# The History and Philosophy of Cypherpunk

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 25:56
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-prXQJSp_H8A
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prXQJSp_H8A

## Description

Rather than bend to knee to Donald Trump, the goal of the cypherpunk movement is to abolish the state in order to maximize human freedom via privacy-enhancing decentralized technologie. After reviewing the history of this deviant group of programmers in the 1980s, what philosophical and technical lessons do the cypherpunks hold for Ethereum today? Censorship-resistant digital cash was only one the start, and the missing parts of their legacy: mixnets and anonymous credentials for identity.

## Transcript

[Music] [Music] okay so we are here uh to basically bring back the cipher Punk roots of blockchain Technology I'm Harry CE of nim and I'm Max Senor devel for Nim so also if you want to talk about building anything with Nim uh come find me over the rest of the conference so I would just like to begin this talk saying that I'm actually very proud of vitalic and the blog post where he decided he was not going to bend the knee to Donald Trump just because Donald Trump was going to pump everyone's crypto bags Donald Trump and authoritarian states are the opposite of Cypher Punk it's the opposite of our ethos the ethos of Cypher Punk is based on meritocracy without orders right not nationalism not kicking out immigrants and all sorts of other complete nonsense so I think it is a good time to kind of go into the history of how uh cypherpunk came to be and we're going to do it a little bit differently I've seen a lot of talks about you know Phil Zimmerman and Eric Hughes and the original cyberpunk movement but's a lot of stuff left out so that's what we're going to go through I'd like to just give a a shout out to the Father the inventor of the term anarchism Pierre pron who had at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution many Core Concepts that now we are only seeing come to fruition for example do you know in 1863 Pierre said we can replace the monarchy with self-governing communes and collectives and individuals who will coordinate via contracts and create their own popular banking systems of course he was uh taken out by marks and generally kind of no one looks at them academically anymore but there's really old roots and then a lot of the questions that we are facing today came forward in What's called the Socialist calculation debate where the question was how is it that we can reorganize Society should we use money or not should we plan in a centralized way or not and most of Austrian economics Hayek Ben Mees and all these folks came from this debate as a reaction against the Socialists from Vienna like altoon nurra who claim that money does not capture all the extern externalities in the well-being of population so there a really old history that predates cryptography and the invention of computing about these topics should we organize and a decentralized way returning sovereignty and power to individuals and to smaller communities I or should we centralize power if you're interested in more tons of philosophy work here but the general thesis is that the spread of cryptographic techniques which were originally the domain of the nation state because the nation state is based on hierarchies on the keeping of Secrets keeping of Secrets around agriculture keeping of Secrets around military cryptography let this spread into the general population and this has been perhaps the most defining change in sovereignty since like essentially ancient go for it Max all right so this section of the talk we're going to go through a couple of let's say the more basic like um technological advances that have happened and then I'm going to then these these are things that we imagine that kind of everyone here knows about uh but we'll do a quick overview and then we'll really jump into the more like the social side of Cipher Punk and how this is how it feeds back into the technology it creates so in ' 67 Whitfield Diffy and Martin Helman they kind of introduced public key cryptography into the public domain right so it's this the idea that you can for the first time then you could create a shared secret key with which you could have like secret communication uh over a non-confidential channel beforehand one of the massive problems of actually like setting up any kind of encrypted coms with people was how do you initially share this secret between both of you right this is the public key cryptography as well as being the basis of like TLS SSL it's also obviously like the basis of so much of the crypto that we use today uh we do next slide all right so then in 79 David charm invented mixnet with uncho electronic mail return addresses and digital pseudonyms right the tldr of this is how do you create an anonymous untraceable communication Network that protects the data of the ooms right as well as the metadata so can you inv can you create something wherein you can't tell who is talking to who and when next one sh it's the green there we go and not too long afterwards he then came out with another concept which is that of anonymous credentials to defend against a dossier Society so this first line of this paper from 1985 I think sums it up better than a lot of stuff still sums it up today so computerization is robbing individuals of the ability to Monitor and control the ways that information about them is used so in 5 charm was already talking about the lack of agency that people were having with regards to the data that was about themselves and how they communicate in the world and could already see the kind of possible uh dystopia on the horizon so finally we had Diffy Helman they allowed people to create to Envision stuff like misn which allow you to communicate privately and then also we have credentials which allow you to transact privately these two kind of key cornerstones of like Cipher Punk Tech that then can be used to Envision this kind of better society that we're talking about here so that was the stuff that I kind of imagined everyone would