Glossary
Cypherpunks
The 1990s privacy-oriented activist movement around the Cypherpunks mailing list — direct intellectual ancestor of Bitcoin and broader crypto culture.
The Cypherpunks were a loose collective of cryptographers, hackers, and privacy activists who organized via the Cypherpunks mailing list (started 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy May, and John Gilmore). They argued that strong cryptography would enable political and economic freedom that governments could not control.
The movement produced ideas and people central to Bitcoin: Hashcash (Adam Back), b-money (Wei Dai), Bit Gold (Nick Szabo), and the broader proof-of-work and digital-cash concepts. Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 paper sits directly in this tradition. The "Cypherpunks Manifesto" by Eric Hughes remains a foundational text.