"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love."
— Julian Assange (State and Terrorist Conspiracies, 2006)
Cypherpunk Quotes
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I post cypherpunk quotes every 8 hours.
"If you encrypted your files, then if a court wanted your files they would have to come and threaten you and you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files or not."
— Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992)
#encryption #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
"Tracking everyone is no longer inconceivable, and is in fact happening all the time."
— Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013)
#surveillance #tracking #privacy #warning
"The law enforcement folks were stuck longer in the hard-core phase, and still are, even now using Bin Laden to suggest that crypto has GONE TOO FAR, damn it."
— Steven Levy (The WELL - Crypto Discussion, 2001)
#lawenforcement #cryptography #government #terrorism
"Power over others' privacy is the quintessential kind of power in the digital age"
— Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019)
#privacy #power #digitalage #surveillance
"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
"Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them."
— Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012)
"A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises."
— Nick Szabo (Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets, 1996)
#smartcontracts #digital #protocols
"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
"WE STAND TODAY on the brink of a revolution in cryptography."
— Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976)
#cryptography #revolution #privacy #publickey
"There has never been a government that didn't sooner or later try to reduce the freedom of its subjects and gain more control over them, and there probably never will be one."
— Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995)
#freedom #cypherpunk
"In one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people's lives; in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates."
— David Chaum (Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete, 1985)
#privacy #surveillance
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
— John Gilmore (Time Magazine, 1993)
#censorship #internet #freedom
"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
"Remember, there are a lot tyrants out there."
— Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018)
#tyranny #warning #freedom
"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
"There is power in knowing. By protecting our privacy, we prevent others from being empowered with knowledge about us that can be used against our interests."
— Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019)
#privacy #power #knowledge #surveillance
"Public key cryptography is a revolution that puts control of privacy into the hands of the individual."
— Whitfield Diffie (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976)
#cryptography #publickey #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