A brief history of the…cypherpunks

The guardians of the internet, and how they gave rise to the birth cryptocurrency.

“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.”

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (Eric Hughes, 1993)

Sometime in late 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area, a motley crew of programmers, cryptographers, and privacy-focused individuals got together to share their concerns about the future of the internet. Many of these conversations had been started years earlier after reading David Chaum’s 1985 paper ‘Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete.’

This group of outsiders, with a niche shared interest, got together in a small unassuming office away from the unimpressed glare of the San Francisco party metropolis & started building a community. The focus was a topic almost no-one at the time cared about — but is now one of the most relevant topics across the geo-political landscape, online digital privacy.