Timothy C. May

Timothy Christopher May (21 December 1951 – 13 December 2018), usually known as Tim May, was an American electronics engineer and writer. At Intel, he co-authored influential research on radiation-induced errors in semiconductor memory. After retiring from the company in 1986, he became one of the organizers of the Cypherpunks and a prominent advocate of crypto anarchy.

Engineering career

May joined Intel during the company's early years and worked on semiconductor-device reliability. With Murray H. Woods, he investigated unexplained changes in stored bits in dynamic random-access memory. Their experiments showed that alpha particles emitted by trace radioactive contaminants in packaging materials could create sufficient charge in silicon to change a memory cell's state.

The 1979 paper developed a physical model, measured alpha activity in materials and discussed implications for denser memories. IEEE's Electron Devices Society later described the May–Woods work as a seminal demonstration of radiation-induced soft errors in commercial memory devices. Manufacturers responded to this class of problem through changes in packaging, materials, circuit design and error mitigation; it is inaccurate to credit one universal fix to May alone.

May became a senior scientist at Intel and retired in 1986. He later lived near Corralitos, California, and concentrated on writing, cryptography and political discussion.

Cypherpunk activity

In 1992, May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore began holding meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area and set up the Cypherpunks mailing list. The list brought together technical work and policy argument about encryption, anonymous communication, digital cash, pseudonyms and government controls on cryptography.

May's own political position was more specifically crypto-anarchist. He predicted that public-key cryptography, anonymous networks and electronic money would allow people to transact and associate outside many forms of state and institutional control. He drafted The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in 1988 and later circulated it electronically. His views were influential but were not a platform accepted by every mailing-list participant.

Writings

May's largest cypherpunk text was The Cyphernomicon, a long FAQ-style collection released as a public snapshot in 1994. It covered cryptographic concepts, remailers, digital cash, surveillance, law, reputation systems and crypto anarchy. May described it as a personal, incomplete document and warned that its contentious political passages could be distorted by selective quotation.

He also wrote “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy”, contributed extensively to mailing-list discussions and spoke at technology gatherings. His work is often discussed as part of the intellectual background of digital currencies, but he did not design Bitcoin and no reliable evidence identifies him as Satoshi Nakamoto.

Death and legacy

May died at his home on 13 December 2018, eight days before his 67th birthday. His legacy joins two fields that are otherwise quite different: the engineering study of soft errors in integrated circuits and the political history of privacy technology. Later descriptions of him sometimes collapse cypherpunk ideas into cryptocurrency advocacy; his central concern was broader—the effect of strong cryptography and anonymous communication on institutions and individual autonomy.

External links

• The Cyphernomicon archive at MIT
• Cypherpunks mailing-list archive