already know now we're go into the more fun stuff so this was uh Resource One this was resource one's project Community memory this was the first computerized public bulletin board system so the first introduction that a lot of people would have had to Computing in general uh it was in the people's Computing Center in San fr Isco and it was the yeah like I said the first PBS so the first way that people were able to like freely share and spread information using computer systems this is interesting because one of the people who is criminally under talked about in this space uh was also key in not just Resource One but also the creation of the people's Computing Center and that's Jude milhon so otherwise known as St Jude she was actually the originator of the term Cipher Punk itself so the title of this Congress and everything else owed that to her and as well as being a founding member of the cipher Punk's mailing list she was a civil rights activist so actually this picture from the Montgomery Police Department is after she got arrested in Montgomery Alberta on a Civil Rights march in 67 um as well as being a Civ you know and it was broad civil rights activism throughout her entire life uh she was also a senior editor at Mondo 2000 which is now wired so you can see how both Tech and culture is constantly feedbacking Psych the feedback cycle is tight basically and a couple of choice quotes of hacking as a martial art a way of Defending against politically correct politicians overly intrusive laws bigots and narrow-minded people of all Persuasions these are some of her uh Publications take a picture um they're all really fun and good but we don't have that much time and a lot to get through so another piece of culture that fed back into the early Cipher Punk movement and became part of it as well it's true names by Verna vinger this is a novel which actually has the original use of the word Nim in terms of pseudonym or hidden name and was even though it was written in A1 thoroughly predictive of government surveillance of parallel online spaces this then fed into one of the kind of like the author of a series of seminal texts within this right which is Tim May so not only just true NIMS in crypto anak which was an essay that then actually vinger enjoyed so much it was invol it was included in the uh late 90s represses of true names he was a founding member of the cyer Punk's mailing list and his let's say predictive power to understand both the potential of this Tech so providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally Anonymous manner um is something to bring attention to finally a lesser known I say strain of thought that I think is still foundational to a lot of The Cypher Cypher Punk ethos that we want to like push forward today is that of agorism so agorism until fairly recently when it was like revitalized by the uh agarist Journal so check that out agorism doxyz then this was a kind of a it was a relatively little known strain of political thought but still had a massive impact on the cipher Punk culture this is the idea of a counter economy right so possibly a different way of thinking about what we would maybe call parallel Societies or these kind of like non-state um these non-state Market structures right so his was very much based in anti-statism and kind of went all the way from black markets to gray markets to just unregulated people helping each other out and the novel that's included here alongside night is you could almost think of it as kind of a a dramatized thought experiment of a young man who as Society is kind of crumbling down um his kind of Journey Through the agarist underworld of uh to regain I suppose freedom in the way that kin described it and I'll kick it back to Harry now so where things all started getting real for the cyppher punks it was interesting Concepts and everyone here is inheriting this tradition was actually hilariously enough as the early internet took off people leaked the secret beliefs of the Church of Scientology who you may know as a lot of lawyers and they started trying to go after some of the cyppher punks and crypto Anarchist and this led to the invention of what was called the cyppher punk Anonymous remailer so you took emails put them in pgp sent them in the computer stripped off the header and sent them out uh However unfortunately those um those Cipher Punk remailers were attacked and this led to the first implementation of mix it's called Mixmaster an anonymous remailer by Lance Krell who I don't know what happened to him I've heard various rumors and ly Sassaman who people think was could have been Nakamoto uh and effectively you would send your messages through a series of computers and mix them up together that kind of unlined the messages and uh this eventually led to tour by Roger dingledine whose talk you should all see I think on Thursday uh and they basically saidwell you know Mix N are really slow can we build something faster that does web browsing but goes through multiple peer-to-peer relays and that's the to that's the anonymous solution that most of us still use today and I remember discussing with Roger once he was like ah you know this hidden Services thing what's it could it be good for and then well it was good for Wikileaks right so Wikileaks let uh Chelsea Manning who and uh folks like Edward sowden leak documents to purely revealing the scope of the mass NSA surveillance and the failure of the Iraq War so forth and so on so Wikileaks is effectively a tour hidden service and so it helped change the world in the war in Iraq and the belief of Julian S was by releasing information into the world people could decide what was true and what's false and this would slowly eliminate the centralization of power and the conspiracy between the nation states to kind of maintain their do ation now the uh problem is of course the nation states weren't very happy with that they obviously put Assange in jail I just want to give a shout out to everyone who contributed to Assange da I was good friends with Julian and you know I said Julian don't you have tons of Bitcoin he said I sold it all the dollars like oh Jesus what a