"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

"It is tempting to try for the best of both worlds—to restrict the privacy of bad people while protecting that of good, permit governments to collect detailed information about us but only allow it to be used for good purposes. But somebody must decide who are the good people and the bad, what purposes are worthy or unworthy. Whoever that somebody is will have his own agenda, his own purposes. Angels are in short supply." — David D. Friedman (The Case for Privacy, 2005) #privacy #government #freedom

"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence." — Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993) #privacy #government #corporations

"Advances in information technology have made possible the rise of a truly international currency that does not depend on a central bank." — Nick Szabo (Bit Gold, 2005) #digitalcurrency #centralbank #international

"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

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

"These legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law." — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #law #civildisobedience #democracy #change

"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

"The cypherpunks were troublemakers: controversial, radical, unrelenting, but also practical. They made things." — Jamie Bartlett (Cypherpunks Write Code, American Scientist) #cypherpunk #code

"When you expose your privacy, you put us all at risk." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #privacy #collective #warning #surveillance

"That cryptographic work is deeply tied to politics is a claim so obvious that only a cryptographer could fail to see it." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #politics

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

"The best defense against abusive government is an informed and active citizenry." — Whitfield Diffie (Congressional testimony, 1993) #government #defense

"We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #freespeech #conformity

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

"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

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

"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

"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

"A hash function should be a one-way function — easy to compute but difficult to reverse." — Ralph Merkle (A Certified Digital Signature, 1989) #cryptography