David Chaum has been making impactful contributions to things like anonymous communication channels, anonymous digital transactions, and privacy protocols since the 1980s.

Actually, impactful contributions doesn’t quite do it justice, in fact, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this man is responsible for unleashing these concepts in the first place.

David wrote a paper in 1981 that opened the door for anonymous communications. This paper perfectly describes how anonymous communications take place today.

Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

“A technique based on public key cryptography is presented that allows an electronic mail system to hide who a participant communicates with as well as the content of the communication - in spite of an unsecured underlying telecommunication system. The technique does not require a universally trusted authority. One correspondent can remain anonymous to a second, while allowing the second to respond via an untraceable return address.”

He also developed:

• Blind Signatures

• Secure Voting Systems

• Zero-Knowledge Arguments.

VIEW VIDEO HERE^^^^

Visionaries are so because they can “see” and understand what the future might hold or need when most others can’t.

The things that David valued so highly over 30 years ago are finally being more widely valued and adopted because more and more people are waking up to the fact that anonymity is something to be valued and it’s a right that everyone should be entitled to.

Oh, don’t worry, David Chaum isn’t done yet. He is also working on a project called PrivaTegrity. According to an article on wired.com:

PrivaTegrity is “…designed to allow fully secret, anonymous communications that no eavesdropper can crack, whether a hacker or an intelligence agency.” It is also “…meant to be both more secure than existing online anonymity systems like Tor or I2P and also more efficient; he claims is fast enough to work as a smartphone app with no perceptible delay”
According to Chaum, “It’s a way to create a separate online reality.”, “One in which all the various things we now know people like to do online can be done in a lightweight manner under a completely different and new and very attractive privacy and security model.”

Please feel free to check out the links posted down below in the description to read up on how David Chaum has shaped this crypto space.

Additional Reading/Sources:

David Chaum Website
Wiki
1981 Paper: “Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms”
More on PrivaTegrity
Wired Article on PrivaTegrity