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

"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

"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

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

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." — Aaron Swartz (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008) #openaccess

"Cypherpunk cryptography has been described as crypto with an attitude. But it is much more than that, for, more than anything else, what the cypherpunks wanted was crypto with values." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cypherpunk #cryptography

"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

"I would like to die peacefully in my sleep, knowing that I helped create a better world for those who come after me." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013)

"If the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet." — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #privacy #surveillance #law #nothingtohide

"Cash is also necessary to retain agency and autonomy. Autonomy can be understood as the power to make decisions for oneself without interference from others." — Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019) #cash #autonomy #freedom #agency

"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

"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

"In the long run, the real battle will be the one fought in defense of technologies that protect privacy. That one we might win." — David D. Friedman (The Case for Privacy, 2005) #privacy #cryptography #freedom

"Because Bitcoin's DMMS is computationally, and therefore thermodynamically, very expensive, alternatives have been proposed which seek to be economically and environmentally more efficient. One popular alternative, proof-of-stake, is frequently proposed as a mechanism for a cheap distributed consensus. As argued by the author in 2014, this is simply not workable." — Andrew Poelstra (On Stake and Consensus, 2015) #bitcoin #consensus #cryptocurrency

"But there is another solution, one advocated forcefully by computer scientist David Chaum. Rather than relying on new laws and more government, Chaum looks to technical solutions. And these solutions rely on the ancient science devoted to keeping information confidential: cryptography." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #cryptography #privacy #government

"The notion that we can just fade into cypherspace and ignore the unpleasant political realities is unrealistic, in my view." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #politics #cypherpunk

"Public key cryptography is a revolution that puts control of privacy into the hands of the individual." — Whitfield Diffie (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #publickey #privacy

"If you go into a store today and make a purchase with cash, no records are left tying you personally to the transaction. With no records, there is nothing to go into a computer database. 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

"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

"Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship. And in the same manner that very significant resources spent on China's firewall, the result is that anyone who's motivated can work around it." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #censorship #leaks