Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
Cypherpunk (born 1974)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (born Bryce Wilcox; 13 May 1974 in Phoenix, Arizona), is an American Colorado-based computer security specialist, self-proclaimed cypherpunk, and ex-CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the development of Zcash.[1]
May 13, 1974
- Ron Wilcox (father)
- Olene Harris (mother)
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn | |
|---|---|
Wilcox-O'Hearn in 2017 | |
| Born | Bryce Wilcox May 13, 1974 |
| Education | University of Colorado Boulder (BS, Computer Science, 1998) |
| Known for | Zcash, Zooko's triangle, BLAKE2 |
| Parents |
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| Website | zooko on X |
Biography
He is known for the Tahoe Least-Authority File Store (or Tahoe-LAFS), a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem[2][3] released under GPL and the TGPPL licenses. He is the creator of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence (TGPPL).[4]
Wilcox-O'Hearn is the designer of multiple network protocols that incorporate concepts such as self-contained economies and secure reputation systems.[5] He is a member of the development team of ZRTP[6] and the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash function.[7][8]
Zooko's triangle is named after Wilcox-O'Hearn, who described the schema that relates three desirable properties of identifiers in 2001.[9]
Wilcox-O'Hearn was founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises in Boulder, Colorado[1] where he is now an advisor.[10]
Zooko was a developer of the MojoNation[11] P2P system and lead developer of the follow-on Mnet network,[12] and a developer at SimpleGeo.[13]
Wilcox-O'Hearn worked on the first cryptocurrency, DigiCash, with David Chaum in 1996.[14] In January 2009, Wilcox was among the first people to publicly write about Bitcoin, and Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto subsequently linked to Wilcox's blog post from the Bitcoin project's website.[15][16] He is a member of the founding team of the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, which launched in 2016.[14] He served as CEO of the affiliated Electric Coin Company until December 18, 2023, when he was succeeded by Josh Swihart.[17][18] Wilcox later commissioned the Rand Corporation to study whether anonymous coins were disproportionately represented in criminal transactions; the study found they were not.[16]
Additionally Wilcox-O'Hearn was one of the co-creators of Blake3.[19]
