"I believed in the idea of giving people the freedom to buy and sell and connect with each other without the all-seeing eye of government watching every move." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #privacy

"WE STAND TODAY on the brink of a revolution in cryptography." — Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #revolution #privacy #publickey

"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

"Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #privacy #secrecy

"A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises." — Nick Szabo (Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets, 1996) #smartcontracts #digital #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

"What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope, it would draw suspicion." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #privacy #encryption #conformity

"I am an engineer, not a mathematician. I try to find practical solutions to actual problems." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #cryptography

"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #privacy #encryption #law

"Cryptography can make possible a world in which people have control over information about themselves, not because government has granted them that control, but because only they possess the cryptographic keys to reveal that information. This is the world we are working to create." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #cryptography #privacy #government

"Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012)

"If cryptography's most basic aim is to enable secure communications, how could it not be a colossal failure of our field when ordinary people lack even a modicum of communication privacy when interacting electronically?" — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #privacy

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." — Linus Torvalds (Linux Kernel Mailing List, 2000) #code #opensource

"Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner." — Tim May (The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988) #anonymity #privacy

"Trusted third parties are security holes." — Nick Szabo (Trusted Third Parties are Security Holes, 2001) #security #trust #decentralization

"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

"Privacy gives each of us more control over his own life—which on average, if not in every case, is likely to lead to a freer world." — David D. Friedman (The Case for Privacy, 2005) #privacy #freedom

"I have argued that the Internet should have had security built into it from the very beginning, where every email message was authenticated with a signature, and that there was an adequate public key infrastructure in place." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #internet #security #email #publickey

"If everyone's every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective. Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they'd like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all." — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #surveillance #selectiveenforcement #power #law

"Even more than monetary gain, personal data bestows power on those who collect and analyse it, and that is what makes it so coveted." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #data #power #surveillance #privacy