The crypto world has been mourning the passing of Timothy C. May at the age of 67. While an unknown entity to the general public, to early internet adopters, cypherpunks, libertarians, and cryptography evangelists, May's writings remain hallowed. The intellectual was an early advocate against state surveillance, privacy erosions, and bête noire of the statist Silicon Valley startups whose tech dystopia has surreptitiously smothered society. May's legacy lives on through his powerful writings that are as potent today as when they first appeared in the late 80s.

Timothy May: Taken Too Early and Ahead of His Time

"Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re-routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering," predicted Timothy May in 1988 with uncanny prescience. "Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation."

The cryptography community has often bemoaned the cryptocurrency community's commandeering of the phrase "crypto". In the case of Timothy May, however, both groups can lay claim to the cypherpunk godfather's legacy. May was crypto in every sense of the word, shaping the nascent cypherpunk movement, which pioneered and pushed for strong cryptographic protocols, while paving the way for the cryptocurrency revolution that would burst into life more than two decades after he published his seminal Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.

A Free Bird Who Refused to Be Pigeon-Holed

May (left) gracing the cover on a 1993 Wired magazine

Timothy C. May, or simply Tim to his friends, was a visionary, a maverick and a free-thinker. The phrase "ahead of his time" has long since been reduced to the realm of cliché, but if ever there was a man to whom the the term belonged, it was May. While it's easy to compose hagiographies of the recently deceased, it's hard to look at May's most famous writings and not feel a sense of awe. Had they been composed in 2018 they would have warranted all the RTs, regrams, shares and faves they would have doubtless received.