--- alias: - Cypherpunk - Cypherpunk movement - Cypherpunks mailing list category: Ideology created: 2026-06-19 location: San Francisco Bay Area, California summary: The cypherpunks were a cryptography-and-privacy movement organized around a mailing list founded in 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy May, and John Gilmore, whose advocacy of strong encryption and digital cash against state control ran forward into Bitcoin and WikiLeaks. tags: - Concept - Cypherpunks - Cryptography - CryptoAnarchy - Privacy - DigitalCash - Cryptocurrency updated: 2026-06-19 --- The cypherpunks were a loose movement of cryptographers, programmers, and privacy activists who held that individuals should use strong encryption to defend privacy and resist state surveillance and control of money. The movement coalesced around a mailing list founded in 1992 by the mathematician Eric Hughes, the former Intel engineer [Timothy May](/people/timothy-may/), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Gilmore. Its program combined anonymous communication, digital signatures, and untraceable electronic money, and its members designed the digital-cash schemes that preceded Bitcoin. The list overlapped heavily with the [extropian](/concepts/extropianism/) subculture, and the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was an early member.[^1][^2][^3] ### Origins In late 1992 May, Hughes, and Gilmore invited about twenty programmers and cryptographers to Hughes's house in Oakland, California, after a series of informal Bay Area gatherings. Hughes set up an email list to reach interested parties beyond the Bay Area, hosted on the server that ran Gilmore's toad.com. At an early meeting the writer Jude Milhon, who published in Mondo 2000 under the name "St. Jude," coined the term "cypherpunks" as a play on the cyberpunk science-fiction genre. The list grew to roughly 700 subscribers by 1994 and around 2,000 by 1997.[^1][^3] The first physical meeting ran a "crypto-anarchy game" in which May handed out role cards for an FBI agent, an NSA agent, and ordinary citizens to act out the dynamics of surveillance and encrypted communication. Beyond the central email list the group built privacy tools in practice, running chains of anonymous remailers, most prominently the Cypherpunk and later Mixmaster designs descended from Gilmore and Hughes's early work, so that messages could be stripped of routing information and bounced through multiple operators before delivery. May's Cyphernomicon, the long FAQ he wrote for the list in 1994, served as its reference document and was hosted by Gilmore's company Cygnus Solutions.[^1][^10] ### The Manifestos May had already written "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" in 1988 and distributed it at the Crypto '88 and Hackers conferences, circulating it again to the new list in 1992. It opened "A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy," and argued that cryptography would alter the power of corporations and governments over economic transactions much as printing had reduced the power of medieval guilds. In March 1993 Hughes published "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," which declared that "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age" and that "Cypherpunks write code," committing the movement to building privacy tools rather than lobbying for them.[^2][^4] Hughes's manifesto drew a distinction between privacy and secrecy, defining privacy as "the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world" and arguing that "we cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence," so privacy had to be built into software by those who wanted it. The "write code" ethos set the cypherpunks apart from policy-focused privacy advocates and produced a stream of working tools, from remailers and encryption software to the digital-cash experiments. May's 1994 Cyphernomicon, a long FAQ written for the list, set out the fuller body of crypto-anarchist thought, including his [BlackNet](/concepts/blacknet/) thought experiment for an anonymous information market.[^5][^13] ### Crypto-Anarchy and Digital Cash The cypherpunks drew on the blind-signature digital-cash work of the cryptographer [David Chaum](/people/david-chaum/), whose DigiCash company Hughes had studied in the Netherlands, and pushed toward money that no government could trace or regulate. Chaum's blind signature, set out in his 1982 paper, let a bank certify a coin without seeing its serial number, so payments stayed anonymous while remaining unforgeable, and his eCash product launched through DigiCash in the mid-1990s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1998, undone by its dependence on banks and the centralized issuer that controlled the ledger, a weakness the later designs set out to remove.[^14] Several list members and overlapping extropians produced the direct precursors to cryptocurrency: [Nick Szabo](/people/nick-szabo/)'s "bit gold," [Hal Finney](/people/hal-finney/)'s reusable proof-of-work, [Adam Back](/people/adam-back/)'s Hashcash, and [Wei Dai](/people/wei-dai/)'s "b-money." The pseudonymous [Satoshi Nakamoto](/concepts/satoshi-nakamoto/) cited b-money and Hashcash in the 2008 Bitcoin white paper, which was first announced to a cryptography mailing list descended from the cypherpunk milieu, and Finney received the first Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto in January 2009.