Cypherpunk movement

The cypherpunk movement advocates for the use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies to change society and politics. It started in the late 1980s, originally, communicating via electronic mailing lists with the aim to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography.

Until the 1970s, cryptography could only be found in the military or spy agencies. It changed when two publications brought cryptography to light: the US government's Data Encryption Standard (DES) and the first publicly available work on public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, “New Directions in Cryptography”. Later, David Chaum reused the concept of public keys to create eCash, which we featured in our first newsletter.

In 1993, the "cypherpunk" appeared in Eric Hughes' "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto". It combines the ideas of cyberpunk (a sub-genre of science-fiction featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements juxtaposed with radical change in the social order), the spirit of individualism (in the cyberspace) and the use of strong encryption to preserve privacy. Cypherpunks advocate that the use of strong encryption will enable individuals to have private transactions without a central authority interfering.

It's no wonder that after eCash, numerous attempts were made to create a digital currency, like "hashcash", "b-money" (which already introduced the concept of users keeping separate databases of who owns what) or "bit gold". These attempts laid the groundwork for other cypherpunks to build on it. In 2004, Hal Finney built a reusable proof-of-work based on what had been proposed by hashcash. Finally in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the bitcoin whitepaper with direct references to hashcash and b-money; which has been the consecration of all the work previously done and which gave the world the blockchain.