Glossary / Culture & history
Cypherpunk
- Definition
- A cypherpunk is a member of the privacy movement that argued from the early 1990s that strong cryptography, rather than legislation, is what protects individuals from surveillance.
The movement was a mailing list, not an organization. It began in 1992 among Bay Area programmers and mathematicians, and its slogan, from Eric Hughes' manifesto of March 9, 1993, was that cypherpunks write code. Bitcoin came out of that tradition three decades in, and its whitepaper cites two proposals first circulated on cypherpunk lists.
How it works
The cypherpunk position was that privacy is something you build, not something you request.
Its founding argument, made by Eric Hughes in A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, is that privacy in an electronic society means the power to reveal yourself selectively, and that anonymous transaction systems are what make that power real. Timothy May had already pushed the idea further in his Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, distributed in 1988, which predicted that untraceable digital payments would arrive whether or not governments approved.
Those were not abstract debates at the time. Encryption software was regulated in the United States as a munition, and Phil Zimmermann, who released PGP in 1991, spent years under federal criminal investigation for its spread abroad; the case was dropped in January 1996. Daniel Bernstein sued over the same export rules and won on the ground that source code is protected speech, a Ninth Circuit ruling in 1999 that fed into the loosening of the controls the following year. The list's answer throughout was to publish working software faster than the rules could be enforced.
Money was a recurring subject because it was the obvious hole. David Chaum's blind signature work gave the field untraceable digital cash on paper, and his company DigiCash built it and then went bankrupt in 1998 because it still needed a bank at the center. The proposals that followed tried to remove that center: Adam Back's Hashcash in 1997, Wei Dai's b-money in 1998, Nick Szabo's bit gold, and Hal Finney's reusable proofs of work in 2004. Each solved part of the problem and none produced a working currency.
Where you see it
Cypherpunk assumptions are visible in bitcoin's defaults, which is why some of them feel unfriendly.
Addresses carry no names and a wallet generates a new one for every payment, because the design assumes the observer is hostile. Keys are held by the user, so there is nobody to appeal to when they are lost. The software is open source and the specification is public, following the list's rule that unaudited cryptography is not cryptography. Satoshi Nakamoto announced the whitepaper on October 31, 2008 to the Cryptography mailing list, a descendant of the original cypherpunks list, to an audience that had watched every previous attempt fail.
The heritage also explains a running tension you will meet as a buyer. Almost every practical route into bitcoin now runs through an identity-verified exchange, which is precisely the arrangement the movement set out to make unnecessary. Hal Finney, who received the first bitcoin transaction in January 2009, had been on that list since the beginning.