With cryptocurrencies dominating the news cycle, the cypherpunk community has once again come to the fore. The increasing use of blockchain technology also means that the number of individuals identifying as cypherpunks is rapidly growing worldwide, posing a concern for government and law enforcement institutions.
But who are cypherpunks, where did they come from, and what do they want?
What Is a Cypherpunk and What’s Their History?
The cypherpunk movement does not have an exact date of birth. Still, its origins can be traced back to the mid-1970s with the US government’s publication of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie’s pioneering study on public-key encryption.
Before this, cryptography as a technological field was extremely niche. It was only used by the military and intelligence agencies, and a huge amount of work in the field was classified.
In 1992, three friends Eric Hughes, Timothy May, and John Gilmore, convened for a meeting that would eventually give rise to the cypherpunk movement.
Hughes was a mathematician at UC Berkeley, May was a businessman employed by Intel, and Gilmore was a computer scientist who worked for Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle). Together, the three individuals discussed issues surrounding cryptography and privacy.
Around the same time, Hughes, May, and Gilmore launched a series of projects that garnered much interest from like-minded people: Hughes started a Cypherpunk mailing list and ran the first anonymous remailer, while May published The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.
Seeing that new movement swiftly gathering momentum in cyberspace, programmer, author, and civil rights activist Judith “Jude” Milhon coined the term “cypherpunks” to describe the community, playing on the word “cipher” and changing it to “cypher,” and combining it the sci-fi genre “cyberpunk.”
In 1993, Hughes wrote and published a piece of work that would mark the beginning of the cypherpunk movement, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.
The Cypherpunk Movement: Aims and Goals
As outlined in A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto:
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Clearly, the main goal is to retain the power to choose what to reveal and what to conceal about ourselves, and cypherpunks want to achieve this without interference by the government and corporations.
On top of this, many cypherpunks believe that governments are conducting mass surveillance on citizens, and they are collecting and withholding important data from said mass surveillance programs. As we know from Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding PRISM, the NSA, GCHQ, and other data collection programs, this is true.
In the finance industry, cypherpunks also advocate for the absence of governments and central banks in any transactions involving money. They feel that financial institutions run by one central system are unable to prevent crimes such as fraud, theft, and money laundering. This belief played a central role in the birth of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
What Does a Cypherphunk Do?
How do cypherpunks go about defending or projecting their interests? The manifesto answers this:
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
In the past decade, cypherpunks have created a slew of cryptography-based functions that supported the movement. For example, in 1997, British cypherpunk Adam Back developed Hashcash, an anonymous transaction system used to limit spam emails and cyberattacks.
Next, in 1998, computer engineer Wei Dai published a proposal that talked about b-money, “an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system,” which would serve as a template for developing cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Such is Dai’s contribution to cryptocurrency that the smallest subunit of Ether is named after him: the Wei.
In 2004, developer Hal Finney built upon Adam Back’s Hashcash and created the first reusable proof of work system, which would later become a foundation for cryptocurrencies. Finney also became the first recipient of Bitcoin when it went live in 2009.
Code and scripts written by cypherpunks are mostly free and readily accessible on the internet. This is because, as proponents of the right to privacy, cypherpunks want other cypherpunks to use, attack, and improve on each other’s codes to make them as secure as possible.
In short, with one innovation built upon another, the cypherpunk movement slowly gained traction outside of the US and UK.
Notable Cypherphunks
In A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, Hughes wrote that a cypherpunk’s personal identity is “not salient,” and it seems like the movement is an underground one. However, some members have managed to make international headlines with their work in the field. You’ve definitely heard of some of the most well-known cypherpunks in the twenty-first century.
- Julian Assange: the founder of WikiLeaks, is perhaps the most notorious cypherpunk to date. Though WikiLeaks was launched in 2006, and it only took the world by storm in the early 2010s, Assange said that he joined the cypherpunk movement as early as 1993 or 1994.
- Jacob Appelbaum: One of the anonymous web browser developers, Tor, which uses onion routing, is a cypherpunk. He has also been a vocal spokesperson for WikiLeaks.
- Bram Cohen: the founder of the file-sharing platform BitTorrent, is a cypherpunk. In 2017, he co-founded Chia Network and developed the cryptocurrency, Chia.
- Satoshi Nakamoto: the founder of Bitcoin is also another big name in the cypherpunk community. However, other than his name, nobody really knows the background of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Last but not least, though having never identified as a cypherpunk, Edward Snowden’s story has been cited as a famous example of government surveillance, which lent more credence to the cypherpunk movement’s aim to break away from government control.
Cypherpunks Aren’t Going Anywhere
As advancements in technology continue to raise new and important questions about data and privacy, it seems that the existence of a community like the cypherpunks is only natural.
It was the cypherpunks who are behind the different technologies that led to cryptocurrency. The mainstream appeal of crypto serves as a testament to the success of the cypherpunk movement. In all, it seems that the cypherpunks are only marching forward, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon.
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