The prehistory of cryptocurrencies Cryptographic money was first mooted by David Chaum in his 1982 paper “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments”12 and his 1985 paper “Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete.”13 Chaum founded DigiCash in 1990 to put his ideas into practice. It failed in the market, however, and closed in 1998. Most concepts later used in Bitcoin originated on the Cypherpunks mailing list in the early 1990s. The ideology was libertarian right-wing anarchism, often explicitly labeled anarcho-capitalism;
