Without Phil Zimmermann, Bitcoin couldn’t get invented. I know that this is a bold statement, but there are two main ways in which Satoshi Nakamoto benefited from his work: firstly, Satoshi used PGP to encrypt his e-mails. Secondly, Phil Zimmermann defended open source cryptography in courts and paved the way for lots of protocols and libraries to get developed over the years. Without PGP, Tor, ECDSA libraries, and other cryptographic breakthroughs, Satoshi Nakamoto could not create and promote Bitcoin.

I had the honor to interview Mr. Zimmermann on September 26th 2023, during the Proof of Work Summit which took place in Prague. Thanks to Bob Summerwill of the ETC Cooperative, who organized the conference, I was able to spend a little more time with Phil Zimmermann and have a brief private conversation which made this interview happen.

Since the recording took place after the main stage presentation by the PGP creator, I took on the challenge to ask him questions on topics that were not addressed during the keynote speech. Therefore, we spoke about open source cryptography projects, his views on Bitcoin, his friendship with Hal Finney, cypherpunk culture, telephony, privacy, and national security.

Phil Zimmermann: The Independent Cypherpunk Who Created PGP

When asked about his involvement in the cypherpunk scene in the 1990s, Phil explained that he was more ideologically independent, as well as geographically separated from the cypherpunks in Silicon Valley. While he didn’t fully align with their libertarian and anarchist ideas at the core of the movement, he agreed with their policy interests. He mostly remained silent and focused on writing code, only speaking publicly after a criminal investigation began – during which he famously advocated for strong cryptography and paved the way for other projects to emerge.

The Open-Source Nature of Phil Zimmermann’s Work

While Phil Zimmermann’s work is open-source, his primary motivation was to get extensive peer review for his encryption software. He wanted to ensure that strong encryption software was thoroughly examined and benefited from the expertise of others.

Hal Finney and the Birth of PGP V2 with Trust Model

Phil hired Hal Finney to work on PGP. Admittedly, Hal had been working on PGP for a couple of years before joining the project as an employee. Due to time constraints and financial difficulties, Phil had to release the first version of PGP without the trust model implemented. Hal’s help allowed them to release version two, which completed the shortcomings of the original.

Hal’s Interest in Digital Currency

Hal was interested in creating a digital currency native to the internet. He was working on proof of work, which solves the double spending problem. Phil acknowledged that he never had any ideas about creating cryptocurrencies himself, as his focus was on privacy technologies.

The Interest in Secure Telephony of Phil Zimmermann

Phil Zimmermann wanted to develop secure telephony before encrypted e-mail, but the necessary technologies weren’t available at the time. He eventually worked on secure telephony when the SIP protocol and broadband became more prevalent.

Phil’s Thoughts on Improving Bitcoin

When asked about his thoughts on improving Bitcoin, Phil pointed out to the carbon footprint aspect. He mentioned that he has been working on ideas, but they are not yet ready for publishing.

Cryptography Projects Phil Zimmermann Admires

Phil acknowledged the cleverness of Bitcoin but stated that his focus has been on personal communication protocols for privacy and end-to-end encryption in email and telephony. He expressed his respect for David Chaum’s brilliant protocols but noted that Chaum’s ideas faced challenges due to aggressive patenting.

In conclusion, my conversation with Phil Zimmermann was a deep dive into the world of cypherpunks, the birth of PGP, and the evolution of Bitcoin. Stay tuned for more insightful episodes on the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast!

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This episode is sponsored by Wasabi wallet, Cryptosteel, Satodime, and ShopInBit.

Time stamps:

The cypherpunk movement in the 1990s [00:02:47] Discussion about Phil Zimmermann’s involvement with the cypherpunk scene and his ideological alignment with their policies.

The motivation behind making PGP open source [00:07:30] Exploration of Phil Zimmermann’s reasons for making PGP open source, including the desire for extensive peer review and the benefits of strong encryption software.

The impact of PGP on the development of cryptography protocols [00:10:47] Phil Zimmermann discusses how the publication of PGP, including its source code, taught many people how to do public key cryptography in software and contributed to the emergence of various protocols.

