The Cypherpunks: The Mailing List Behind Crypto's Ideas

Many of the people who laid the groundwork for cryptocurrency met in the same place: a mailing list. In 1992 a small group in the San Francisco Bay Area began discussing how strong cryptography could protect individual privacy. They called themselves cypherpunks, and their ideas, code and arguments shaped what came later.

How the group started

The cypherpunk mailing list grew out of regular meetings organised by Eric Hughes, Timothy May and John Gilmore in 1992. Early participants were programmers, mathematicians and privacy advocates. The mailing list let people around the world join the same conversation, and it became a place to share code, draft proposals and argue about policy.

The name is a play on cipher and cyberpunk. It signalled both the technical focus and a certain impatience with waiting for governments or companies to provide privacy.

The ideas that defined it

In 1993 Eric Hughes published A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, which argued that privacy in an electronic age needs to be built into the tools people use, not left to the goodwill of institutions. The group's slogan is often summarised as "cypherpunks write code": rather than only lobbying, members wrote software to put their principles into practice.

Common themes included:

• Strong encryption for everyone. Cryptography should not be a tool reserved for governments and large firms.
• Anonymous communication. This led to work on anonymous remailers, which strip identifying information from email.
• Digital cash. Payments should be possible without exposing every purchase to a bank or intermediary.
• Open source code. Security tools should be inspectable by anyone.

The political backdrop: the Crypto Wars

The movement formed during what are now called the Crypto Wars. In the United States, strong cryptography was treated as a munition under export rules. Phil Zimmermann released PGP in 1991, and he later faced a criminal investigation over its distribution, which was dropped in 1996. In 1993 the government proposed the Clipper chip, an encryption scheme with a built-in way for authorities to access keys, which drew sustained criticism from privacy advocates and security researchers. The Clipper proposal did not take hold.

These fights gave the cypherpunks a clear cause and a sense that the technical choices of the era would have lasting political effects.

From mailing list to money

Digital cash was a recurring subject. David Chaum's earlier work on blind signatures was widely discussed. Adam Back, an active member, proposed Hashcash in 1997, a proof-of-work system originally meant to make email spam costly. Wei Dai posted his b-money proposal to the list in 1998, and Nick Szabo, who was also associated with the community, designed bit gold in the same period. Each of these pieces appears, directly or indirectly, in the lineage of Bitcoin.

When Satoshi Nakamoto announced Bitcoin on a cryptography mailing list in October 2008, the proposal landed in a community that already understood the problems it was trying to solve. Hal Finney, a long-time cypherpunk and PGP developer, was among the first people to run the Bitcoin software and received the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto in January 2009.

People and projects

The list brought together a wide range of contributors. Timothy May had written the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in 1988, setting out a more radical vision of untraceable digital interaction. Hal Finney wrote code for anonymous remailers and later created RPOW, a system for reusable proofs of work, in 2004. Adam Back worked on Hashcash, and Wei Dai and Nick Szabo wrote the proposals for b-money and bit gold. Not everyone on the list agreed with each other, and debates over tactics, legality and ethics were a regular feature. What united them was the belief that working software mattered more than petitions.

Practical advice that comes out of this tradition, such as encrypting disks and email and limiting what data you collect, is part of good security hygiene today. Our security page lists the protections that come with Zebra Hosting plans.

What came out of it beyond Bitcoin

The movement's influence is wider than cryptocurrency. Several things now taken for granted trace back to the same debates:

• Widespread HTTPS and end-to-end encrypted messaging.
• Tools for anonymous browsing such as Tor, whose onion routing research began separately but was embraced by the privacy community.
• The principle that security software should be open to public review.

Criticism and limits

The cypherpunk vision has always had critics. Law enforcement agencies argue that strong, anonymous tools can shelter criminals. Some economists and technologists note that a movement based on distrust of institutions can underestimate the value of accountability and consumer protection. Cryptocurrency history includes both privacy-preserving experiments and large-scale fraud, and it is fair to say the early ideals did not always survive contact with a commercial market.

A practical lesson for site owners

The enduring cypherpunk idea that matters most for anyone running a website is that encryption should be the default. Free SSL certificates have made HTTPS available to every site, and there is no good reason to leave a login or checkout page unencrypted. Read how it works on our SSL page, and every Zebra Hosting plan includes free Let's Encrypt certificates.