In the late 20th century, a silent revolution began taking shape behind the scenes of technology. While most of the population could not even imagine the potential of the internet, a group of visionaries already foresaw a future where privacy, freedom, and decentralization would be defended through cryptography.
The Cypherpunks were activists, cryptographers, and programmers who believed cryptography could be the definitive tool to protect the individual against state surveillance. The standouts are The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto by Timothy C. May and A Cypherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes. These documents not only predicted the rise of technologies like Bitcoin, PGP, and Tor — they shaped the fight for privacy in the digital age. The legacy of May and Hughes is that of men whose predictions about privacy, digital currencies, and resistance to government surveillance came true in ways not even they could have imagined.
The making of two brilliant minds
Timothy Christopher May showed a brilliant mind from an early age, with a leaning toward physics and technology. He graduated in Physics and worked at Intel during the 1970s, where he contributed to the development of microprocessors. His engineering career, however, would be only the prelude to his real impact on the world. Inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and libertarian thinkers, May began to question centralized power structures and to look for ways to protect individual freedom in an increasingly digital world.
Eric Hughes was a mathematician, cryptographer, and one of the founders of the Cypherpunk movement, with a career marked by an uncompromising defense of digital privacy and freedom of information. A mathematics graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Hughes stood out as one of the leading theorists and activists of applied cryptography, actively collaborating on the Cypherpunks mailing list throughout the 1990s.
Beyond writing A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993), which became one of the movement's founding texts, Hughes also worked on developing privacy systems and was among the first to operate an anonymous remailer — technology that allowed email to be sent without revealing the sender's identity. His career reflected the conviction that cryptography should be accessible to everyone as a tool of emancipation, influencing generations of developers and digital activists.
Origins of the Cypherpunk movement
In the 1980s and 1990s the internet was still in its infancy, but governments and companies were already showing an interest in controlling and monitoring digital communications. The US National Security Agency (NSA) tried to restrict the use of strong cryptography, classifying it as a "weapon" subject to regulation.
It was in this environment that the Cypherpunks emerged, a movement combining three elements:
- libertarian ideas inspired by Ayn Rand and by Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek;
- cryptographic technology, such as RSA, PGP, and anonymity systems;
- digital activism raising the banners of resistance to censorship and state surveillance.
Some of the movement's most influential names included the aforementioned Timothy C. May and Eric Hughes, along with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks; Hal Finney, cryptographer and the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction; and Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
They gathered on private mailing lists and at conferences, discussing how cryptography could be used to decentralize state power and fight abuses of authority. The vision was clear: technology should be used to protect the individual against oppression by governments and corporations.
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
In 1993, Eric Hughes published A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, defining the movement's principles. It opens by drawing the distinction that anchors the entire text — the one between privacy and secrecy:
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
From that definition, Hughes derives a requirement: if identity is exposed by the underlying mechanism of a transaction, privacy does not exist at all. Hence the need for anonymous transaction systems, of which cash has historically been the primary one. He is careful to separate anonymity from secrecy:
An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.
The manifesto then rejects the idea that privacy will be granted from above:
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.
And it closes with the line that became the movement's operating principle — the reason the Cypherpunks produced working software rather than only position papers:
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.
The full text is short and worth reading in the original: A Cypherpunk's Manifesto.
The manifesto's key points included cryptography as a tool of liberation, digital anonymity as a fundamental right, and the need for decentralized systems to prevent censorship and abuse of authority.
The birth of crypto anarchy
In the late 1980s, May came into contact with a group of cypherpunks — activists who believed in cryptography as a tool of political emancipation. In 1988 he wrote The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, a seminal text that predicted much of what we can observe today. It opens with a deliberate echo of Marx:
A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.
May's central prediction was that computer technology was about to make fully anonymous interaction possible — two people transacting and signing contracts without ever knowing each other's true name or legal identity — and that this would change the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, and even the concepts of trust and reputation.
He was equally clear-eyed about the response and the costs. The State, he wrote, would try to slow or halt the technology by citing national security, drug dealers, tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration — and he conceded that many of those concerns would be valid, including illicit markets and worse. His conclusion was that none of it would stop the spread of crypto anarchy.
The closing image is the one most often quoted. Just as barbed wire — a seemingly minor invention — made it possible to fence off vast ranches and permanently changed the concepts of land and property in the American West, May argued that a seemingly obscure discovery in mathematics would become the wire clippers that dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property:
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!
The full text is available at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute and at activism.net.
May argued that cryptography would enable free digital markets, tamper-proof communications, and even decentralized digital currencies — all of this decades before Bitcoin.
Predictions that came true
Many of May's ideas, which seemed radical in the 1990s, are reality today:
- Cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin leading the way. Although Satoshi Nakamoto was not a self-declared Cypherpunk, the Bitcoin whitepaper clearly shows influences drawn from the movement.
- Hidden markets, such as Silk Road, which operated on cryptography.
- Encrypted communication, such as Signal, Telegram, and PGP.
- Mass surveillance exposed, as in the Snowden leaks.
- Tor (The Onion Router), an anonymity network built to protect political dissidents.
May predicted a world where mathematics would replace trust in institutions, and the rise of blockchain proved him right.
The legacy
Today, in an era of mass surveillance, digital censorship, and corporate centralization, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto remains more relevant than ever. It reminds us that freedom is not given — it is built (and built with code).
Strong cryptography is now the default: HTTPS, Signal, Telegram. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies challenge the traditional financial system controlled by central banks around the world. Leaks like Edward Snowden's proved that mass surveillance is real.
Despite all of it, governments still try to regulate the internet — Apple vs. FBI, supreme courts going after individuals, and various other state acts attempting to censor and silence. Large companies like Google and Meta collect data at an unprecedented scale (how many cookie banners have you accepted lately?).
Conclusion: the future of the internet
The cypherpunks left us a warning: if we do not defend privacy now, it will disappear. With the advance of AI, facial recognition, and CBDCs (central bank digital currencies), the fight for digital freedom matters more than ever.
Timothy C. May was a prophet of the digital age. His ideas challenged the status quo and inspired generations of developers, activists, and libertarians. Even though the world has not become fully crypto-anarchist, his influence is undeniable. If your banking data and documents are kept confidential today, much of that traces back to this movement's original concern.
What is your take on governments and large corporations violating your privacy? Write below.
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Written by
Paulo Victor Fraga
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