"The last characteristic which we note in the history of cryptography is the division between amateur and professional cryptographers. Skill in production cryptanalysis has always been heavily on the side of the professionals, but innovation, particularly in the design of new types of cryptographic systems, has come primarily from the amateurs." — Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #innovation #amateur #freedom

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." — Aaron Swartz (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008) #openaccess

"It is important to realize that while distributed consensus is a hard problem, ordinary consensus is much easier and better studied, and can be solved some trillions of times more efficiently by use of trusted identifiable signing parties. Therefore, cryptocurrencies which compromise by introducing trusted parties, even under limited circumstances, should consider whether their new trust model is one for which consensus is easily achieved by some other mechanism." — Andrew Poelstra (On Stake and Consensus, 2015) #consensus #trust #cryptocurrency #bitcoin

"Privacy gives each of us more control over his own life—which on average, if not in every case, is likely to lead to a freer world." — David D. Friedman (The Case for Privacy, 2005) #privacy #freedom

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

"Bitcoin is a tool of resistance gifted to us by Satoshi. The idea has escaped and the idea of cryptocurrency will not be stopped." — Amir Taaki (The libbitcoin Manifesto, 2013) #bitcoin #resistance #cryptocurrency #freedom

"There is nothing quite so disempowering as a government that can read all your most intimate thoughts and correspondence." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #surveillance #government #privacy

"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

"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

"They have built a legal paradigm that presumes records collected about us do not belong to us." — Edward Snowden (Joe Rogan Experience, 2019) #privacy #legal

"The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's informational footprints—everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion—can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #privacy #cypherpunk #encryption #freedom

"Fundamentally, I believe we will have the kind of society that most people want. If we want freedom and privacy, we must persuade others that these are worth having. There are no shortcuts." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #freedom #privacy

"Bitcoin is not just a currency. It's a platform for trust." — Andreas Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money, 2016) #bitcoin #trust

"When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013) #bitcoin #satoshi #history

"Somebody had to be the first one to start banging on the Berlin Wall, with a sledgehammer, in 1989. Somebody had to be the first to walk through. Somebody had to be the first to stand up and say, 'Enough!'" — Jim Bell (Assassination Politics, 1997) #resistance #freedom

"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

"That cryptographic work is deeply tied to politics is a claim so obvious that only a cryptographer could fail to see it." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #politics

"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

"The NSA's cryptographic monopoly has evaporated." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #nsa #cryptography #monopoly #freedom

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