"That's why our primary defense isn't law, but technology." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #law #defense #wikileaks

"We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #privacy #selfdefense #anonymoustransactions

"'Swiss banks in cyberspace' will make economic transactions much more liquid and much less subject to local rules and regulations." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #digitalcash #economics #regulation #freedom

"Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited amount of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem." — Tim May (Cypherpunks Mailing List, 1993) #cryptography #violence #mathematics

"Some have predicted that the initial success of electronic money may be in the form of a technically illegal 'black market' where crypto-hackers buy and sell information, using cryptography to protect against government crackdowns." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #cryptography #resistance

"For Bitcoin to succeed and become secure, bitcoins must become vastly more expensive." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2011) #bitcoin #security #economics

"You use envelopes for postal mail. You use it for love letters, business letters and your medical records. The only way to create the digital equivalent of an envelope is to encrypt." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #encryption #privacy #email #envelopes

"I am active in policy space rather writing code, doing a lot of public speaking. There is a lot of need for activism now in the shadow of the Patriot Act." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #patriotact #surveillance

"Just as a merchant will accept cash from a customer without demanding proof of identity, we also want our electronic money system to allow similar transactions to take place, without the identity of the people involved being revealed to each other, or even to someone who is monitoring the network." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #anonymity #privacy

"The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global social network." — fiatjaf (Nostr Protocol Documentation, 2020) #nostr #protocol #censorshipresistance

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." — Linus Torvalds (Linux Kernel Mailing List, 2000) #code #opensource

"Technological ideas and technological things are not politically neutral: routinely, they have strong, built-in tendencies." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #politics

"If cryptography's most basic aim is to enable secure communications, how could it not be a colossal failure of our field when ordinary people lack even a modicum of communication privacy when interacting electronically?" — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #privacy

"Every action I took was out of a desire to enable people to have freedom and control over their own lives." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #autonomy

"Bulk collection, which should become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language if we have any kind of decency." — Edward Snowden (Joe Rogan Experience, 2019) #surveillance #masssurveillance

"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

"Mathematics is not the law." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #mathematics #law #cryptography #philosophy

"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

"In the long run, the real battle will be the one fought in defense of technologies that protect privacy. That one we might win." — David D. Friedman (The Case for Privacy, 2005) #privacy #cryptography #freedom

"Digital pseudonyms, the creation of persistent network personas that cannot be forged by others and yet which are unlinkable to the 'true names' of their owners, are finding major uses in ensuring free speech, in allowing controversial opinions to be aired, and in providing for economic transactions that cannot be blocked by local governments." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #freespeech #anonymity #economics