stupid thing to do and then he was like kind of unsure about this eth nft stuff but then it raised 16 million if not more to help him get out paid for his legal bills and it's because of donations from everyone particularly in Asia that this happened uh so that's absolutely wonderful and it's a real use case of our technology after Wikileaks was of course the rise of anonymous which people may or may not remember from 2011 the first people that supported Arab Spring in Tunisia of course also came together because of Scientology and uh some of you may not know this and he may not be happy that I'm saying it but Mustafa from Celestia back in the day his name was T and he was the youngest member of uh one of the kind of more prominent LC Anonymous Crews and even uh vitalik himself was work at the kind of before ethereum took off he was living with Amir Taki and other people in Spain working on dark wallet the first private kind of Bitcoin wallet because it slowly occurred to people that Bitcoin wasn't private Anonymous and we needed better technology confidential transactions so forth and so on they did what was sort of the first not I o but Bitcoin fundraise and now uh dark wallet and all the cool stuff before it like faircoin and unst has evolved into dark F I just want to give Rachel and Amir and everyone here shout outs and definitely come to Rachel's talk lunar Punk ingame to know what the future we're talking about the past but what the future of Cypher Punk holds and it will be on Wednesday at 4M on stage six and at the same time as we're seeing this research of the use of cryptography not to centralize power in the state but Empower individuals through Wikileaks and so forth and so on uh anarchism itself is resurgent uh there are now a large amount of interesting and wildly differential uh widely different Anarchist books I'm going to recommend a few here but effectively they kind of argue that you know it's not just domination is not just a nation state but domination is how we think of the world itself that the world is not just something to be manipulated and controlled to satisfy our desires but the world itself should be autonomous and free and this is there's also some newer questions uh in this book I would recommend there's the invisible committee and the ton a French Collective a book in 99 called the cybernetic hypothesis and in this book they said capitalism based on the individual and the nation state is dying but actually it's being replaced by something worse a control Society where computers are used to control and manip manipulate our behaviors and to make us completely transparent to various forms of power in Domination but now the domination is not centralized in the palace centralized the king but spread out and diffused through all society and so I would just want to kind of End by discussing a little bit we've covered a lot of history and hopefully you got some cool screenshots of it but what is actually the philosophy of cypherpunk and I think it's actually a descendant of the philosophy of anarchism which remember happened at the same time Nation the nation state itself started forming and it's just the critique of anarchism but given technological power through cryptography which is ultimately a nonviolent way to redistribute power relationships away from centralized power and two individuals and smaller collectives whatever they may be communes dows so forth and so on so the decentralization of power is the movement of sovereignity away from the nation state into the individual and importantly unlike all the rapid nonsense going on in politics today it's Universal to All Humans that we believe that all humans should have the right to use strong cryptography the right to transact freely and to have freedom of speech and that's like the fundamental you can see how blockchain technology enables that and also it's important that we you know we talk a lot about Dows but the fundamental structure is more deep voluntary Association that via contracts and Market structures we can create a society without domination and exploitation by any form of ruling class or other kind of terrible uh self-inflicted domination and then furthermore that information itself this is where cryptography comes in quite useful should be based on strong anonymity you should be anonymous first and foremost and then you should as Eric Hughes from the cipher Punk Manifesto stated which we kind of skipped over but it's an excellent small text I recommend reading it that the power that the real power of cryptography comes from the ability to selectively disclose yourself to the world so you don't have a single identity you can be a different person in different social spaces at different points in your life and amongst different crowds and cryptography and enables that universally using the internet and this gives us agency over our flows of data which more and more compose who we are and the cypherpunk tech is still under development again we have mix Nets there's quite a few teams working on them we at Nim are also working on one electronic cash which uh you know of course you have zcash and Monero but we decentralized fast private ecash is still not a solved problem and I think this has been incredibly neglected we need Anonymous credentials we need ability to selectively disclose I think ZK passport and some other teams and raro whatever are working on this the ability to selectively disclose arbitrary characteristics about ourselves but generalizable we're also working on that a bit and I guess the question we have is what are the consequences for theorum right so we have again there are two Paths of Technology as I think Amir Tak has said looking at Lewis Mumford and one path we have this centralization of Mega machinic technology which sucks power away from the individual and two centralized power structures making us all slaves to the machine and I think in the worst possible World blockchain technology would make this worse that we would be completely enslaved in some sort of libertarian nightmare where every our movements and every we do and our transactions are transparent to everyone one and