| Phil Zimmermann was a radical. As an anti-nuclear activist, Zimmermann was troubled that the U.S. and Soviet Union had stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to each destroy the other. This idea of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), he believed, was indeed mad. It meant the world was constantly on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. Zimmermann was also a computer programmer. If the grassroots peace movement had a method for secure communication, he reasoned, citizens would be better equipped to organize and protest, without interference or surveillance from the government. He developed a piece of software that would give ordinary citizens military-grade privacy. They could encrypt emails, spreadsheets, and documents with software that would take a supercomputer billions of years to crack. In the understatement of the year, he called it “Pretty Good Privacy.”
There were many similarities between PGP and today’s cryptocurrencies: they both use public and private keys. They both let users trust each other without a centralized authority. And they both had terrible user interfaces.
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