This is an amazing read from the past it reminds me of the time I was down the cyber-security rabbit hole in the 1990s with Netscape, Napster and BitTorrent.

"Retrospectively, a lot of ex-DigiCash employees understand why Chaum was so paranoid. As a cryptographer you have to assume the whole world is trying to rip you off. A certain amount of paranoia is part of the job. Chaum had also worked for intelligence agencies, and that didn't fortify his faith in the good intentions of humankind. His vision of the privacy of the individual was almost an obsession. In 1996 he said, in the relations magazine of Honeywell-Bull: "The difference between a bad electronic cash system and well-developed digital cash will determine whether we will have a dictatorship or a real democracy." -- NEXT Magazine, 1999

NEXT, January 1999