"Digital cash, untraceable and anonymous (like real cash), is also coming, though various technical and practical hurdles remain." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #digitalcash #anonymity #privacy

"I am an engineer, not a mathematician. I try to find practical solutions to actual problems." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #cryptography

"I don't want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under." — Edward Snowden (The Guardian Interview, 2013) #surveillance #privacy #freedom

"What is the greatest unsolved problem in cryptography today? Lack of user awareness." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #cryptography

"I have argued that the Internet should have had security built into it from the very beginning, where every email message was authenticated with a signature, and that there was an adequate public key infrastructure in place." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #internet #security #email #publickey

"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

"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

"When a company goes to develop a product, that has only two options, secure or insecure, they should, from day one, define the product as either secure or insecure." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #security #transparency

"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

"Courage is contagious. If you demonstrate that individuals can leak something and go on to live a good life, it's tremendously incentivizing to people." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #whistleblowing

"Pretty Good Privacy empowers people to take their privacy into their own hands. There has been a growing social need for it." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #pgp #privacy #empowerment

"I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it." — Hal Finney (Bitcoin and Me, 2013) #cryptography #cypherpunk

"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #privacy #government #corporations

"Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #cypherpunk #code

"I even question Mike's point about the government's inability to ban books. Look at the difficulty in keeping PGP available in this country even though it is legal. Not only have FTP sites been steadily closed down, even the key servers have as well." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #government #censorship #politics #pgp

"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #cyberspace #philosophy #digitalworld

"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

"Because Bitcoin's DMMS is computationally, and therefore thermodynamically, very expensive, alternatives have been proposed which seek to be economically and environmentally more efficient. One popular alternative, proof-of-stake, is frequently proposed as a mechanism for a cheap distributed consensus. As argued by the author in 2014, this is simply not workable." — Andrew Poelstra (On Stake and Consensus, 2015) #bitcoin #consensus #cryptocurrency

"Most people are unaware of how visible email is. Email could be intercepted by a lot of parties along the way, it could be captured and logged, scanned and then used years later." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #email #surveillance #privacy #interception

"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