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2026-07-30

Mirror of cypherpunks mailing list with improved UX

Disclaimer

Why cypherpunks list matters

See also: Wikipedia: List of notable cypherpunks
Cypherpunks mailing list is one of the founding discussion forums on the topics of cryptography, privacy, security, freedom, etc.
Notable projects that are causally downstream of this subculture - Bitcoin, Hashcash, Zcash, Tor, Signal, PGP, Wikileaks, SecureDrop, (maybe) Bittorrent, etc

Cypherpunk manifesto was written by Timothy May.

Why did I improve the UX?

I think reading these people's writings is good for my own motivation.
- People here were technically competent and intellectually curious.
- Also they understood that low-trust violent solutions make sense. Cryptography was (IMO correctly) viewed as a weapon, both by the cypherpunks and the govts opposing them.
- Cypherpunks generally did not tradeoff their curiosity in favour of being violent, or vice versa.
I think it is good to read about the origin of any subculture you participate in.
- I think information density of these writings is high, especially if you read carefully.
- Many discussions on this topic today are simply rehashed discussions or working implementations of stuff that was discussed back in the 1990s itself. You will often learn more going to back to original discussions, as opposed to reading more modern stuff.
- Implementations are still lagging theory by a lot, because writing code as a cypherpunk doesn't always make money, and secure cryptographic code is especially hard to write. (Beginners are especially discouraged from "rolling your own crypto" which makes the learning curve steeper.) You can still find ideas discussed in some obscure thread from 1995, that has no working implementation as of 2026.

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