Progress pill
The political trend among bitcoiners

Who are the cypherpunks?

What's your Political Leaning?

Who are the cypherpunks?

This movement was born in the early 1990s out of concern for human freedom in the face of government surveillance in the digital age.
They are emerging in a context where information and communication technologies are developing rapidly, but where governments and corporations are also beginning to exert greater control over these technologies. It's a movement that intersects with libertarian and anarchist thinkers. It is motivated by concerns about mass surveillance and the violation of privacy.
The idea was to make anonymity and financial freedom accessible to all, thanks to digital cryptographic tools. This way, government authorities would have no control over online activities.
The first Cypherpunk mailing list, of which Satoshi was a member and where he first shared the Bitcoin white paper, was launched in 1992 by Tim May and Eric Hughes. Their aim was to support the creation of new software to protect privacy.
The Cypherpunk Manifesto, written by Eric Hughes in 1993, sums up their philosophy:
Privacy is essential to an open society in the electronic age (...) We can't expect governments, corporations or other large anonymous organizations to guarantee our privacy (...) My main goal for Cypherpunks is to get people to defend their privacy, rather than relying on someone else to provide it.
Eric Hughes - Cypherpunk Mailinglist, March 23, 1993.
And he adds:
confidentiality in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the main system of this type.
This is why cryptography will be used as a tool of resistance against all forms of state and corporate control. It ensures that each party to a transaction knows only what is strictly necessary for that transaction.
Cypherpunks believe in the power of cryptography to create spaces of freedom and individual autonomy, enabling people to communicate and interact securely and anonymously.
They advocate a model where trust is placed in decentralized cryptographic systems rather than in centralized institutions such as banks, corporations or governments.

The cypherpunk method

Cypherpunks write code
proclaims Éric Hughes, concluding his manifesto.
For him, the way forward lies in the active construction of anonymous systems that render arbitrary political divisions irrelevant and unnecessary. The code is based on the application of cryptography to transform the abstract idea of freedom into a new economic and societal reality.
Cypherpunks find no comfort in hopes and wishes. They actively intervene in the course of events and shape their own destiny.
Politically, they seek to build decentralized networks where decisions are taken collectively and no single entity can impose its will. All centralization is based on coercion, not consent, in other words, it treats individuals like children incapable of autonomy, who must be punished if they start to decide their own fate.
This philosophy of freedom and active construction, inherited from the Cypherpunks, was embodied by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, with the invention of Bitcoin. He was the first to put into practice the idea of an uncensored, sovereign electronic currency.
Bitcoin limits state power by offering a decentralized, pseudonymous and hard-to-control monetary alternative. Whether adopted by right-wing or left-wing activists, by defenders of freedom or equality, or simply by savers with no political label, it gives individuals the opportunity to emancipate themselves from the traditional financial system and regain control of their money.
From this point of view, without explicitly claiming to belong to a political camp, Bitcoin bears the seeds of a silent revolution and joins the top of the dial in Nolan's diagram.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to Eric Hughes' Cypherpunk Manifesto, what is the primary responsibility for defending privacy in an open electronic society?