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// The Dream: A Borderless and Virtual World //
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Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and we’re going to write it.
Eric Hughes
The Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993
In the early 1990s, a group of mathematicians and prescient software guys believed that the Internet would demolish artificial walls. They were excited about the Internet and anxious about privacy. They thought that once governments understood the Internet’s importance, they would move to co-opt, monitor, and censor it. With the power of encryption, they would use it as a weapon against central planning.
And what is a cypherpunk? They are cryptography activists.
Cypherpunk’s thought that information technology could create a 1984 style tyrannical top-down control society or develop into a decentralised enabler of human freedom. Indeed, their dream was to enable the future of human freedom.
The Internet would soon become an essential battleground for human freedom.
But this time, it would be different. Cypherpunks were anarchists! They had the power of mathematics in their hands. Could hide it anything.
Against the Big Brother!
Cypherpunks saw the future of censorship even before WWW came out. They foretold online censorship and surveillance that would eclipse the open Internet.
Cryptography, according to the cypherpunks, was the only tool capable of ensuring the Internet’s freedom.
Cryptography is the mathematics of codes and codebreaking. Before the 1970s, cryptography was a relatively obscure field practised only by the military and spy agencies. In the view of many, the monopoly was broken when Whitfield Diffie invented “public-key” cryptography. Through the use of technology, public-key cryptography ushered in a new era of activism. This new form of cryptography led to the creation of private mailing lists and software to protect individuals, data houses, and cryptocurrency. Strong encryption (anything with more than 40 bits of security) was deemed a military munition at the time, making it illegal to export from the United States.
The inventions of RSA and PGP foreshadowed a time when people’s digital speech may be genuinely free and private. Encryption was the most effective means of redistributing power away from governments and toward individuals.
These were just the beginning.
A spectre is haunting the modern world, the ghost of crypto anarchy…
… Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!
Timothy C. May
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
“Consider a mailbox, Anyone can throw a letter in a mailbox, but only the mailman who has a key can take it out. Anyone in the world could set up one of these equations, serving as the mailman of his or her very own impenetrable virtual letterbox. And because that individual could prove ownership of the mailbox by opening it with the only known key. Public-key cryptography also made it possible to set up a provable identity on the Internet. Completely disconnected from any real word personal information.” said Whitfield Diffie.
The cypherpunks knew that encryption alone would not be enough to liberate cyberspace. To build a genuinely free digital commons, you needed an utterly sovereign economy. Like a form of digital money. Their mentality was like that:
“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.”
And it follows…
“When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only needs to know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees…….. Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.”
Attempts… Attempts… Attempts…
Hascash. In 1997, it was the first attempt anonymous transaction system developed by Adam Back. His creation was initially meant to limit email spamming and DDoS attacks. It is similar to the proof of work (POW) use in Bitcoin.
In 1998, Wei Dai published a proposal for B-Money. Satoshi Nakamoto referenced b-money when creating Bitcoin. In his essay, published on the cypherpunks mailing list in November 1998, Dai proposed two protocols. The first protocol is impractical as it requires a broadcast channel that is unjammable as well being synchronous.
In 2004, Hal Finney created Reusable Proofs of Work, which was based on the principles of Backs’ Hashcash, and in 2005, Nick Szabo proposed Bitgold, which was based on Hal Finney’s and other projects’ ideas.
As can be seen, since the 1990s, many people from all over the world have been working ceaselessly on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, and there have been several attempts to tackle the difficulties surrounding cryptocurrencies by some of the brightest minds in the field.
Dream Comes True
Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous individual or group of individuals, sent a paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to the cypherpunk mailing list at metzdowd.com in October 2008.
The paper contained obvious allusions to B-money and Hashcash and addressed many of the issues that earlier developers had. Sceptics were quick to dismiss the report, but Nakamoto persisted and mined the Bitcoin genesis block on 3 January 2009.
Last Words…
Crypto-anarchy is still going strong. It thrives in the spaces between the websites and online chat rooms we frequent daily. May and his band of rebels have shifted many people’s perspectives and given birth to the Pirate Utopias we all employ to fight the State’s tentacles. Bitcoin, Tor, and crypto-parties are all trendy concepts in the current internet world.
Right now, a shadow haunts us, and the principles of the early Cypherpunks are being adopted daily. The sky appears to be the limit in this technical assault against the State, based on its ideas proclaimed in the early days of cyberspace. A new era is dawning in which information transmitted by the likes of these Cypherpunks permeates our daily lives.
Governments cannot halt the spread of information.
