Timothy C. May

Timothy C. May was an American engineer, writer, and one of the founding figures of the Cypherpunk movement. A former Intel physicist, May became convinced that cryptography would fundamentally shift power away from centralized institutions and toward individuals. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he co-founded the Cypherpunk mailing list, where many of the ideas that later shaped Bitcoin, digital privacy, and decentralized systems were first debated. His famous essay, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” predicted anonymous digital money, censorship-resistant communication, and markets beyond state control—decades before they became real. May wasn’t interested in reforming the system. He wanted to obsolete it.