"By its very nature, it favors the bright (who can put it to use) over the dull (who cannot). It favors the adaptable (who are quick to see the merit of the new) over the sluggish (who cling to time-tested ways). And what two better words are there to describe government bureaucracy than 'dull' and 'sluggish'?" — Chuck Hammill (From Crossbows To Cryptography: Techno-Thwarting The State, 1987) #government #freedom

"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

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #government #regulation #cyberspace

"The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's informational footprints—everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion—can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #privacy #cypherpunk #encryption #freedom

"We hope this will inspire others to work in this fascinating area in which participation has been discouraged in the recent past by a nearly total government monopoly." — Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #government #monopoly #freedom

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." — Edward Snowden (Reddit AMA, 2015) #privacy #freespeech

"Fundamentally, I believe we will have the kind of society that most people want. If we want freedom and privacy, we must persuade others that these are worth having. There are no shortcuts." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #freedom #privacy

"Technological ideas and technological things are not politically neutral: routinely, they have strong, built-in tendencies." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #politics

"Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012) #cryptography #nonviolence

"It is important to realize that while distributed consensus is a hard problem, ordinary consensus is much easier and better studied, and can be solved some trillions of times more efficiently by use of trusted identifiable signing parties. Therefore, cryptocurrencies which compromise by introducing trusted parties, even under limited circumstances, should consider whether their new trust model is one for which consensus is easily achieved by some other mechanism." — Andrew Poelstra (On Stake and Consensus, 2015) #consensus #trust #cryptocurrency #bitcoin

"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

"There is only one way this vision will materialize, and that is by widespread use of cryptography. Is this technologically possible? Definitely. The obstacles are political—some of the most powerful forces in government are devoted to the control of these tools." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #cryptography #privacy #government #politics

"The last characteristic which we note in the history of cryptography is the division between amateur and professional cryptographers. Skill in production cryptanalysis has always been heavily on the side of the professionals, but innovation, particularly in the design of new types of cryptographic systems, has come primarily from the amateurs." — Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #innovation #amateur #freedom

"Cash is more than a method of payment. It is a fundamental tool for individual privacy and autonomy, and it is necessary for an open society." — Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019) #cash #privacy #autonomy #opensociety

"They're abridging the freedom and privacy of all citizens—to defend us against a bogeyman that they will not explain. The decision to literally trade away our privacy is one that must be made by the whole society, not made unilaterally by a military spy agency." — John Gilmore (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #privacy #freedom #government #nsa #democracy

"Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #intelligence #secrecy #law #government

"Bitcoin is not a list of cryptographic features, it's a very complex system of interacting mathematics and protocols in pursuit of what was a very unpopular goal." — Nick Szabo (Bitcoin, what took ye so long?, 2011) #bitcoin #cryptography #protocols

"If you see a proposal for an electronic money system, check to see whether it has the ability to preserve the privacy of financial transactions the way paper money does today. If not, realize that the proposal is designed to harm, not help, individual privacy." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #privacy #warning

"I think the greed and hype and nattering about 'to the Moon!' and 'HODL' is the biggest hype wagon I've ever seen." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #bitcoin #hype #greed #criticism

"If we had a mapping which took the fixed digicash bits onto the interesting parts of the fractal, then fake cash would not produce pretty pictures, while real cash would produce some part of a beautiful fractal. Again, you would have validation and beauty being tied together." — Hal Finney (The Beauty of ECash, 1994) #digitalcash #cryptography