Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn at 34C3 in 2017
Born
Bryce Wilcox

(1974-05-13) May 13, 1974 (age 50)
EmployerElectric Coin Company
Parents
  • Ron Wilcox (father)
  • Olene Harris (mother)
Websitezooko on Twitter

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (born Bryce Wilcox; 13 May 1974 in Phoenix, Arizona), is an American Colorado-based computer security specialist, self-proclaimed cypherpunk, and ex-CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the development of Zcash.[1]

Biography

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He is known for the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store (or Tahoe-LAFS), a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem[2][3] released under GPL and the TGPPL licenses. He is the creator of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence (TGPPL).[4]

Wilcox-O'Hearn is the designer of multiple network protocols that incorporate concepts such as self-contained economies and secure reputation systems.[5] He is a member of the development team of ZRTP[6] and the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash function.[7][8]

Zooko's triangle is named after Wilcox-O'Hearn, who described the schema that relates three desirable properties of identifiers in 2001.[9]

Wilcox-O'Hearn was founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises in Boulder, Colorado[1] where he is now an advisor.[10]

Zooko was a developer of the MojoNation[11] P2P system and lead developer of the follow-on Mnet network,[12] and a developer at SimpleGeo.[13]

Wilcox-O'Hearn worked on the first cryptocurrency, DigiCash, with David Chaum in 1996.[14] He is a member of the founding team of the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, which launched in 2016.[14] He currently serves as the CEO of the affiliated Electric Coin Company.[15] Wilcox later commissioned the Rand Corporation to study whether anonymous coins were disproportionately represented in criminal transactions; the study found they were not.[15]

Additionally Wilcox-O'Hearn was one of the co-creators of Blake3.[16]

References

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  1. ^ a b DJ Pangburn (2013). "Introducing the PRISM-Proof Storage Device". motherboard. Vice. Archived from the original on 28 August 2013.
  2. ^ Wilcox-O'Hearn, Zooko, ANNOUNCING allmydata.org "Tahoe", the Least-Authority Filesystem, v1.3, retrieved 20 April 2009
  3. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (22 April 2009). "Why Whack-a-Tard won't save music". The Register. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  4. ^ Yee, Ka-Ping (2008). An Open Source License Idea (PDF). PyCon.
  5. ^ Ferne, Peter (21 November 2008). "Collaborative Filtering and Social Capital". World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
  6. ^ zfoneproject (2010). "About The Zfone™ Project". Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  7. ^ "BLAKE2 website". BLAKE2 Team. 19 November 2012. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  8. ^ Jean-Philippe Aumasson; Samuel Neves; Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn; Christian Winnerlein (2013). "BLAKE2: simpler, smaller, fast as MD5" (PDF). Applied Cryptography and Network Security. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 7954. IACR. pp. 119–135. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38980-1_8. ISBN 978-3-642-38979-5.
  9. ^ Ferdous, Md. Sadek; Jøsang, Audun; Singh, Kuldeep; Borgaonkar, Ravishankar (2009). "Security Usability of Petname Systems" (PDF). Identity and Privacy in the Internet Age. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 5838. pp. 44–59. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.617.1149. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04766-4_4. ISBN 978-3-642-04765-7.
  10. ^ "About Us". Least Authority Enterprises. 2017. moved to Berlin in 2016
  11. ^ Staff (29 July 2000). "Get Your Music Mojo Working". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  12. ^ "Cutting edge P2P, crypto comes to your PC". The Register. 25 February 2002.
  13. ^ "Post-Funding, SimpleGeo Pounces on a Six Aparter, A Hacker, And Beta Keys". TechCrunch. 14 December 2009.
  14. ^ a b O'Hearn, Zooko (29 December 2017). "Cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, etc.: revolutionary tech?". 34C3 (video). Chaos Computer Club. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  15. ^ a b del Castillo, Michael (6 May 2020). "Cypherpunk Zooko Wilcox Aims To Bring Anonymous Zcash To Law-Abiding Masses". Forbes. Retrieved 1 June 2020.
  16. ^ "Blake3 github". GitHub.