Hal Finney and Tom Hanks [00:13:11] Discussion about the potential casting of Tom Hanks to play Hal Finney in a movie.

Hal Finney’s Role in PGP Development [00:13:36] Exploration of Hal Finney’s contribution to the development of PGP and the trust model implementation.

Proof of Work and Penny Black Project [00:14:20] Explanation of proof of work and its use in solving the double spending problem and reducing email spam through the Penny Black project.

17:48 – Did Phil Zimmermann ever think about inventing Bitcoin? 

19:13 – Silent Phone

 20:40 – Encryption is fast 

22:45– When did Phil Zimmermann hear about Bitcoin for the first time? 

24:07 – Is Phil Zimmermann proud of enabling Bitcoin? 

24:44 – Phil Zimmermann’s disappointment about Bitcoin

Improving Bitcoin and Carbon Footprint [00:26:39] Discussion on ideas for improving Bitcoin, particularly in relation to reducing its carbon footprint.

David Chaum’s Ideas and Patents [00:29:47] Conversation about David Chaum’s ideas and patents, and their impact on the acceptance and development of electronic cash, including Bitcoin.

End-to-End Encryption and National Security [00:32:49] Exploration of the importance of end-to-end encryption for preserving democracy and national security, particularly in the context of networks controlled by potentially adversarial entities like China.

Full transcript:

Ad Twins (00:00:00) – You’re listening to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast, the Bitcoin podcast for OGs and intermediaries. Make sure you subscribe, leave a comment and like this episode. Also read the new BTCTKVR magazine. This episode is sponsored by Wasabi Wallet, Cryptosteel, ShopInBit and Satodime. Thank you for listening!

Vlad Costea (00:01:12) – Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. I am Vlad and today I’m doing a very special interview here at the Proof of Work Summit in Prague. And I’m sitting next to Phil Zimmermann, who is a legendary cypherpunk who fought the privacy wars in the 1990s to make it safe for projects like Bitcoin to exist. And there is a lot to Phil Zimmermann. You can look up his name. It’s a double N, and there is a specific page on his website which mentions that you should always write it with a double N, and it seems like people get that wrong many times. And also something that you should know during this intro is that he hired Hal Finney. I think he was the first employee who worked at PGP.

Vlad Costea (00:01:58) – Yeah. And you’ve had him as an employee for a long time. (Yeah.) And I think before that he was a video game developer. And then you got him to work on PGP, which is pretty good privacy technology to encrypt emails. And Satoshi Nakamoto used PGP. And I think, if it wasn’t for PGP, Bitcoin couldn’t exist for two reasons. First of all, there was that privacy wars situation which made it safe for someone like Satoshi to emerge. Secondly, because he used PGP. So I’m I’m awestruck and I’m going to stop talking. Sorry I even choked. It’s good to have you sir.

Phil Zimmermann (00:02:40) – Yeah it’s my pleasure.

Vlad Costea (00:02:43) – Keep the microphone a bit closer to your mouth.

Phil Zimmermann (00:02:45) – All right.

Vlad Costea (00:02:47) – So what was it like in the 1990s with the cypherpunk scene? Do you feel like you are part of that whole movement that was on the cover of Wired magazine with Eric Hughes and all of that? Or were you just an independent researcher?

Phil Zimmermann (00:02:59) – I was more independent. I lived in Boulder, Colorado at the time, and they were in Silicon Valley.

Phil Zimmermann (00:03:05) – And so I was geographically separated when I was working on PGP. At first I was working alone, and so there was a lot of separation between them. Also, my ideology was not quite as aligned with libertarian thought. I’m not a libertarian. I’m not an anarchist. I’m, you know, I’m a moderate. And I was just… I like writing the software. At the time, I was a software engineer and more of an applied cryptographer, not a theoretician. But, you know, I did agree with the cypherpunks on a lot of things from a policy perspective. I thought that, you know, their policy interests were aligned with my own, largely except for the libertarian and anarchy part.

Vlad Costea (00:04:09) – Yeah, I read part of the Cyphernomicom by Timothy May, and I found it a bit extreme at parts. But at the same time, I liked the whole spirit of the movement. It was uncompromising. I think that’s the word that describes it best.

