Sam Maloney, a 35 year-old programmer and father of two, has been tragically killed by law enforcement officers in an unresolved raid in his London, ON home on December 23rd 2016. The case is currently under investigation.
Sam was the creator and core developer of MORPHiS, a system for distributed file storage and encrypted messaging. He is also the inventor of DPUSH (DMAIL), a decentralized spam resistant unsolicited messaging protocol based on Proof-of-Work. He believe his inventions would also help scale and develop Bitcoin, and he had been working on decentralized Bitcoin microtransations networks before the publication of Lightening, which he thought MORPHiS was the missing piece to.
Sam was an idealist, he wanted to make the world a better place through technology. Like Satoshi, Sam didn't just talk about using disruptive technologies to change the world: he coded and implemented his ideas in an open-source software and grew a community around his project. He dedicated his entire life to his project, a gift to humanity that he hoped would bring peace to the world. He held radical, controversial political views that he was not afraid to express and defend. He was deeply devoted to the cause of privacy and censorship-resistance. He was a brilliant and gifted distributed systems expert, and there is no telling what incredible technical contributions he would have made to our community.
On his mission statement, Sam wrote:
"This is my life until success or death; and I am young!"
His last commit to Morphis was on December 21st, two days before he was shot to death by police in front of his wife.
Rest in peace, Sam.
More about Sam's work
After successfully completing DMAIL and releasing MORPHiS in 2015 (I tried it, it works), Sam was working on a Bitcoin Microtransaction and Mixing Layer, which in hindsight seems to be similar to lightening. He envisioned his Bitcoin micro-payments architecture as an incentive layer for TOR and distributed computation, an alternative design for what Ethereum used to do based on the Bitcoin stack. After completing MORPHiS' Bitcoin integration, he was going to work on a web-of-trust. Ultimately, this technology was in his mind going to be the foundation for an Utopia, which he name the Atlantis project, inspired by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
In his words:
MORPHiS will be backed by Bitcoin for the incentivized layer. It will be a symbiont with Bitcoin. I fully grok that the hash power cannot be split and thus things like Maidsafe I believe are not the answer. I like to combine simple things to get the emergent properties. So MORPHiS is simple, combined with Bitcoin which is simple, we will have much more than the sum of the parts. MORPHiS is different as well in that it does not depend on Bitcoin and may never, it may simply augment itself with Bitcoin, and for sure is planned to augment Bitcoin with a microtransaction and mixing network.
MORPHiS is fully functional. Sam was also interested in building tools for direct democracy and governance, and contributed to numerous P2P technology projects that had privacy and liberty as stated goals.
On his mission
I am doing this all for free for all humanity because I hate evil. My #1 guiding moral principal is that I am morally opposed to slavery in every form, including the covert economic slavery powered by lies that is used today in all nations that claim they do not allow slavery. I do not believe in 'neccessary evil'. Infact, I know that there is no neccessary evil, such is only shortcuts which lead to destruction. Nothing will stop me from completing my life's work, my purpose in life. This is my calling. I am and for years already been working on this full time; and I will continue to do so until it is finished.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...push_has_been/