David Chaum is a smart guy. He founded DigiCash in 1989 and was the pioneer in electronic cash throughout the 90s. One could even argue that he was Satoshi Nakomoto before Satoshi Nakomoto was a thing. His only error was in not maintaining his anonymity. Before the internet even existed, Chaum and his buddy Silvio Micali (founder of Algorand) were studying cryptography with Leslie Lamport in the 1970s. For all these reasons, Chaum is often referred to as the "crypto godfather."

Who is Leslie Lamport? Oh, you know, he's only the guy who brought the Byzantine General Problem to computer science. Read the seminal paper from 1982 here.

David Chaum’s dissertation was actually written about distributed consensus. But he's such an advocate of privacy that he never opted in to the Berkeley library digitization project. It just sat there on paper for years gathering dust. Even he had forgotten exactly what he had written about four decades prior.

Despite his history, eighteen months ago David Chaum was not a part of the blockchain industry. When he first came to the space via invitation from the Korean blockchain community, he says, “Frankly I was unimpressed.” The dapps and the projects that were prevalent at that time were frankly kind of weak, more opportunistic than revolutionary.

Within a few months of being exposed to the blockchain industry, he announced the launch of his own platform (with attendant cryptocurrency, of course) called Elixxir based on his own cMix privacy solution.

Today at Korea Blockchain Week 2019, Chaum introduced Praxxis, a fundamentally new type of consensus algorithm and currency that goes along with it. He claims that it is a quantum-resistant electronic payment system that also provides the speed and scalability needed to foster global adoption. He expects a Praxxis whitepaper before the end of the year.

This kind of research is incredibly important right now due to the recent revelation that Google has reached quantum supremacy.

In Chaum's world, which is very much focused on privacy concerns, it is “a theft of metadata” that is the biggest threat of all. In his view, this metadata represents what is essential and unique about us all. The fact that it was/is secretly stolen by mega-corporations and governments is far more frightening than the potential threat of having your cryptocurrency stolen by quantum computer hackers. The early cryptographers certainly foresaw this development back in the day but, as Chaum said, "We underestimated the power of those with deep pockets to monetize the data mining and media targeting model" that is so widely prevalent today among internet behemoths. He is also concerned with the government's fascination with what Edward Snowden recently called "the full take," which is spy talk for capturing every bit that travels along every wire in the world and saving it forever, encrypted or not, in the hope that one day they may be able to decrypt that data for political advantage. He states that “the actors that are capable of developing these technologies [quantum resistant tech that would be a serious threat to existing cryptocurrencies] are state actors.”

As long as this information continues to be easily available and basically unprotected, it can be used to manipulate not only our political implementation, our votes (as we found in the Cambridge Analytica scandal) but also our society as a whole. If advancements in privacy and quantum-resistant cryptography do not continue to proceed apace, our basic ability to be a human being is compromised. He concludes with the simple mantra:

We must protect our metadata.