Cypherpunk

Cypherpunk describes a member of a loosely organized community of cryptographers, programmers and privacy activists who believe that strong cryptography and freely available software are the most reliable tools for protecting individual freedom against surveillance by governments and corporations. The name, coined by activist Jude Milhon, blends "cipher" with "cyberpunk" and stuck after a small group began meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1992 and launched the Cypherpunks mailing list.

The movement's defining text is Eric Hughes's 1993 essay "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," which opens with "privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age" and ends with the rallying cry "cypherpunks write code": rather than lobby for privacy rights, members simply built the software themselves. Early output included Phil Zimmermann's PGP email encryption, David Chaum's anonymous digital cash research, and remailers that stripped identifying data from messages before forwarding them.

Cypherpunks are widely regarded as the intellectual ancestors of Bitcoin. Adam Back's Hashcash proof-of-work scheme, Wei Dai's b-money proposal and Nick Szabo's bit gold design, all discussed on the mailing list during the 1990s, are cited directly in the Bitcoin whitepaper, and list member Hal Finney received the first bitcoin transaction ever sent. Whatever Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator's ties to the group, the project's aims, censorship-resistant, permissionless money outside the control of any state, mirror the manifesto almost word for word.

The label still applies today to anyone who builds or champions privacy-preserving technology, from encrypted messaging to decentralized networks, keeping the original ethos alive well beyond the original mailing list.