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

Phoenix, Arizona Phoenix ( ; nv, Hoozdo; es, Fénix or , yuf-x-wal, Banyà:nyuwá) 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 1 ...

), is an American

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

-based

computer security Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, the ...

specialist, self-proclaimed

cypherpunk A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal g ...

, and CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the development of Zcash.

Biography

He is known for the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store (or Tahoe-LAFS), a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem released under

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

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 kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

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 the p ...

and secure

reputation system Reputation systems are programs or algorithms that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and ...

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 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 differing in t ...

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 home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...

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, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertatio ...

in 1996. He is a member of the founding team of the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, which launched in 2016. He currently serves as the CEO of the affiliated

Electric Coin Company Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by ...

. Wilcox later commissioned the

Rand Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed ...

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 BLAKE is a cryptographic hash function based on Daniel J. Bernstein's 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 differing in ...

References

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