Headline May 21, 2015/ ''' THE CYPHERPUNKS WORLD '''

''' THE CYPHERPUNKS WORLD '''

AFTER Mr. Szabo led the company in a new direction, it was renamed Mirror, and it recently raised $12.3 million from several prominent venture capitalists, these people said.

The company, writes the author,  declined to comment for this article.

Mr.Szabo's role at Vaurum has been kept a secret because of his desire for privacy, and he left in late 2014 after becoming nervous about public exposure, according to the people briefed on the company's operations.

While he was still there, though, the array of arcane skills and knowledge at his command led several colleagues to conclude that Mr. Szabo was involved in the creation Bitcoin, even if he didn't do it all himself.

I met Mr.Szabo, a large bearded man, in March 2014 at a Bitcoin event at the Lake Tahoe vacation home of Dan Moreheadd, a former Goldman Sachs trader who now runs a Bitcoin focused investment firm, Pantera Capital.

Mr Szabo was working for Vaurum at the time. Mr.Morehead and other hedge fund executives in attendance dressed in expensive loafers and form-fitting jeans.

 Mr. Szabo, his bald pate encircled by a ring of salt-and-pepper hair, wore beat-up black sneakers and untucked striped shirt.

While he kept to himself, I managed to corner him in the kitchen during the cocktail hour. He was notably reserved and deflected questions about where he lived and had worked, but he bristled when I cited what was being said about him on the Internet-

Including that he was a law professor at George Washington University  -and the notion that he had created Bitcoin.    

''There are a whole bunch of parallels," he told me. "I mean the reason people tag me is because you can go through secure property titles and bit gold   -there are so many parallels between that and Bitcoin that you can't find anywhere else.''

When he asked if he believed that Satoshi had been familiar with his work, Mr.Szabo said he understood why there was so much speculation about his own role:

"All I'm saying is, there are all these parallels, and it looks funny to me, and a lot of other people."

Dinner began, interrupting the conversation, and I never got another chance to talk to Mr.Szabo.

When I emailed him last Wednesday, to repeat his denial: ''As I have stated many times before, all this speculation is flattering, but wrong  -I am not Satishi."

Many concepts central to Bitcoin were developed in an online community known as the Cypherpunks, a loosely organized group of digital privacy activists.

As part of their mission, they set out to create digital money that be as anonymous as physical cash.

Mr. Szabo was a member, and in 1993, he wrote a message to fellow Cypherpunks describing the diverse motivations of attendees in a group meeting that had just taken place.

Some people, he wrote,  "are libertarians who want government out of our lives, others are liberal fighting the  N.S.A , others are great fun to ding people in power with cool hacks.''

Mr. Szabo had a libertarian mind-set. He was drawn to those ideas partly, he told me, because of his father, who fought the communists in Hungary in the 1950s, before coming to the United States-

Where Mr.Szabo was born 51 years ago. Reared in Washington State, Mr. Szabo studies computer science at the University of Washington. And-

Several experiments in digital cash circulated on the Cypherpunk lists in the 1990s. Adam Back, a British researcher, created one called hashcash that later became a central component of Bitcoin.

Another, called  b money, was designed by an entirely private computer engineer named Wei Dai.

When these experiments failed to take off, many  Cypherpunks  lost interest but not M.Szabo. He worked for six months as a consultant for a company called  DigiCash, he has written on his blog.

The Honour and Serving of the  ''Technology History and Operational Research''  continues. Thank you for reading and see Ya ll on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

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