Wake up, cypherpunks
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Wake up, cypherpunks
Cypherpunks "Like most of our cyberpunk cousins, not that punk."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Crypto Wars
Translation: Kurt Pan
“Arise, cypherpunks, for evil is brewing in the belly of the beast,” Timothy May used these words to rally his comrades.
In the spring of 1992, May hosted Eric Hughes in Oakland, California, who was then searching for a place to live. During their time together, house hunting quickly fell by the wayside as the two passionately exchanged views on the privacy threats posed by the emerging digital revolution. By the end of the visit, May and Hughes decided to organize a group of like-minded friends to take action. Their focus would be building cryptographic tools to protect themselves from present and future enemies.
That September, the group held its first gathering. May and Hughes, joined by John Gilmore—who would become the third co-founder of the cypherpunks—carefully invited about twenty people to their inaugural meeting. Many participants held strong anti-establishment views, believing governments would exploit the digital age to expand their power. A declaration reading was scheduled during the meeting. May had first published his “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” in 1988, but now it had a fully attentive audience. It began:
“A specter is haunting the modern world—the specter of crypto-anarchism.” May’s manifesto explained that technologies capable of sparking a “social and economic revolution” were emerging, and within ten years, sufficient computing power would make this revolution “economically feasible and essentially unstoppable.” Just as the invention of the printing press weakened the power of medieval guilds, cryptography would transform the nature of commerce and governance. The coming technological revolution would bring public-key cryptography to the masses, enabling citizens to communicate and transact anonymously. May wrote that these developments would profoundly reshape society: if transactions were hidden by cryptography, governments would no longer be able to collect taxes, and payments would use cryptographic currencies beyond the control of central banks. The nature of government regulation would have to change—how can you regulate what you cannot see? The ability to keep information confidential would face fundamental challenges, as public-key encryption and anonymous relays would allow insiders to leak classified documents online with little fear of identification. Implicit in May’s words was the idea that if citizens’ interactions were protected by encryption, the state’s ability to build comprehensive digital dossiers on the population would be severely curtailed. May warned:
“Naturally, states will try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing concerns over national security, the use of cryptography by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of social disintegration. Many of these concerns are justified; crypto-anarchism will enable the free trade of state secrets and allow transactions in illegal and stolen materials.”
Timothy May acknowledged that “criminals and foreign powers” would gain capabilities through the new world of crypto-anarchism, but this would not “stop” its spread. For May and his peers, even though cryptography might enable some activities—such as child abuse—that they themselves opposed and could agree with governments on opposing, the ability of cryptography to protect individuals was analogous to the right to bear arms. While both guns and encryption could be used for terrible purposes, they also represented the final line of defense for citizens against potentially tyrannical governments that monopolized violence. British cypherpunk Russell E. Whitaker commented, “The arguments in favor of the right to own and carry weapons often map directly onto arguments for the right to own and use private keys.”
For the remainder of the first meeting, the group played a “crypto-anarchy game,” role-playing how their respective anonymous systems might operate. During the session, Eric Hughes’s girlfriend Jude Milhon—a seasoned hacker and activist in her own right, who had written a guide on the “online revolution”—joked, “You guys are just a bunch of cypherpunks.” The hackers loved the name, and according to May, it was “immediately adopted.”
The name derived from the cyberpunk genre, which combined elements of science fiction, hacking, and cyberspace. Cyberpunk novels included William Gibson’s *Neuromancer*, which later inspired the film *The Matrix*. These stories typically featured hackers persecuted by oppressive regimes in the real world, yet thriving in cyberspace, often outsmarting authoritarian rulers through sheer intellect. However, as May explained in the sprawling *Cyphernomicon*—the closest thing the group had to an authoritative text—cypherpunks “are, like most of our cyberpunk cousins, not very punk.”