Phil Zimmermann (00:04:23) – Yeah. I found Tim May’s polemics were quite extreme, and that’s part of why I didn’t feel as aligned as, you know… I was not fully aligned with their with the cypherpunk sentiments. And maybe, maybe I was putting too much reading, too much from one guy. But, you know, I didn’t feel the same way.

Vlad Costea (00:04:49) – But you were on the mailing list, right?

Phil Zimmermann (00:04:52) – That’s an interesting question. I think I was, I’m not sure. Probably it’s been 30 years. So yeah.

Vlad Costea (00:05:00) – I understand. Where I was getting with this is that nowadays we tend to argue a lot on social media and whatever, and I was curious if there were ideological debates or arguments on mailing lists back in the day.

Phil Zimmermann (00:05:12) – I didn’t get into any arguments. I was mostly silent. I just wrote code. I let other people make the arguments. I mean, after after the criminal investigation got underway, I started speaking publicly. And so I did make a lot of arguments there. There, I was trying to make the case for why we needed strong cryptography.

Phil Zimmermann (00:05:39) – We had to get away from the World War Two attitude of trying to control this technology. The information age had arrived. It was time for us to embrace it as part of the the complexities of an information society.

Vlad Costea (00:05:56) – When you published online, was it under the MIT license, which is open source?

Phil Zimmermann (00:06:03) – Well, I think the first version of PGP published under the GNU General Public License.

Vlad Costea (00:06:09) – Because I know you did publish it at MIT. So I, made this connection, which I guess was wrong.

Phil Zimmermann (00:06:16) – Well, later on, I started having more cooperation with MIT because they, MIT press published the book… the two books, The PGP User’s Guide and the PGP Source Code Book. Also they put PGP on their website site, and that was convenient for me. They were showing their solidarity by sort of implicitly saying to the feds: look, you know, if publishing this on the internet is a crime, then you should arrest MIT also. So I appreciated that vote of solidarity. And they gave me an email address.

Vlad Costea (00:07:03) – I’m not going to mention it, but I think you still use some of that. Anyway… where I was getting with this is that basically I’m not aware of open source software that was being published and was getting popular before PGP. Linux came out later. Internet browsers like Firefox came out way later. It’s very hard for me to think of open source software before PGP.

Phil Zimmermann (00:07:30) – That’s true. But I think that, well, my motivation for making open source was not the usual reasons why people make their software open source. I agreed with the idea of open source. I thought it was a great idea. You know, I was philosophically aligned with open source, but it wasn’t my primary motivation for making PGP open source. Rather, I wanted PGP to get a lot of peer review. And I thought that the best way to achieve that was to make it open source. So I was more interested in the goals of having strong encryption software be extensively peer reviewed and benefiting from that. So, you know, open source was a way of achieving that.

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Vlad Costea (00:09:10) – That was a good reason, but I guess that also got you into trouble. Because open source means that anyone can read, can copy, can modify, can reverse engineer what’s happening there to replicate, distribute, maybe sell if they want.

Phil Zimmermann (00:09:27) – Well I didn’t want them to sell it. I, you know, I wanted to… if anybody’s going to sell it, I’d rather it be me.

Phil Zimmermann (00:09:33) – But I wasn’t trying to sell it. I was giving it away. And so, you know, later on, I met someone who was a senior cryptographer at NSA who had retired, and he told me… Robert Morris, you might remember that there was a internet worm. One of the early internet worms was Robert Morris junior, his son. But Robert Morris Senior was this most senior cryptographer at NSA. And I met him many years later after he retired. And he told me that that one of the things that worried the NSA about the publication of PGP was that it included source code and that the the guys at NSA looked at this, and their biggest concern was that this would teach a lot of people how to do good key management and good software development for, you know, public key cryptography. They were afraid of it metastasizing. And it did. And, you know, a lot of people looked at it and learned from it and developed their own applications. And, you know, we saw the emergence of a lot of protocols.

Phil Zimmermann (00:10:47) – Now, I don’t want to take credit for all those protocols. I’m just saying that PGP helped teach a lot of people how to how to do public key cryptography in software.