recorded but the cyppher punk saying is transparency for the powerful privacy for the weak so we should have not identities not soulbound tokens not complete nonsense like dids or various authoritarian technology claiming to be self- Sovereign like The self- Sovereign identity nonsense but we should instead support zero knowledge proofs Anonymous credentials that enable selective disclosure okay yeah I really wish people just not put the word self- sovereign in front of fascist technology and be like oh it makes it all better it's so stupid uh privacy on chain is not succinctness everyone in ethereum is obsessed with gas fees and making things succinct but reality is we need private smart contracts which darki and Alo and other folks are working on private transactions Aztec and tornado cash and again remember we have to support our political prisoners Roman storm smov and Alex so do support them [Applause] and I'll just try to I'm ending right now but we also there's now discussion of adding someone in the last session said what when should we add privacy to the network in ethereum I would say what better time than now and what better people than you all out there we have mix Nets and MPC Solutions which can help with network privacy and help with inclusion lists to make you know ethereum not a censorship chain but a real chain open to the whole world and we need to defend validators from each other to prevent DDS attacks and clients from malicious RBC nodes and again let's not forget another political prisoner who was the only person to support mix Nets when we started but now is in jail or almost out Virgil Griffith so that's it yeah that's it whoa all right you know if everyone had that level of passion I think we could change the world tomorrow uh but nevertheless uh thank you thank you for that very passionate speech and I believe you know privacy is an important thing freedom is an important thing but let's go over to the Q&A section and we've got some interesting questions the top voted question quite fun why does cipher Punk sound so religious would a religious fervor lead to Cipher Punk being not that different from the future it replaces very philosophical question some deep ideas there how would you like to address this well I would say religions generally start as movements against corruption and centralization wow I mean they do and then what happens is that they're then incorporated into the nation state so for example I Buddhism I I apologize I don't know tooo much about but like with Christianity you have you know Jesus throwing the people out the temple and then all of a sudden BEC merging with the Roman Empire right people do Cipher Punk sounds religious because it's fundamentally an ethical and moral movement and know that level is similar to religion but rather than promising a pie in the sky a happy afterlife we want to create a better Society now and that will lead to Passion I would rather have people be passionate about building a better Society now right now with the tools we have than believe in something else well said you want to add on yeah if I could just add something as well I mean we've also been talking about like Anarchy and a lot of anarchist political philosophy as well which truly I mean all of that not solely relies on but is fully undergirded by The Passion of believing in each other as human beings as well so there's a crossover there with let's say like religious fervor as you said in the question but I think you can still distinguish those two things in a meaningful enough way and it's still positive so very much very much so thank you for answering that now uh funny question at the top Trump pumping our bags is good for funding Cipher Punk's Tech research Punk Cipher punk I'm just kidding um no I mean I would argue look more Capital has been wasted in the uh pumping of bags and I've seen before and there's a double side to the blockchain technology all the interesting Creative Concepts come at least from my perspective from the cipher Punk movements blockchain smart contracts digital cash Anonymous cash and then you have all this kind of you know other stuff coming from more traditional financial institutions taking Financial techniques and you know I'm not against it letting them be more widely accessible and I would argue that what you're seeing now is you're seeing the movement you know with particular with ETF and being slowly more and more moving away from cypherpunk ideals and more towards just traditional Financial pump and dump scams like whatever the Trump is doing with defi World Liberty blah blah and so it's true that some percentage of that money is being spent for cyppher Punk tooling but very little almost none tour project which has been providing anomy for decades their founder is here Roger dingledine but they don't have enough money very few people have donated ethereum so we have some good uses like a sanal but most ciper Punk Tech is incredibly underfunded and now because of privacy blah blah blah on inter cash people are afraid of touching it and funding it I know I raised money from a16 and whatnot some people throw down but it's increasingly hard yeah also just just be realistic with what amount of uh bandwidth you actually have when you're building if you're optimizing for something to pump a bag then you will build something that pumps a bag that is it so you also need to think about the amount of uh you know Innovation tokens you have to spend on any of these projects even though in theory yeah you could uh have your bags pumped by a bad thing happening and just quickly centralized power in general does not Empower people and cypherpunk is about empowering people so that's why we push for decentralization voluntary associations do not necessarily evolve into nation states historically they actually destroy nation state from barbarians sacking Rome onwards and I think that's not necessary right and I do recommend that people just basically throw down as much as they can on this Tech yeah this is decentralization stage ladies and gentlemen fight against the MC and the MC State ladies and Gentlemen let's give our two speakers a big big