Chapter 1: The principles of decentralised security

Security is a prerequisite for digital economies as it lays the foundational conditions for trust, exchanges of data and coordination. This chapter provides an intellectual history of digital security, setting out conceptual elements that are fundamental to understanding security in decentralised digital context. It is organised according to three historical eras.1 The first era is defined by the computer hackers of the 1960s, who demonstrated hacking as a counterculture of individual freedom through making and breaking computers. The second era revolves around the public key cryptographers of the 1970s, as well as the Xanadu and American Information Exchange (AMiX) communities of the 1980s, who contributed to early ideas on the development of economic commerce, highlighting the need for secure means of digital exchange. The third era highlights the Cypherpunks of the 1990s, a disparate group of privacy advocates who authored the ‘Cypherpunk Manifesto’ and used computer code and cryptography to build secure, decentralised digital infrastructures. Their aim was to wield the power of cryptography and computers to resist state and corporate surveillance and enable individual autonomy.