Cypherpunk
Also: cypherpunks, cypherpunk movement
history · beginner
A loose 1990s movement that believed strong cryptography, deployed by individuals, was the only durable check on state and corporate power.
The Cypherpunks were a mailing list and a posture. The list ran from 1992 onward; the posture, captured in Eric Hughes's 1993 *Cypherpunk Manifesto*, was that privacy in the digital age was a precondition for an open society, and that privacy could not be granted — it had to be enforced by the math.
> "Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it." — Hughes, 1993
The cast: Tim May (whose 1988 *Crypto Anarchist Manifesto* opened the conversation), Hal Finney, Adam Back (Hashcash), Wei Dai (b-money), Nick Szabo (bit gold), Phil Zimmermann (PGP), David Chaum (DigiCash). They argued for, prototyped, and shipped anonymous remailers, digital cash schemes, public-key crypto for the masses, and distributed timestamping. Most of their experiments failed commercially. Almost every primitive Bitcoin uses traces back to a cypherpunk paper or piece of code.
Satoshi posted the Bitcoin whitepaper to the (by then much quieter) cryptography mailing list on 2008-10-31. He addressed the cypherpunk audience directly — Wei Dai and Adam Back are the only people Satoshi is known to have corresponded with by email prior to the launch. The whitepaper's references list b-money and Hashcash. Bitcoin is the cypherpunks' first commercially successful artifact.