the Cypherpunks
termcryptographyprivacy
The movement and mailing list founded in 1992 around a single conviction: that widely deployed strong cryptography, not legislation, is what protects privacy from states and corporations. Eric Hughes's manifesto supplied the creed - 'Cypherpunks write code.'
The list argued out most of the modern internet's privacy machinery years before it shipped: anonymous remailers, digital cash, onion routing, and the legal fight over encryption export that became the Crypto Wars. Its alumni built PGP's ecosystem, Tor, BitTorrent and eventually Bitcoin - Satoshi's paper was announced on a descendant list. The name was coined by Jude Milhon, and the movement is where cryptography stopped being a military discipline and became a civil-rights one.
Also known as: cypherpunk mailing list, crypto wars, cypherpunks write code