James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of "The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future." His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to "The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto" to be published by Ignota Books.
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It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.