Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (born Bryce Wilcox; 13 May 1974 in

Phoenix, Arizona Phoenix ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With over 1.6 million residents at the 2020 census, it is the ...

), is an American

Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...

-based

computer security Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and computer network, n ...

specialist, self-proclaimed cypherpunk, and ex-CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the development of

Zcash Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin's codebase. It shares many similarities, such as a fixed total supply of 21 million units. Transactions can be transparent, similar to bitcoin transactions, or they can be shielded t ...

Biography

He is known for the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store (or Tahoe-LAFS), a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem released under GPL and the TGPPL licenses. He is the creator of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence (TGPPL). Wilcox-O'Hearn is the designer of multiple

network protocols A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of ...

that incorporate concepts such as self-contained

economies An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with ...

and secure

reputation system A reputation system is a program or algorithm that allow users of an online community to rate each other in order to build trust (social sciences), trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites s ...

s. He is a member of the development team of

ZRTP ZRTP (composed of Z and Real-time Transport Protocol) is a cryptographic key-agreement protocol to negotiate the keys for encryption between two end points in a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone telephony call based on the Real-time Transport Protocol ...

and the

BLAKE2 BLAKE is a cryptographic hash function based on Daniel J. Bernstein's ChaCha (cipher), ChaCha stream cipher, but a permuted copy of the input block, XORed with round constants, is added before each ChaCha round. Like SHA-2, there are two variants ...

cryptographic hash function. Zooko's triangle is named after Wilcox-O'Hearn, who described the schema that relates three desirable properties of identifiers in 2001. Wilcox-O'Hearn was founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises in

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Home rule municipality, home rule city in Boulder County, Colorado, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the most ...

where he is now an advisor. Zooko was a developer of the MojoNation P2P system and lead developer of the follow-on Mnet network, and a developer at SimpleGeo. Wilcox-O'Hearn worked on the first cryptocurrency,

DigiCash DigiCash Inc. was an electronic money corporation founded by David Chaum in 1989. DigiCash transactions were unique in that they were anonymous due to a number of cryptographic protocols developed by its founder. DigiCash declared bankruptcy in ...

, with

David Chaum David Lee Chaum (born 1955) is an American computer scientist, List of cryptographers, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of Digital cur ...

in 1996. He is a member of the founding team of the anonymous cryptocurrency

, which launched in 2016. He currently serves as the CEO of the affiliated Electric Coin Company. Wilcox later commissioned the

Rand Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

to study whether anonymous coins were disproportionately represented in criminal transactions; the study found they were not. Additionally Wilcox-O'Hearn was one of the co-creators of Blake3.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilcox-Ohearn, Zooko Living people Cypherpunks Computer security specialists People associated with cryptocurrency Businesspeople from Boulder, Colorado 1974 births