# Cypherpunks The **cypherpunks** were a mailing list and loose movement founded in 1992 by Timothy May, Eric Hughes, and John Gilmore, organized around the proposition that strong [[Encryption]] is a political technology — that privacy is not a policy to be granted by governments but a capability to be built and deployed unilaterally. Hughes's "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993) supplied the operative line: cypherpunks write code. The list's practical output is disproportionate to its size. Anonymous remailers, PGP advocacy during the 1990s "Crypto Wars" over export controls and the Clipper chip, early digital-cash proposals including David Chaum's DigiCash and Nick Szabo's bit gold, and eventually the [[Bitcoin]] white paper — announced on a cryptography list descended from the same milieu — all trace to it. The political theory that accompanied the code, [[Crypto-Anarchism]], is the direct intellectual ancestor of both the cryptocurrency industry and the darknet markets, and its founding claims are what **Silk Road** was built to test. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: the Crypto Wars and export-control litigation, key list figures and their later careers, the digital-cash lineage, and the movement's split between the privacy and the finance wings.