I heard Eric Hughes talk at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in NYC in 1994[1]. Amazing talk on crypto and digital banking in the future and digita

I heard Eric Hughes talk at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in NYC in 1994[1]. Amazing talk on crypto and digital banking in the future and digital currencies decades before Bitcoin. I was juiced. I bought and started reading Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. I was introduced to the J programming language and then APL, and I found this little treasure, "Mr. Babbage's Secret: The Tale of a Cypher and APL", and although no where in subject matter or as rigorous as Schneier's book, it was fun. It had old posts in newspapers where people shared secret messages. The book goes into Babbage's life and interest in these ciphers. It has APL code for the examples, which is great because of its conciseness you don't need pages of code to sift through in the book. However, it is written in a much less concise form with comments compared with modern APL. I moved away from crypto and into hardware hacking and circuitry. I got into robotics and left the cypherpunk world behind! Another talk at that first HOPE was on using the parallel port to control motors and other things. Eric Hughes gave a great talk. I know video was recorded, so it would be good to watch it all for fun and memories. Footnote: I had a chance to buy Bitcoin in May 2013 for around $124. It had just left double digits, and I was sweating buying 20 for $2500! My luck! [1] https://infocondb.org/con/hope/hackers-on-planet-earth/cryptography-and-privacy https://infocondb.org/con/hope/hackers-on-planet-earth/crypt...