In the following months, the group’s name and its crypto-anarchist ideology faced challenges. Some cypherpunks argued they should rebrand, saying that talking about anarchism was “bad for the cause,” and that “middle-class Americans would shy away from radical hippie activists in T-shirts, leather jackets, sandals, and beards.” They argued that unless cypherpunks could speak the language of the “suit class,” their message would be ignored. Suggestions like “Cryptography Research Association” or “Crypto Privacy” were floated, but Timothy May believed “cypherpunk” was the right name:
“I very much agree with many of you that the name ‘cypherpunk’ has certain, shall we say, unusual connotations. Some will picture us as skateboarding geeks, others as body-pierced ‘crypto-cavemen’ partying all day long. But the name undoubtedly attracts many people and does generate considerable attention. Names like ‘North California Association of Cryptography Enthusiasts’ seem unlikely to attract much notice.”
The cypherpunk brand would capture journalists’ imaginations. After all, May reflected, there were already groups working on digital civil liberties that could “present a lawyerly face to the media.” As for “respectability,” May wrote to his challengers:
“Is our goal to be ‘assimilated’ into the system? To become a respectable voice in a polite negotiation process? I don’t think so. In a way, cypherpunks fill an important niche by being the unapologetic, radical edge… perhaps something like the Black Panthers, Yippies, and Weather Underground did for the previous generation.”
After invoking countercultural icons, May firmly declared he had no intention of wearing a suit, cutting his hair, or shaving off his beard; nor did he intend to “soften” the message cypherpunks conveyed or become “moderate and rational” in the pursuit of crypto-anarchism. He would keep his word.
Timothy May was the most vocal advocate of crypto-anarchism, posting more messages to the mailing list over six years than any other user. Nevertheless, May did not see himself as their leader. In theory, crypto-anarchists had no leaders; May explained this in the *Cyphernomicon* by pointing to the etymology of their ideological label: “an-archic = without rule = without head = an-arch (without primary authority) = anarchism.” Still, May was one of the few members with enough free time to serve as an unofficial spokesperson for the cypherpunks, even if this role was never formally recognized by others. In 1986, at age 34, May retired from his position as a physicist at Intel, having accumulated enough stock options to ensure he’d never need to work again—as long as he avoided expensive sports cars, overseas travel, and fine dining. During his twelve years at Intel, one of May’s key achievements was proving that quantum events could affect the motion of subatomic particles; this discovery allowed Intel to shield their semiconductors from such disruptive quantum effects, enabling Moore’s Law to continue advancing. But by 1986, conditions at Intel had grown tougher, with the bottom tenth of employees in each department fearing for their jobs. After receiving a sharply critical performance review, May ran the numbers on his trusty HP calculator and realized he could afford to quit and pursue an intellectual life free from corporate whims. In retirement, May consumed vast quantities of books and academic papers, ranging from business magazines to science fiction. “I never had any interest in horseback riding, boating, hiking, or the usual things people do,” he remarked. “Instead, I just read, read, and read some more.”
Like many technologists, the cypherpunks deeply cherished the internet, loving it so much that it sparked a parental desire to protect what many regarded as their intellectual home. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—an outstanding digital civil liberties group—described his first connection to the internet as a “religious vision.” He recalled:
“If you could put all of humanity into a single social space where they had no clothes or buildings—or anything else—to show who they were, no property, no jurisdictional boundaries, perhaps not even laws… this could be the most significant event since humans learned to control fire.”
For Barlow, the internet brought a “power renegotiation” between government and citizen—one as revolutionary as the invention of the Gutenberg Bible. The internet became a nexus for these intellectual explorers. Cypherpunk John Young, who ran one of the earliest leak sites before collaborating with Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, recalled discovering the internet with his wife: “We felt like we’d been living in dull stagnation, and suddenly we were at the forefront.” For “netizens,” instant interaction with pioneers in their field became possible, even across continents. In a world where proximity once determined collaborative potential, groups could now easily assemble, exchange groundbreaking ideas, incubate change, and find solace among others who shared their passion.
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