Wow, I was looking for my emails. I remember going to HOPE in 1994 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. Among all the talks I remember Eric Hughes' talk on cryptog

Wow, I was looking for my emails. I remember going to HOPE in 1994 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. Among all the talks I remember Eric Hughes' talk on cryptography. Talks of working with banking and others to bring cryptography and anonymous transactions to fruition almost 2 decades before the Satoshi paper and blockchain. I attended several 2600 meetings at the food court in the Citicorp building before then. Amazing times! There was also a talk at HOPE on controlling the world with your parallel port. This launched me into doing controls for animatronic and window display circuits - the Christmas windows at Saks and Lord & Taylor later in the 90s. Red boxing with tape recorders at payphones and then Radio Shack came out with an affordable speed dialer. Simply replace a crystal on the circuit and program 1,2,3, or 4 quarter tones on it, and voila, free calls from payphones. I wrote a simple OTP in C back then. I'll have to wade through this. I don't think I posted on this group, but I was teaching myself cryptography at the time. I bought a hardcover of Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier around 1995/96...I grew up at the poverty line in the late 60s in Brooklyn, and hacking and the potential of computers and programming enthused me and instilled a sense in me that I could not only be a part of the larger world outside of my parochial surroundings, but possibly be a creator of change in it for the good of the world at large.