[^3][^6][^7] ### The Crypto Wars Through the 1990s the cypherpunks fought United States export controls that classified strong cryptography as a munition under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Clinton administration's 1993 "Clipper chip" proposal for key-escrow encryption, under which the government would hold a copy of every key. The campaign mixed litigation with deliberate provocations: activists printed the RSA algorithm on T-shirts and in a machine-readable book to test whether publishing code counted as exporting a weapon, and Zimmermann's MIT Press release of the PGP source code as a printed book in 1995 was designed to invoke First Amendment protection for the printed word.[^1][^3] The decisive case was Bernstein v. United States, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of the mathematician Daniel Bernstein, in which a federal court ruled in 1996 that source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the export licensing scheme was an unconstitutional prior restraint. The Department of Justice investigated Zimmermann from 1993 for "munitions export without a license" over PGP's spread overseas and dropped the case without charges in January 1996, and the Clipper chip proposal collapsed after the cryptographer Matt Blaze exposed a flaw in its escrow protocol in 1994. The Clinton administration substantially relaxed the export rules in 2000.[^11][^12] ### WikiLeaks and Bitcoin Julian Assange participated on the list from the mid-1990s and built encryption tools in line with its philosophy before founding [WikiLeaks](/organizations/wikileaks/); his 2012 book *Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet* opened with the line "The universe believes in encryption." The journalist Andy Greenberg traced the line from the cypherpunks to WikiLeaks and the broader hacktivist world in *This Machine Kills Secrets* (2012).[^3][^8] When Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Bank of America cut off donations to WikiLeaks in December 2010 in what became known as the banking blockade, the organization turned to Bitcoin, providing one of the cryptocurrency's first prominent real-world uses as censorship-resistant money; Satoshi Nakamoto, days before departing, urged the project not to draw that "heat" onto the young network. The movement's digital-cash thread runs into cryptocurrency and connects to the financial-sovereignty politics later associated with the [sovereign-individual](/concepts/the-sovereign-individual/) thesis and parts of the [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) network.[^9][^15] [^1]: "Cypherpunks Write Code," *American Scientist,* on the 1992 founding by May, Hughes, and Gilmore, the toad.com list, Jude Milhon's coinage, the subscriber counts, and the crypto wars. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/cypherpunks-write-code [^2]: Hughes, Eric. "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," 9 March 1993. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html [^3]: Greenberg, Andy. *This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information.* Dutton, 2012. [^4]: May, Timothy C. "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988, recirculated 1992. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html [^5]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt [^6]: Nakamoto, Satoshi. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," 2008, citing Wei Dai's b-money and Adam Back's Hashcash. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [^7]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on the extropian and cypherpunk overlap and the digital-cash precursors of bit gold, RPOW, and b-money. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/ [^8]: Assange, Julian, with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. *Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.* OR Books, 2012. [^9]: "Julian Assange," Cypherpunks Mailing List archive (proff@iq.org), on Assange's posts from the mid-1990s. https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/authors/julian_assange_proff_at_iq_org_/ [^10]: May, Timothy C. *The Cyphernomicon,* 1994, on the early meetings, the crypto-anarchy game, and the remailer culture. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt [^11]: "Bernstein v. U.S. Dept. of Justice," Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the 1996 rulings that source code is protected speech and the export licensing scheme an unconstitutional prior restraint. https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice [^12]: "The Crypto Wars," on the ITAR munitions classification, the Zimmermann investigation closed in January 1996, Matt Blaze's 1994 finding against the Clipper chip, and the 2000 relaxation of export controls. See Levy, Steven. *Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.* Viking, 2001. [^13]: Hughes, Eric. "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto," 9 March 1993, on privacy as the selective revelation of oneself and the rejection of relying on governments and corporations. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html [^14]: Chaum, David. "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments," 1982; and "The Genesis Files: How David Chaum's eCash Spawned a Cypherpunk Dream," *Bitcoin Magazine,* April 2018, on DigiCash and its 1998 bankruptcy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-how-david-chaums-ecash-spawned-cypherpunk-dream [^15]: Greenberg, Andy. "WikiLeaks Asks For Anonymous Bitcoin Donations," *Forbes,* 2011, on the December 2010 banking blockade and the turn to Bitcoin; and Nakamoto's warning on the bitcointalk forum, December 2010. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280