Cypherpunks

Before the 1970s, cryptography was primarily practiced in secret by military or spy agencies. But, that changed when two publications brought it into the open: the US government publication of the Data Encryption Standard and the first publicly available work on public-key cryptography, "New Directions in Cryptography" by Dr Whitfield Diffie and Dr Martin Hellman.

In the 1980s, Dr David Chaum wrote extensively on topics such as anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems, which he described in his paper "Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete".

Over the next several years, these ideas coalesced into a movement.

In late 1992, Eric Hughes, Timothy C May, and John Gilmore founded a small group that met monthly at Gilmore's company Cygnus Solutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group was humorously termed “cypherpunks” as a derivation of “cipher” and “cyberpunk.”

The Cypherpunks mailing list was formed at about the same time, and just a few months later, Eric Hughes published "A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto".