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The end of an age. RIP, Tim. Cypherpunk Movement, leaded by Tim May is an established ideology and movement since the late 80s. At the time, they were the most prominent supporters of individual privacy and digital liberty. It was them, who helped to build the EFF DES cracker to expose the lies of FBI about DES’s security, and forced the U.S government moving to the 128-bit encryption standard. It was them, who successfully stopped the NSA’s plan to install mandatory encryption backdoor on the telephone system. And it was also them, who fought against the regulation of cryptography through various means, and effectively ended it. They were also the earliest researchers on practical technology to defend privacy. The very idea of an anonymous communication system was purposed by David Chaum in 1981, and implemented as Type I Cypherpunk Anonymous Remailer. By purely coincidence, the syntax used in the control messages allows the user to chain multiple remailers, and hence the concept of Onion Routing was discovered. Cypherpunks also recognized the importance of cash — an anonymous payment system in the past 3000 years, urgently needed a electronic version to stop the enablement of a surveillance state in the digital age. The original vision was also purposed by David Chaum, but it faced various difficulties, especially the problem of consensus and double-spending (Chaum's own centralized payment processor was good, but did not succeed commercially, but check GNU/Taler!), so it was under constant discussion throughout the entire 90s, until Satoshi Nakomoto, presumably a Cypherpunk, purposed a workable, but perhaps less-favorable solution 10 years later. The inventor of computer firewall, Steven Bellovin, and the first developer of a commercial firewall, Marcus Ranum, were also cypherpunks. The entire concept of deniable cryptography was also invented by the cypherpunks, specifically, first implemented in a Linux Full-Disk Encryption program by Julian Assange. |
Yes, the original mailing list was a victim of its own success — it disintegrated in 2000 because the entire fields of privacy, cryptography the movement kickstarted, turned to be too diverse to be contained in a single mailing list.
>“The main reason the list doesn’t seem to have the center of gravity anymore is the topic has gotten so big and gone in so many directions,” Wayner says. “It used to be you could read maybe (the newsgroup) comp.risks and Cypherpunks and you had read all there was. Now there are so many things going on it can’t be the center of gravity, it can’t be the center of all things.”
You don't have to agree Tim May's Anarcho-Capitalist position or everything he has said, but I think we can all agree that the victory of the First Crypto War is our timeless legacy and his largest contributions (as a leader) to the Internet.