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.
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 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 systems. 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 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, 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
Zcash, 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