in an industry that is built upon David Chom's work. He's the founder of Digicash, one of the early experiments into online cash, but mainly one of the big proponents of privacy at all costs, where not just the data about a message is private, but all of the metadata is private too. And I'd like to read a quote out to help emphasize the importance of who David Chom is and what he's done for this industry. This is Chom's warning to the world in 1985, where he talks about the dangers of user data that is building up around computing systems. He says computerization is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used. Already, public and private sector organizations acquire extensive personal information and exchange it amongst themselves. Individuals have no way of knowing if this information is accurate, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate. New and more serious dangers derive from computerized pattern recognition techniques. Even a small group of them tapping into data gathered every day in consumer transactions could secretly conduct mass surveillance, inferring individuals' lifestyles, activities, and associations. The automation of payment and other consumer transactions is expanding these dangers to an unprecedented extent. Projecting this, the vision of these two futures, one built with current technology and one built with decentralized services, David Chom saw that the two approaches appear to hold quite different answers. Large-scale automated transaction systems are imminent. And as the initial choice for their architecture gathers economic and social momentum, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. Whichever approach it prevails, it will likely have a profound and enduring impact on our economic freedom, democracy, and our informational rights. David Trump said this in 1985, before we had surveillance capitalism, before we had Web 2, and before we have the state of, you know, Facebook, Instagram, all this collection of metadata and the reselling to targeted ads and all these other practices that we now deem evil in this world, but we now also have to live with. And so David Trump saw this in 1985, which is one of the reasons why he's such a fantastic character. And he's been dedicating his life to building private cryptographic systems that protect users' data and not just the contents of messages, but all of the data that those messages leak, as in who is the sender, who is the receiver, how big is that message, what time was that message sent.

All of these bits of data that create a Sudoku puzzle that's solvable to track who we live at in the world of what we now call the metaverse, but was previously called just our online footprint. David Chom, his name is on this shirt. If you aren't watching the podcast, this is the cryptographer shirt that we made with Metafactory. It's the shirt with all the cryptographers that this industry is built on. And so I will stop with my gushing and allow this conversation to progress into one of the core cryptographers that this entire crypto industry is built on, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. David Trom, I am so honored to have you on this Layer Zero podcast. Welcome to Bankless.

It's so great to be here with you, David.

So, David, yeah, there was this episode that we did on Bankless a while ago called Before Bitcoin. And it was just a reading of one of my friends' explorations into the early days of cryptography. And I think that's something that this crypto industry really forgets to pay attention to as to the significance of the shoulders of giants that this industry stands on. And so I really want to go and explore that part of crypto's history, like the pre currency side of this industry, going back to our roots and going back to the cryptography side of this industry. Are you ready to go down that journey with me?

Uh-huh. Sure, sure. Yeah, I think you're right. It's something that most people don't

pay enough attention to these days, although

it is a layer

sort of below what we're using today in a sense. But yeah, we can talk about it, sure.

Yeah, and I actually want to start at the very beginning. Cryptography has many different parallels that are less about math, right? Like it's a puzzle, it's a lock that you try and break. I'm wondering when you were growing up as a child, what were like the early indications or characteristics or things that you like to pay attention to that later would be obvious about cryptography?

Love you. Yes, I was uh,

you know, really the truth is that I

appreciated the super strength of secrets.

Hmm.

As a child. Much, yeah. Of course, I was interested in all kinds of security mechanisms and this sort of thing, but

I really had a reverence for how powerful it is if you know something and no one else does.

And I thought that maybe uh there was a way to leverage that to help make the world a better place.

And what were some of those first things that captured your attention

when you were young?

Well, you know, it was a different growing up than a lot of I think

your listeners have, so have had, because you know, there was the anti war movement, and I was uh

You know, very much uh caught up in all that kind of thing. And,

you know, I learned how to program computers by punching the the little squares out of the hollerith cards with a toothpick. Then we give the DAC, and then the weekend, the next week, we'd go to the, you know, back to the science museum, and they'd give us the output from the, you know,

Fortran program, and it would say, you know, invalid punch in column six failed, you know, and it's repeat this process. You know, I was interested in all kinds of things, but

I think the really powerful force in my youth was the idea that the world really needed, it was going to go off in the wrong direction and it really needed some help. And the power of secrecy maybe could be leveraged for that. So that's kind of, you know, they say people know their life story when they're six or something. Have you ever read that? You know, they yeah, so something like that.

What what was the indications that came to you that the world was about to go off the rails, for example?

Well, don't forget, you know, we think that, you know, January 6th was an unprecedented big deal, but when I was growing up, you know, there was uh

The whole Watergate thing. And people found that,

you know, equally shocking. And I think there's a common thread running through

a lot of that stuff. But um,

Mm-hmm.

you know, the war in Vietnam was not really that popular, but it was a pretty tragic thing. And uh

I think it polarized and galvanized, but there were it was a very different era, you know. People were

extremely excited about the future as well, because there was a lot of other vectors besides that when the war and all. But uh

Yeah, the power of uh technology to influence society, you know, was very much uh top of mind. Also with nuclear weapons, for example, in those days and uh,

you know, Cold War and all these things. It was um,

yeah. So, as a someone interested in technology, I could see that this

was something that,

you know, could be used by the powers that be in their standard way of using.

These kind of mechanisms and so on to sort of buttress their position and not really innovatively, or maybe there was a different way through.

Yeah, I'm wondering if you thought about technology back then, back in the 60s, 70s, but also its relationship to politics and institutions. I'm wondering when did you make that connection or did you?

I'm afraid I did. And I got in a little bit of trouble here and there for kind of, you know, doing stuff. And I was also like kind of a student of what the government was doing with technology, you know, and I would call people up and pretend to be like, you know, I don't know, much older than I was and find out all kinds of things. And then

people started like threatening me because they felt that I was, you know, prying into.

Things that that I shouldn't, and so forth. You know, sometimes I'd call these companies and then they would kind of send me over to some other guy who tried to entrap me. You know, he was some kind

of spook that worked there. I mean, this scary stuff like that happened. It was uh

Mm-hmm.

it was a different time, you know. You could order manuals for all kinds of stuff for free, like

how to build an IBM system 360 out of, you know, or how the very sophisticated burglar alarm technology worked, or

all kinds of stuff was a little more available in those days. And uh

Mm-hmm.

So I was interested in all these things,

but with an eye towards seeing how they could be deployed in the people's interests as opposed to institutional interests.

Mm-hmm.

I'd like to jump to your time at Berkeley. What was your major at Berkeley?

Oh, well, you know, I was a graduate student there. I had gotten this like four year graduate fellowship,

Regions four year graduate fellowship, they only gave one every two years and

for UCLA, and I transferred to Berkeley after the first quarter. You know, I was like, I was much happier there. And uh, but most of the people who were doing cryptography there left.

You know, so one guy went to work for the government and another guy went to try to influence government. So, you know, and Merkel had left then and and so on. But um it was fantastic being there. It was the beginning of, you know, my advisor were we ran the Berkeley

Linux, Unix distribution project. And so

my office mate was Eric Schmidt. You know, just the two of us sat in this office looking out at the bell tower, and Bill Joy, for another founder's son, was, you know, kind of around the corner. You know, talked to him a lot and um