"If you have a certain amount of time to spend on advancing the cause of greater personal privacy, can you do it better by using the time to learn about cryptography and develop the tools to protect privacy, or by convincing your government not to invade your privacy?"
— Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995)
#privacy #cryptography
"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'"
— Richard Stallman (GNU Project, 1985)
#freesoftware #liberty #opensource
"Remember, there are a lot tyrants out there."
— Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018)
#tyranny #warning #freedom
"What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope, it would draw suspicion."
— Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991)
#privacy #encryption #conformity
"The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us."
— Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010)
#whistleblowing #transparency #leaks
"I'd like to think that decades from now, people will look back and see this time as the dawning of a new era of individual empowerment and freedom."
— Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013)
#bitcoin #freedom
"The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting."
— Edward Snowden (The Guardian Interview, 2013)
#nsa #surveillance #masssurveillance
"I believed in the idea of giving people the freedom to buy and sell and connect with each other without the all-seeing eye of government watching every move."
— Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015)
#freedom #privacy
"There is a war going on between those who would liberate crypto and those who would suppress it. The seemingly innocuous bunch strewn around this conference room represents the vanguard of the pro-crypto forces."
— Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993)
#cryptography #cypherpunk #resistance #government
"I would like to die peacefully in my sleep, knowing that I helped create a better world for those who come after me."
— Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013)
"It's not data that's being exploited. It's people that are being exploited. It's not data that's being manipulated, it's you that's being manipulated."
— Edward Snowden (Joe Rogan Experience, 2019)
#surveillance #privacy
"A phase change is coming. Virtual communities are in their ascendancy, displacing conventional notions of nationhood. Geographic proximity is no longer as important as it once was."
— Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994)
"The outcome of this struggle may determine the amount of freedom our society will grant us in the 21st century. To the Cypherpunks, freedom is an issue worth some risk."
— Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993)
#freedom #cypherpunk #privacy #21stcentury
"The key question at the heart of the cypherpunk movement was not freedom, but the crisis of freedom in a situation of extensive social control of dominant institutions over private individuals."
— Enrico Beltramini (Against technocratic authoritarianism, 2020)
#cypherpunk #freedom #surveillance #control
"I wanted to empower people to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness."
— Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015)
#freedom #empowerment
"By the 1990s, at the NSA at least, they figured out that it was impossible to totally snuff the stuff, and that there was a need for some form of crypto for citizens. So the idea was to keep the strong stuff out of general usage, by banning its export."
— Steven Levy (The WELL - Crypto Discussion, 2001)
#nsa #cryptography #exportlaws #government
"I see Bitcoin as ultimately becoming a reserve currency for banks, playing much the same role as gold did in the early days of banking."
— Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2010)
#bitcoin #banking #gold
"The age of the printable gun has arrived, and there's nothing anyone can do about it."
— Cody Wilson (Come and Take It, 2016)
#3dprinting
"If the federal government can't even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?"
— Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013)
#law #privacy #surveillance #government
"Their non-anonymity also means that a dedicated attacker will eventually always be able to attack the system."
— Andrew Poelstra (On Stake and Consensus, 2015)
#anonymity #security