Vlad Costea (00:11:01) – Speaking of public keys, it was one of the first systems of which I’m aware, which had this structure with a public key and the private key. And the public key was for identification to prove that it was you who sent that message, and you would sign the message with the private key. And that was enough of a proof for the other person to know that, first of all, yes, it was encrypted. But there was also this layer of identification to know that it was you who sent the message. I think that’s really cool. And Bitcoin developers still use that to this day.

Phil Zimmermann (00:11:35) – Yeah, well, I didn’t invent that idea. That part came with the invention of public key cryptography. I just applied it. I’m not a I’m not a real cryptographer. I’m an applied cryptographer.

Phil Zimmermann (00:11:51) – I’m not a theoretician. So at that time, I was just interested in writing software that would implement these ideas. And actually, I haven’t written any software for many years. My life was taken over by the political and legal travails of PGP, and I got away from writing code myself. Instead, I had volunteers work on it for me.

Vlad Costea (00:12:18) – Which is, I guess, even better because there is only so much work you can do yourself, right? But others can keep the project alive in perpetuity.

Phil Zimmermann (00:12:27) – That’s right. And one of those volunteers was Hal Finney, so. It was great. I loved working with Hal. He was he was a a great guy and a kind and generous soul. You know, Halw was how was an absolute genius. And what we see often happens with geniuses is that they pay for their genius with social maladroitness. You know, they sometimes lack emotional maturity. But that never happened to Hal. Hal did have good emotional maturity, and he was a generous, kind person.

Phil Zimmermann (00:13:11) – And so if they ever wanted to make a movie about Hal, they’d have to have Tom Hanks play him.

Vlad Costea (00:13:18) – Do you think you would have liked Tom Hanks to play in his biopic?

Phil Zimmermann (00:13:24) – Well, I think they’re of comparable age, but as the years go by, Tom Hanks keeps getting older and Hal doesn’t because he died many years ago.

Vlad Costea (00:13:36) – Yeah, it’s certainly interesting that he was the first person you hired. And why was that? Was he such a special coder or was he just the most enthusiastic?

Phil Zimmermann (00:13:44) – Well, Hal had been working on PGP for a couple of years before that, almost since I published version one. He immediately volunteered to help, and it helped us get to version two. In version one, I didn’t have the trust model implemented yet because I ran out of time. I missed five mortgage payments writing it, and I was about to lose the house, and so I had to release it without the trust model. I knew what the trust model had to be. I knew how it should work, but I didn’t have time to write it.

Phil Zimmermann (00:14:20) – So version two came out 15 months after version one, and that did have the trust model largely similar to the way it is today. And Hal worked on that. Hal worked on implementing that.

Vlad Costea (00:14:36) – Hal was also very passionate about creating something like Bitcoin. He had reusable proof of work (RPOW) that was published in 2004. He was friends with Nick Szabo, who did his Bit gold experiment, which never came to fruition. Did he ever talk about internet money and creating a currency that’s native to the internet?

Phil Zimmermann (00:14:57) – Well, I knew that he was working on proof of work. And, you know, that solves the double spending problem. So that’s a very clever. That’s a very clever idea. Proof of work had already existed for solving other problems. I mean, one of the earlier problems that it that it was proposed as a solution was spam. Microsoft had a project called Penny Black, named after the first postage stamp that happened, I don’t know, centuries ago in England. But the Penny Black project used proof of work to try to reduce how much spam you get.

Phil Zimmermann (00:15:43) – So you would send somebody an e-mail and your mail server would talk to their mail server and give it a… the recipient’s mail server would give a cryptographic puzzle to solve to the sender’s mail server, and then it would have to solve that puzzle which involves finding a hash preimage. And then it would send the email along with the solution, and it would the recipient would mail server would check that solution, and if it was correct, it would deliver the email. And so that was a clever idea, except that that was before e-mail spam really took off with bot networks where you had, you know, thousands of PCs participating in the spamming. And so even if that would increase the workload for a spammer, if he distributes it amongst thousands of PCs, he could overcome this. So that may be why Penny Black never became a widely deployed solution. But anyway, that was one use of proof of work, and later proof of work was used to solve the double spending problem along with the blockchain construct.

