The cypherpunks

Bitcoin didn’t emerge from a bank or a university lab. It grew out of the cypherpunks — a movement of programmers and privacy activists who, from the late 1980s, believed cryptography could shift power from institutions to individuals. Their unfinished project was digital cash.

Privacy through code, not permission

The cypherpunks gathered on a mailing list in the 1990s with a simple conviction: in a digital world, the only privacy you truly have is the privacy you can enforce with maths. Rather than lobby governments for better laws, they wrote code — encryption tools, anonymous remailers, digital-cash schemes — to build the private, free world they wanted directly.

“Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and we’re going to write it.” — Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993

Two decades of near-misses

We met their attempts in the Computer Science section — DigiCash, e-gold, b-money, bit gold. Brilliant ideas, each missing a piece, and most undone by a central point of control. Among the most important building blocks was one that would become Bitcoin’s engine:

• Hashcash (Adam Back, 1997) — invented to fight email spam. To send a message, your computer had to solve a small, deliberately costly hash puzzle — cheap for one email, ruinously expensive to spam millions. It proved that “burning” a bit of computation could act as a gatekeeper no one controls. Bitcoin would repurpose exactly this idea as Proof of Work.

On 31 October 2008, a message hit the Cryptography Mailing List: “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” It was signed Satoshi Nakamoto.