The Cypherpunks Mailing List

The object

The Cypherpunks mailing list began in September 1992, after a series of meetings at the Oakland house and Cygnus Solutions offices of Eric Hughes, a mathematician, attended by Hughes, the former Intel physicist Tim May, and Sun Microsystems' fifth employee John Gilmore. May supplied the ideology (his 1988 Crypto Anarchist Manifesto had already imagined cryptography dissolving the state's grip on information), Gilmore the infrastructure and money, Hughes the code. The name was coined, half in jest, by the writer Jude Milhon. The artifact is a plain SMTP mailing list run off Gilmore's machine toad.com (no website, no moderation, growing to some two thousand subscribers by the mid-1990s) and its archive, where most of the political language of modern cryptography was forged in public.

"Cypherpunks write code"

Hughes's 1993 A Cypherpunk's Manifesto contained the line that became the movement's discipline: Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. The list refused to be a debating society. Tools shipped from it: Hughes's and others' anonymous remailers (the Type I "cypherpunk" remailers, and later Mixmaster); David Chaum's DigiCash and Wei Dai's b-money proposal for digital currency; Adam Back's hashcash proof-of-work scheme of 1997, later cited in the Bitcoin white paper; and the conceptual groundwork for onion routing that became Tor. The list also waged a continual pressure campaign in the crypto wars, opposing the NSA's Clipper chip and its "key escrow" plan in 1993, and helping the litigation that forced the U.S. government to begin relaxing cryptography export controls in 1999–2000.

Why it matters

PGP, Tor, and Bitcoin all share parents on this list. Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 Bitcoin announcement was posted to a direct descendant, the Cryptography mailing list, and drew on hashcash and b-money work done here. The cypherpunks treated cryptography not as a feature but as a constitutional technology, one that decides, in code, who can speak and read and pay without permission. They were the bridge from the GNU Manifesto's argument about software freedom to a wider claim about all networked life. Their roster reads like a foundation document: alongside May, Gilmore, and Hughes were Julian Assange, who later founded WikiLeaks; Bram Cohen, who built BitTorrent; Hal Finney, the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction; and Zooko Wilcox-O'Hairn, among many others.

The list was also famously prickly. Threads ran for thousands of messages; civility was scarce; bad ideas were burned out in public. The friction was the point.

The lesson it set loose

Software defends what law forgets. The cypherpunks insisted that an argument is finished only when someone has shipped a binary that makes it true. Their inheritance, from PGP through Tor to the cryptocurrencies, is a chain of working code where there could have been a chain of petitions.