"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
"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
"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
"Efforts to influence the government (e.g., lobbying and propaganda) are important only in so far as to delay its attempted crackdown long enough for the technology to mature and come into wide use."
— Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995)
#lobbying
"Cash is also pretty good for privacy because there's no camera that can capture every movement of a dollar bill every time it moves; it just wouldn't work."
— Peter Valkenburgh (Your Secret Right to Cash, 2017)
#cash #privacy #surveillance #technology
"Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension."
— Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015)
#cryptography #politics
"Be interested in liberty and the freedom to transact and speak to get back to the original motivations. Don't spend time trying to make government-friendly financial alternatives."
— Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018)
#liberty #freedom #transactions #government
"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
"Bitcoin is a tool of resistance gifted to us by Satoshi. The idea has escaped and the idea of cryptocurrency will not be stopped."
— Amir Taaki (The libbitcoin Manifesto, 2013)
#bitcoin #resistance #cryptocurrency #freedom
"Money, like written language, was one of the most important inventions of civilization."
— Nick Szabo (Shelling Out: The Origins of Money, 2002)
#money #civilization #history
