Modulo 59

projectb59.com just got a new front door. You can now choose between the Timeline to Bitcoin and the new Gaming History archive, covering early games, Sierra, Atari, consoles, virtual worlds, digital economies, preservation, and playable history. The Sierra side also got a major rebuild, with new Vault records, source trails, and a much deeper Buckazoids section. A special thanks to @caboken and Roberta, and to @TheColossalCave and @SierraOnlineUni for helping keep so much Sierra history alive. And Ken, if you ever dig up anything cool from the old Sierra days that deserves a safe home, send it our way. We’d be very happy to preserve it in the Vault for you 😉

In the early 1990s, a group of mathematicians and engineers organized around a mailing list and called themselves cypherpunks. They were not optimistic about what was coming. They watched governments push for mandated encryption backdoors, prosecute a developer for shipping privacy software, and attempt to install surveillance mechanisms into the telephone network at the hardware level. They published their analysis. They wrote the code. They warned that a small number of institutions, given control of communication infrastructure, would use it. They were right. The tools they built -- b-money, Hashcash, DigiCash, Bit Gold -- are the technical lineage behind modern blockchain technology. Most of that work is disappearing. Forum threads go dead. Personal sites go offline. Mailing list archives rot. What remains is increasingly mythology -- a simplified story that starts much later than the actual history, strips out the politics, and loses the warning. The mission of Project B59 is to preserve the history that preceded Bitcoin: the writings, the code, the archived websites, the mailing list debates, the forgotten projects, and the games. We locate primary sources, document their provenance, and make them permanently accessible before they vanish from the internet. From the cypherpunks building anonymous remailers to the early virtual worlds that first experimented with digital economies, these stories share a common thread. The technical lineage behind the tools we use today was built by people who never got credit. Preserving the record is how we honor the work.

Project B59 got a new look. Still chasing the same rabbit holes, strange connections, forgotten names, old papers, early internet history, Bitcoin, games, and all the little threads that somehow keep leading in the same spot.. 👇

In 1987, Phil Salin and Tim May had a conversation that May later traced directly to the development of crypto-anarchy. Salin saw online markets. May saw networks that could move information and money beyond state control. The missing piece was untraceable payments. The next day, May went back to David Chaum’s work and called what followed “an epiphany.” Five years later, the Cypherpunks mailing list was born.