Who were the cypherpunks?

The first meetings

In the autumn of 1992 Eric Hughes and Tim May brought together a group of people in California who were interested in cryptography, the study of secret codes. May, a former Intel physicist who had retired at 34, read out The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, which he had written in 1988. It begins: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.”

At one of the first meetings Jude Milhon, an editor at the magazine Mondo 2000, jokingly called the group cypherpunksCypherpunkSomeone who believes in using strong cryptography to protect people’s privacy. Many ideas behind Bitcoin came from the cypherpunks of the 1990s., from “cipher” and “cyberpunk”, and the name stuck. They met at Cygnus Support, a company co-founded by John Gilmore, the third founder. Steven Levy of Wired found “around fifteen techie-cum-civil libertarians” there in 1993, some “lying on the floor staring at the ceiling”.

Most of the talk happened on the group's email list, which by Levy's count “commonly generates more than 50 messages a day”. By 1997 it had perhaps 2,000 subscribers.

What they believed

They believed privacy was worth defending, and that software would defend it better than laws. Hughes set this out in A Cypherpunk's Manifesto in March 1993. “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age,” it begins, and privacy, he wrote, is not secrecy: a private matter is something you don't want the whole world to know, a secret something you don't want anybody to know. “We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence,” so they would build it themselves: “Cypherpunks write code.”

Members' politics varied: many were civil libertarians, but May's manifesto went much further. It imagined people doing business with each other in total anonymity, which would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions”, and it warned that this would “even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion”.

Remailers, munitions and the Clipper chip

They built tools for staying private online, and argued for the right to use them. Several members ran anonymous remailers, services that pass on email without revealing who sent it, an idea first proposed by the cryptographer David Chaum. Hal Finney, by his own account, ran the first that used cryptography.

At the time the United States classed encryption software as a munition, so sending it abroad needed an export licence. Adam Back squeezed the RSA encryption method into three lines of code, small enough to sign off an email with, and a law professor, Peter Junger, got the US Commerce Department to rule in writing that it must not be exported. It was printed on a T-shirt too.

The list also opposed the Clipper chip, an encryption chip introduced in 1993 whose keys the US government would hold, and the fight brought it many new members. In 1994 Matt Blaze, a researcher at Bell Labs, published a flaw in it, and by 1996 Clipper was defunct.

The search for digital cash

Chaum’s design for digital cash offered privacy from the bank issuing the money: the bank could validate a coin without connecting its use to the person who withdrew it. It still needed that bank to operate. His company, DigiCash, filed for bankruptcy in 1998.

In 1997 Back announced hashcash, a proof of workProof of workA puzzle that takes a computer real effort to solve, so the answer proves the effort was spent. Bitcoin’s miners use it to add each block.: a puzzle that takes a computer effort to solve but is easy to check. Requiring a small proof with each email could make sending millions of spam messages expensive. Hashcash proved that work had been done; it did not keep a shared record of who owned money.

In 1998 Wei Dai proposed b-money, in which participants kept accounts without a bank. Dai identified a problem himself: his first design assumed messages could reach everyone at once without being blocked, which he called impractical. His second used a smaller set of servers, with deposits and checks intended to keep them honest.

Nick Szabo explored a system called bit gold. In 2004 Finney put Reusable Proofs of Work (RPOW) online. Its server exchanged a proof of work for a token; to pass the token on, a user returned it for a fresh one, preventing it from being spent twice. Special IBM hardware let users check what software the server was running. The experiment still depended on that server.

Were they all working towards Bitcoin?

No. The list brought together people with different projects and politics. After a dispute over moderation, it moved from Gilmore’s server to linked mail servers. Members worked on file sharing through BitTorrent, publishing leaked documents through WikiLeaks, and private payments through Zcash. Back co-founded Blockstream.

Nor does membership establish who Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator, was. Finney and Back have both denied being Bitcoin’s creator. A New York Times investigation in April 2026 pointed to Back; he rejected its conclusion, Unchained reported. The published correspondence gives a firmer connection than guesses about identity.

From the list to Bitcoin

The most direct line runs through Back and Dai. In August 2008 Satoshi wrote to Dai that a forthcoming paper extended his ideas into a working system. Back had noticed the similarities and suggested the contact.

The white paper cites both b-money and hashcash. Bitcoin combined proof of work with a public history of payments: participants could agree which coins had been spent without a bank or Finney’s token server. Satoshi announced it on 31 October 2008 on a different list, the Cryptography mailing list.

Finney downloaded the software when it was released. In January 2009 Satoshi sent him ten bitcoins as a test, the first payment between two people. Finney later recalled the work that followed: he reported bugs, and Satoshi fixed them.