About Tim May

May was born December 21, 1951, and grew up in a San Diego suburb before his family relocated to Washington, D.C. when his father, a naval officer, was transferred there. He joined a local gun club at 12 at his father's urging and stayed a lifelong collector. By his own account he was a loner, a science prodigy, and a heavy reader of science fiction — the profile that, decades later, made "write code instead of asking permission" feel like the obvious move rather than a radical one.

The turn toward libertarianism came early and specifically: the summer before his junior year of high school, in 1967, he picked up Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and read it in three straight days. He went on to U.C. Santa Barbara, took graduate physics classes, and from there went straight into semiconductor work at Intel.

May's most cited technical contribution has nothing to do with cryptography: in 1978 he and colleague Murray Woods traced a mysterious source of memory-chip errors to alpha particles emitted by trace radioactive elements inside the chip packaging itself — the "alpha-particle soft-error problem." Their 1979 paper on it won the IEEE's WRG Baker Prize, and the finding became a foundational result in semiconductor reliability engineering.

A hundredfold run-up in Intel's stock through the mid-1980s gave May the option few engineers get: in 1986, at 34, he retired from Intel entirely, cashed in his options, and never had to work again.

The path to the Manifesto ran through a failed pitch. In 1987, May's friend Chip Morningstar introduced him to economist Phil Salin, who was building AMiX, an early online marketplace for information. May thought Salin's e-commerce framing missed the point — he pushed instead toward something closer to a black market for information itself: a system where whistleblowers or leakers could sell secrets untraceably. He'd later flesh this idea out as "BlackNet." But he saw the flaw immediately: none of it worked without untraceable payment, and ordinary payment rails could always be traced back to a person.

Digging for an answer, May found a 1985 Communications of the ACM cover story by cryptographer David Chaum on using cryptography to make digital transactions untraceable. He called it an epiphany — "like standing on top of the mountain." Chaum's specific scheme didn't fully convince him, but the underlying idea did: public-key cryptography, combined with networked computing, could dismantle existing social and financial power structures. In September 1988, May sat down at his Macintosh Plus for about ninety minutes and wrote a 497-word essay patterned loosely after The Communist Manifesto. He titled it The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and handed it out at that year's CRYPTO conference and the Hackers Conference. Its central claim — that strong cryptography would let "individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other" beyond the reach of any government — reads today less like speculation and more like a roadmap that got built.

In September 1992, May and friends — commonly credited as Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, who hosted the list on his toad.com server — set up a mailing list to keep arguing the ideas out loud. A hundred people signed up within days; by 1997 it averaged 30 messages a day across roughly 2,000 subscribers. The name itself, a play on "cyberpunk," was reportedly coined by Hughes' girlfriend at the time. May, Hughes, and Gilmore later wore masks for the cover of Wired's second issue, illustrating Steven Levy's 1993 profile of the group.

The list attracted people who'd go on to matter well beyond it. Julian Assange posted there from 1995 under the handle "Proff," years before WikiLeaks existed. May was, by most counts, its single most prolific contributor across the decade that followed.

Two years in, May sat down and wrote the list's sprawling unofficial FAQ — the document this site is built around. It folded the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in as source material and expanded it into roughly seven hundred questions across twenty sections: cryptography basics, remailers and anonymity, the Clipper Chip fight, digital cash, and the crypto-anarchist thesis in full. He was explicit that it was one person's view, not a list consensus, and said as much in the document itself.

The list's traffic and influence faded in the years after September 11, 2001 — by May's account, a lot of people got cold feet about the subject matter — though it never formally dissolved. He grew more private, living quietly at his home in Corralitos, California. When cryptocurrency itself finally arrived and boomed, May was unimpressed with what the movement had become: in his last published interview, with CoinDesk, he criticized crypto exchanges for adopting the KYC and anti-money-laundering rules he'd spent his life arguing against, and said plainly that he thought Satoshi would have been disgusted by it.

May died of natural causes at home on December 13, 2018, eight days short of his 67th birthday. His friend Lucky Green announced it publicly; obituaries ran in the New York Times, Reason, CoinDesk, and The Register, among others — an unusual spread for a man who spent his later decades avoiding public life.

The technical line from the Cypherpunks list to Bitcoin is not vague or retrospective — it's traceable name by name. Adam Back first proposed Hashcash on the list, the proof-of-work scheme Satoshi's white paper cites directly. Nick Szabo, creator of "Bit Gold" and coiner of the term "smart contracts," workshopped his ideas there. Wei Dai proposed his "b-money" digital cash system on the list, crediting May as a major influence — and Satoshi contacted Dai directly while developing Bitcoin. Hal Finney, quoted at length in this document's digital-cash sections, took Back's Hashcash idea toward real e-money and went on to receive Bitcoin's first transaction from Satoshi in January 2009. May himself flagged Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta's digital timestamping work to the list — an early, direct ancestor of the blockchain. Whether Satoshi Nakamoto ever posted to the list under another name is unknown and unknowable. It didn't need to happen that way for the lineage to be real.