Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by coin desk.

What's going on guys? It is Sunday, January 24th, and that means it's time for Long

Reads Sunday. Before we start today's Long Reads Sunday, however, I want to take you back to 1991.

In that year, a man named Phil Zimmerman created the first version of something that he called

Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. PGP was a type of encryption, and Phil's motivation had been that as a

long-time anti-nuclear activist, people like him could securely use bulletin board systems as well as store

important messages and files.

When PGP was released, it was with no license fee for non-commercial use,

and the complete source code was included with all copies.

This quickly found its way onto the internet with some interesting consequences.

In February of 1993, Zimmerman became the target of a criminal investigation by the U.S. government

for exporting munitions without a license.

This sort of encryption was at the time considered munitions, and the penalties for this sort of

export were, as you might imagine, pretty big.

This began what became known as the Crypto Wars, a series of battles throughout the 1990s

where cypherpunks and their allies fought to keep this sort of privacy technology easily

available. The way they took on this particular set of regulations was pretty original.

Zimmerman published the entire source code of PGP in a hardcover book via MIT Press.

This was distributed and sold widely, and basically anyone with the book then had the code.

The point was that while the export of munitions like guns and bombs was restricted, the export of books is protected by the First Amendment.

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