"What is the greatest unsolved problem in cryptography today? Lack of user awareness." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #cryptography

"Mathematics is not the law." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #mathematics #law #cryptography #philosophy

"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

"There is nothing quite so disempowering as a government that can read all your most intimate thoughts and correspondence." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #surveillance #government #privacy

"The goal of electronic cash is to allow these same kinds of private transactions to take place electronically." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #privacy #transactions

"Crypto anarchy is not just about avoiding laws. It's about making certain laws unenforceable, and hence making them obsolete." — Tim May (Cypherpunks Mailing List, 1992) #cryptoanarchy #law #enforcement

"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

"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'" — Richard Stallman (GNU Project, 1985) #freesoftware #liberty #opensource

"Google and Facebook are not really in the business of data – they are in the business of power." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #surveillance #power #techcompanies #data

"Most people are unaware of how visible email is. Email could be intercepted by a lot of parties along the way, it could be captured and logged, scanned and then used years later." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #email #surveillance #privacy #interception

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

"That's why our primary defense isn't law, but technology." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #law #defense #wikileaks

"Using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous 'digital cash,' it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given." — Jim Bell (Assassination Politics, 1997) #encryption #digitalcash #anonymity #privacy

"We live in a golden age for surveillance. Everything you do can be captured." — Jacob Appelbaum (30C3 Congress, 2013) #surveillance #privacy

"Cash is an escape valve in our increasingly intermediated and therefore surveilled world." — Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019) #cash #privacy #surveillance #freedom

"You can pay for access to a database, download a program, or have a prescription filled — without anyone being able to trace the transaction back to you." — David Chaum (Security Without Identification, 1985) #privacy #transactions #anonymity

"When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013) #bitcoin #satoshi #history

"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

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #cyberspace #independence #government

"The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global social network." — fiatjaf (Nostr Protocol Documentation, 2020) #nostr #protocol #censorshipresistance