Cypherpunks

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Beginning

  • In the early nineties, a group of cryptography experts called ‘cypherpunks’ gave life to ideas like digital currency and promoting freedom through the use of technology. In the early days strong proponents of cryptography and privacy-centric technology
.
  • David Chaum published a paper in 1985 discussing anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation protocols – Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete.
  • The original group of Cypherpunks met in 1992 in San Francisco. This then grew into a global mailing list with over 700 members. The set of topics amalgamated mathematics, cryptography, politics and philosophy and computer science.

Main points

The main tenets of the movement can be gleamed from a quote by Eric Hughes in his Cypherpunk’s manifesto of 1993:

  • Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age...
  • We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy...
  • We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any...
  • Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and ... we're going to write it...

The Cypherpunk mailing list gradually evolved into different forms – for example anonymous and Cryptoparty , but the same underlying libertarian beliefs of rights to privacy and anonymity remained in various forms.

Members

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