"Cash is also pretty good for privacy because there's no camera that can capture every movement of a dollar bill every time it moves; it just wouldn't work." — Peter Valkenburgh (Your Secret Right to Cash, 2017) #cash #privacy #surveillance #technology

"We are not asking to threaten the national security. We're asking to discard a Cold War bureaucratic idea of national security which is obsolete. My response to the NSA is: Show us. Show the public how your ability to violate the privacy of any citizen has prevented a major disaster." — John Gilmore (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #nsa #privacy #nationalsecurity #transparency #government

"I had this view of cryptography in which the critical value of cryptography was that you didn't have to trust other people." — Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992) #cryptography #trust #autonomy

"Again, we need to win political, not technological, victories in order to protect our privacy." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #politics #privacy

"The notion that we can just fade into cypherspace and ignore the unpleasant political realities is unrealistic, in my view." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #politics #cypherpunk

"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

"Cash is also necessary to retain agency and autonomy. Autonomy can be understood as the power to make decisions for oneself without interference from others." — Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019) #cash #autonomy #freedom #agency

"I have been working on ideas to display the information in digital cash in some other way that is more esthetic. It would be nice if the display somehow only worked for correctly signed cash notes, with forged cash not displaying anything nice." — Hal Finney (The Beauty of ECash, 1994) #digitalcash #cryptography

"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

"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

"Privacy is the foundation that allows freedom of speech, thought, and association to thrive. Without it, these freedoms exist only on paper and can't be exercised in practice in a meaningful way." — Zooko Wilcox (Cypherpunk Technologies Press Release, 2023) #privacy #freespeech #freedom

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture." — Aaron Swartz (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008) #civildisobedience #openaccess

"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

"Using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous 'digital cash,' it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given." — Jim Bell (Assassination Politics, 1997) #encryption #digitalcash #anonymity #privacy

"Technology has let the genie out of the bottle. Crypto anarchy is liberating individuals from coercion by their physical neighbors—who cannot know who they are on the Net—and from governments." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #cryptoanarchy #freedom #government

"In view of the serious implications of such a law, I abandoned my plans to charge for PGP in the hopes of achieving wider distribution." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #pgp #encryption #government #backdoors

"There's a real possibility that all the noise about 'governance,' 'regulation' and 'blockchain' will effectively create a surveillance state, a dossier society." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #surveillance #regulation #blockchain #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

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #privacy #manifesto

"Money, like written language, was one of the most important inventions of civilization." — Nick Szabo (Shelling Out: The Origins of Money, 2002) #money #civilization #history