Security Without Identification

* Article: Security Without Identification. David Chaum.

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Ori Shimoni:

""In 1985, cryptographer David Chaum published “Security Without Identification,” a blueprint for commerce without surveillance or control. Over the following years, Chaum and other cypherpunks developed a comprehensive technical vision: pseudonymous identities, untraceable payments, anonymous credentials, decentralized reputation. Together, these components would enable peer-to-peer marketplaces where people could trade directly with privacy and autonomy.

Only fragments of this vision were realized: secure browsing through HTTPS, end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, cryptocurrencies as digital cash. Yet these advances remained isolated, developing separately rather than converging into the comprehensive p2p commerce ecosystem envisioned by cypherpunks.

Instead, the following decades saw the rise of corporate mediation. Companies like eBay and Amazon, followed by sharing economy platforms like Uber and Airbnb and super apps like WeChat, provided convenience through centralized control—solving trust between users but extracting growing fees and control.

Today, the technical barriers that once prevented implementation of the complete cypherpunk vision have largely dissolved. Decentralized Commerce (DeCom) represents an opportunity to integrate the partial successes—cryptocurrency and encrypted communications—with the missing components of p2p discovery, reputation, and dispute resolution. Using low-cost smart contract execution environments (L2s), programmable cryptography (ZK, FHE, MPC, Obfuscation), content-addressed storage (IPFS, Arweave), open social protocols (Farcaster, AT Protocol), and other technologies, DeCom has the potential to improve market efficiency, reduce fees, enhance privacy, and return control to users.

But before we can understand where DeCom might take us, we need to uncover the twists and turns that led us here. This essay excavates the history of p2p exchange, tracing how we arrived at today's centralized marketplace model, and examining why previous DeCom attempts failed. By analyzing these efforts—from early Bitcoin marketplaces to platform cooperatives—we can extract lessons to inform how we can realize the original vision from four decades ago."

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See the source article on Decentralized Commerce