Cypherpunk
Cypherpunks are the privacy-activist movement (1990s mailing list onward) who argued liberty requires private digital communication — and built it: PGP, re
Cypherpunks are the privacy-activist movement (1990s mailing list onward) who argued liberty requires private digital communication — and built it: PGP, remailers, digital cash experiments, and eventually the ideas Bitcoin assembled. “Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful” was the creed; code, not permission, the method.
Why it matters
Bitcoin is applied cypherpunk philosophy — every design choice (no identity, no reversals, no rulers) traces to those mailing-list debates. Understanding the lineage explains why the culture resists KYC-creep and corporate capture so fiercely: for many builders this was never about getting rich, but about making surveillance-expensive money exist at all.