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Vlad Costea (00:17:48) – I asked you about Hal Finney potentially thinking about creating a digital currency, which is native to the internet, but did you ever have that idea or did you have a concept for this? I know in the 90s it was a big thing. People were thinking how to send each other money for servers and remailers and stuff like that without using banks.

Phil Zimmermann (00:18:08) – I never, had any ideas about doing cryptocurrencies. That wasn’t my focus. I was just focused on privacy technologies.

Phil Zimmermann (00:18:19) – My biggest interest after PGP was secure telephony. And in fact, I wanted to do secure telephony first, before e-mail. But it was too early. The enabling technologies weren’t there yet. Nobody had broadband, for example, and the SIP protocol wasn’t invented yet, so I had to wait. I did try to do it in 1995 with PGP phone, but it was a decade too early. So a decade later, when the SIP protocol helped with the signaling part of the call, and then there was RTP to handle the media. Then it was time… and lots of people were getting broadband around that time. So then it was time to put my attention back on secure telephony.

Vlad Costea (00:19:13) – I also have to ask you about this, because today you showed me there is an application in the App Store and Google Play which uses cryptography similar to Signal’s, but has some interesting features of its own. It’s a messaging app that’s encrypted. Can you tell me more about that?

Phil Zimmermann (00:19:29) – That’s Silent Phone from Silent Circle, and it’s a it’s a really nice, secure telephony project that solves the man in the middle problem in a unique way.

Phil Zimmermann (00:19:46) – It’s tailor made for… it’s an encryption protocol that’s tailor made for telephony. Signal is a protocol used for text messaging. And you can use Signal to transport a session key that you feed into telephony. But my protocol ZRTP is designed specifically for telephony. And I do use the Signal protocol for text messaging. So the app actually does both text messaging and attachments, and telephony.

Vlad Costea (00:20:24) – So by telephony you also mean video calls and stuff.

Phil Zimmermann (00:20:28) – Yeah. Yeah. Voice and video.

Vlad Costea (00:20:31) – So everything is encrypted with your application.

Phil Zimmermann (00:20:33) – Yeah. End to end.

Vlad Costea (00:20:33) – And does it cause any kind of lag or is it fluid?

Phil Zimmermann (00:20:40) – No. It doesn’t take much time for the encryption. You know, voice compression takes more computing than the encryption.

Vlad Costea (00:20:48) – I didn’t know that.

Phil Zimmermann (00:20:50) – Yeah. I mean, you know, nobody would use encryption if it was too slow. I mean, for example, disk encryption has to be fast. Nobody would use it otherwise because the disk is a very high speed IO device.

Vlad Costea (00:21:10) – When you tell me about encryption, I think about stuff like Tor, which usually slows down your connection. (It does. Yeah.) Or Nym. I spoke with the guys from Nym last year, and they told me that when they do a video call, there’s like a few seconds of delay.

Phil Zimmermann (00:21:24) – Yeah. You know, video calls are not a place where you want to have that kind of latency. You know, when you’re doing e-mail, you can go through intermediaries. You know, there’s protocols for that. There’s mixing of e-mails. You know, there’s onion routing of e-mails. And nobody cares if that takes extra time because it’s e-mail. Web browsers, they have to be faster. And so people will tolerate a little bit of delay for web browsing, but not much. But for telephony, for having a voice or video conversation, there’s no tolerance for latency. People hate latency when it comes to telephony. I mean, if you have some latency in there, you can actually get people to fight.

Phil Zimmermann (00:22:25) – Because you keep stepping on each other’s lines and it sounds like you’re interrupting the other person. You’re not trying to interrupt them, but you think they stopped talking. They paused. So you start talking and oops, now they’re talking. But they talked earlier, but you didn’t get it in time. So yeah, people hate that.

Vlad Costea (00:22:45) – Since this is a Bitcoin podcast, I have to return to the main topic which is Bitcoin. (Yeah.) And I have to ask you, when was the first time when you read or heard about Bitcoin and what did you think about it?

Phil Zimmermann (00:22:58) – Oh I don’t remember what time that was. I heard about it pretty early in the process when it first came out. But I wasn’t that interested in it at the time. I was focusing on telephony.

Vlad Costea (00:23:15) – So you are not interested means that you didn’t care much to look into it or something.

Phil Zimmermann (00:23:20) – I figured I’d get to it later. That was at a time when I was really focused on secure telephony.

Vlad Costea (00:23:30) – I remember Adam Back saying that for many years Bitcoin was like the holy grail. Not necessarily Bitcoin, but solving the double spending problem.

Phil Zimmermann (00:23:40) – That was a very difficult problem to solve. You know, nobody had produced an adequate solution until Bitcoin came along.

Vlad Costea (00:23:48) – But you were not quite interested in the topic.

Phil Zimmermann (00:23:52) – No, I only had a limited you know, there’s only so many hours in a day. And I was devoting my attention on privacy of personal communication. And that was, you know, that’s where I was putting my effort.

Vlad Costea (00:24:07) – But when you think about the fact that your legal battles led to the creation of Bitcoin indirectly… are you proud of the fact that this type of money can exist today because you were willing to fight back in the 90s?

Phil Zimmermann (00:24:23) – Yeah, I… You know, look: I was interested. I found bitcoin to be interesting and a really positive idea when I first heard about it. But I find that today, as the years have gone by, so many years have passed and there’s been an evolution of the environment around Bitcoin.

Phil Zimmermann (00:24:44) – And I’m kind of disappointed to see that there’s so much criminality, not so much Bitcoin exactly. But I mean Bitcoin itself attracts a lot of criminality. But more importantly, there’s thousands of cryptocurrencies. And there there’s an awful lot of fraud in pump and dump. And that’s that’s disappointing. And the the ransomware which is mostly Bitcoin… that’s disappointing. And then there’s the carbon footprint. You know, that’s that’s kind of alarming. So those things worry me about Bitcoin. And so, even though conceptually in the abstract I thought it was a great idea, it would have been a better outcome if it could have gotten this far without those things. So I wish I could see some engineering effort putting put into trying to develop countermeasures to those problems.

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Vlad Costea (00:26:39) – This was going to be my next question based on our conversation earlier, because you know quite a bit about Bitcoin, given your understanding of applied cryptography, you have a greater depth of understanding some aspects of it. And I was curious if you have any ideas how to improve it or how you would design it differently.

Phil Zimmermann (00:27:00) – Well, I am interested in… I mean, the carbon footprint part is something that interests me a lot. And I’ve been trying to develop some ideas, but my ideas aren’t good enough yet.

Phil Zimmermann (00:27:15) – I’d like to talk to other people about it, so. I need to improve the ideas before. They’re not ready for publishing. You know, they have to be debugged.

Vlad Costea (00:27:30) – Is there any cryptography project that you look at and you think that you wish you built that, or you think you could have done it better?

Phil Zimmermann (00:27:39) – Well, you know, I focused on different areas. I think Bitcoin is very clever protocol. And I have a lot of respect, enormous respect for the guy who invented it.

Vlad Costea (00:27:56) – You know who it is?

Phil Zimmermann (00:27:58) – I wouldn’t care to speculate as to who it might be. But I do have a lot of respect for him, and… that’s not where I put my attention. I put my attention on personal communication protocols, to have privacy, end to end encryption – both for email and for telephony. I would like to do more, but I don’t think I’m going to be doing it in cryptocurrency.

Vlad Costea (00:28:31) – I think David Chaum came up with the Xx Network… Elixxir or something.

Vlad Costea (00:28:36) – That’s what it used to be called. And he tried to do messaging, which is end to end encrypted and also doesn’t leak metadata. Did you have time to look into that?

Phil Zimmermann (00:28:48) – I haven’t looked at that. I find that everything that Chaum does is extremely brilliant, and so I have a lot of respect for his intelligence and his ability to design really interesting protocols. However, I also note that David Chaum likes to patent his ideas, and that makes it difficult for those ideas to gain market acceptance. And so, I mean, his ideas like blind signatures and… you know, his sort of his ecash ideas that preceded Bitcoin were clever ideas, but they never got much traction because they were encumbered so much with patents. Now those patents have expired, but so much time has passed that other approaches to electronic cash have overtaken them. So like Bitcoin, for example.

Vlad Costea (00:29:47) – Are you suggesting that Bitcoin could have been invented much sooner if David Chaum did not patent ecash?

Phil Zimmermann (00:29:54) – No, no, no. What I’m saying is that David Chaum’s ideas didn’t get very far in the marketplace because they were encumbered by patents. He likes to patent a lot of things.

Phil Zimmermann (00:30:08) – And as brilliant as his ideas are, I think that there would be more acceptance of his ideas if they were not aggressively patented.

Vlad Costea (00:30:19) – I’ve heard you talk about Shamir secret sharing today, and it’s a pretty smart scheme for sharing secrets, basically. And it’s also used for Bitcoin private keys to split your key into multiple shards. Do you think that’s a good approach?

Phil Zimmermann (00:30:35) – I do, because, I mean, when you think about all the the sort of terrible tragedy of people losing their Bitcoin wallets, you know, they forgot their, their keys or they forgot their passphrase or something for their Bitcoin wallet. And, and so people have lost a lot of money, you know, remember that there’s the story of that guy I think in the UK that had lost millions of dollars in a landfill because it was a disk drive. He was getting pretty desperate. I mean, it’s a terrible tragedy. So having some way to take a key for a Bitcoin wallet and split it into shares and then giving those shares to your friends to help you recover them, it’s a good way to do it. You know, that would cut down on the misery that people have to endure when they lose their Bitcoin keys.

Vlad Costea (00:31:32) – What’s next for you? What do you work on and what do you plan to still do? You travel around the world giving talks about what it was like to fight for privacy back in the 90s, and you also warn people that end to end encryption might be not necessarily ended, but compromised.

Phil Zimmermann (00:31:51) – Yeah, we are facing government pushback on end to end encryption for the past few years, and we have to push back and make sure that they don’t take that away. My concern is that democracies around the world are have been sliding into autocracies. And if that happens, we need to have people have access to end to end encryption so that they can resist the loss of democracies into autocracies. They need to be able to push back and organize politically. If that happens. And they can’t do that if they don’t have end to end encryption. The other concern that I have about end to end encryption is that we often find ourselves trying to communicate through networks that are controlled by China. You know, Huawei has built a lot of 5G infrastructure in Europe in particular, but in other parts of the world as well.

Phil Zimmermann (00:32:49) – And the European democracies are starting to realize that they need to take a step back from 5G infrastructure from Huawei. But it’s going to take them a while to roll that back. In the meantime, you know, there’s too much European network traffic that’s going across a network controlled by a potential enemy, and that’s a bad national security risk for a lot of the Western democracies in Europe. And so we need to have end to end encryption as the as the safe, safest countermeasure to that. What we really need to do is to get rid of the Huawei infrastructure here. But short of that, or while we’re waiting for that to happen, we should have end to end encryption for national security reasons.

Vlad Costea (00:33:45) – Now. I guess it’s sort of like a Trojan horse to some nations, because it came as a cheap alternative to whatever else was…

Phil Zimmermann (00:33:52) – Well, the Chinese gear was cheaper and of higher quality. I mean, the European vendors had more expensive and not as good equipment. However, the Chinese gear, you know, is under the control of the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence agencies.

Phil Zimmermann (00:34:10) – So no matter how good they are or how cheap they are, it’s not a good idea to deploy that and then depend on that for your your whole country’s network infrastructure.

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Vlad Costea (00:35:12) – So, Mr. Zimmermann, how can people follow your work and keep up with what you’re doing and maybe send you an email or whatever?

Phil Zimmermann (00:35:21) – Well, you’ll find my contact information on my website.

Phil Zimmermann (00:35:24) – Phil Zimmermann.com: You have to be careful how you spell that. Zimmermann should have two Ns because there’s another guy named Phil Zimmerman. He’s got a website. It’s Phil Zimmerman.com with one N. And so if you go to my website, you can find my email address and contact information.

Vlad Costea (00:35:44) – Thank you very much for your time. I have a lot of respect for your work and best of luck with everything.

Phil Zimmermann (00:35:51) – It’s my pleasure.

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