In Part 2 of the Cypherpunk series, we dig into more OG’s in privacy, some 2nd wave cypherpunks and legends who helped spawn the crypto industry. Building conviction begins with understanding our roots and how it all began.
"Cryptography is about giving people tools to protect themselves, even against powerful adversaries." - Ivan Damgård
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
(https://x.com/zooko)
A true cypherpunk visionary, he has been shipping code long before BTC. He conceptualized Zooko's Triangle (solving naming in decentralized systems); created Tahoe-LAFS (secure distributed filesystem); co-founded @Zcash and ECC. He first encountered the cypherpunk movement in the mid-1990s, while pursuing a computer science degree at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Inspired by Eric Hughes' A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) and David Chaum, Zooko adopted his pseudonym and dove into the Cypherpunk Mailing List. He debated alongside Hal Finney (Bitcoin's first recipient), Adam Back (Hashcash inventor), and Wei Dai (b-money proposer), ideas that directly inspired Satoshi's whitepaper. Zooko even wrote one of the earliest public analyses of Bitcoin in 2009, praising its potential while critiquing scalability, and was name-dropped by Satoshi in forum posts for his P2P expertise.
By 22, he was contributing to DigiCash (Chaum's e-cash system, launched in 96). After college, he worked on peer-to-peer (P2P) systems at SimpleGeo (location-based services) and founded Least Authority Enterprises in 2014, focusing on "least authority" security models that minimize trust in centralized entities. He also authored the Transitive Grace Period Public License (TGPPL), an open-source license to prevent corporate capture of cypherpunk code, and contributed to SPHINCS (post-quantum signatures).
"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy... We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any."
Daira-Emma Hopwood
(https://x.com/feministPLT)
Inspired by the U.S. government’s attempts to suppress encryption software, such as PGP, in the late 90s, they immersed themselves in cypherpunk culture, PGP encryption, and debates around government surveillance and privacy tools.
They serve as an R&D Engineering Manager at the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the org behind Zcash, and is a principal author of its protocol specification, which incorporates advanced zero-knowledge proofs (like zk-SNARKs) to enable private transactions on a public blockchain.
They work on post-quantum cryptography research, aimed at protecting systems like Zcash from potential future quantum computing threats.
Their work emphasizes capability-based security, peer-to-peer networking, and privacy-enhancing technologies. They’ve authored or contributed to over 100 repositories on
GitHub covering topics from mixnets to secure protocol design.
“If you don’t have financial privacy, you don’t have privacy”
Len Sassaman
(https://x.com/lensassaman)
Built Mixmaster anonymous remailers (1990s); co-authored Mixminion (next-gen Type II remailers); early Tor contributor; embodied privacy through anonymity networks. A privacy advocate whose pioneering work in anonymous communication and secure protocols profoundly influenced the early internet and modern digital privacy tools. He contributed to PGP encryption and anonymous remailers before his death on July 3, 2011, at age 31.
At 19, in 1999, he moved to the San Francisco Bay, immersing himself in the cypherpunk movement. He lived with Bram Cohen (BitTorrent inventor) and emphasized practical privacy tools to evade surveillance, influencing everything from email anonymity to blockchain privacy.
Was Sassaman Satoshi? Satoshi's last post was April 23, 2011, and he died months later, but he was critical of bitcoin’s lack of privacy and frequently re-tweeted Zooko.
“This big Bitcoin heist shows Bitcoin suffers from the worst of both worlds: no strong anonymity, yet no fraud reversal protection.”
Roger Dingledine
(https://x.com/RogerDingledine)
A wave 2 cypherpunk, inspired by David Chaum and the original movement. Roger has spent over two decades building and defending infrastructure that protects free speech, whistleblowers, journalists, activists, and everyday users from surveillance and censorship.
He’s the lead developer of Tor (2002–present), and turned onion routing (NRL, 1990s) into a global anonymity network. Influenced by David Chaum and Paul Syverson. Tor was originally funded by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and became open-sourced in 2004. Dingledine co-developed it with Nick Mathewson, and later, Syverson. Tor is used daily by over 10 million people worldwide.
Co-founded the Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (now Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium) with Len Sassaman. Zooko credits Tor for inspiring Zcash’s anonymity.
"Anonymity loves company."
Moxie Marlinspike
An early 2000’s anarchist hacker who created Signal Protocol (2013) — end-to-end encryption with double ratchet; now standard in Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger; made usable privacy mainstream. Built Open Whisper Systems (2013) → Signal Foundation (2018) Created the first seamless E2EE messaging app with forward secrecy and disappearing messages.
Signal is used by over 100 million people and recommended by Snowden, EU Commission, and U.S. Senate. He ran an encrypted SMS service for Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
“By providing the illusion of participation for everyone, democracy allows majorities to justify their actions, no matter how oppressive.”
Who inspired the Cypherpunks?
David Kahn
Author of The Codebreakers (1967) — the first comprehensive, unclassified history of cryptography that inspired an entire generation of cypherpunks, including Whitfield Diffie. The Codebreakers was the first public, book-length history of cryptography from ancient Egypt to the Cold War. It covered Enigma, Purple, Venona, Zimmermann Telegram, Bletchley Park, Navajo code talkers, and more. The NSA panicked and tried to stop its publication, but the publisher refused. After reading it, Diffie said: “If the government can break codes, maybe civilians can make codes the government can’t break.” Zimmerman’s PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) is a joke from a chapter title in Kahn’s book.
“The future may belong to public cryptography developed outside government.”
Whitfield Diffie
“The Father of Public-Key Cryptography” Co-inventor of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange (1976) — the single most important breakthrough that made the cypherpunk movement possible. Authored “New Directions in Cryptography” (IEEE Transactions, Nov 1976) — the most cited paper in cryptography. Enabled PGP, SSL/TLS, SSH, Signal, Tor, Bitcoin wallets, VPNs — literally every secure Internet transaction. Made end-to-end encryption possible for civilians.
“We stand today on the brink of a revolution in cryptography. The development of cheap digital hardware has freed it from the design limitations of mechanical computing and brought the cost of high grade cryptographic devices down to where they can be used in such commercial applications as remote cash dispensers and computer terminals.” - Nov. 1976
Martin Hellman
Published “New Directions in Cryptography” — the paper that ends symmetric-only crypto forever. Turned Diffle’s concept of public-key agreement
into working modular exponentiation over insecure channels. This one-way function (easy to compute forward, hard to reverse) is still used in every TLS handshake, Signal, WireGuard, Bitcoin key exchange, etc. Direct mentor to early cypherpunks: Phil Zimmermann, Taher Elgamal (SSL inventor), Paul Kocher, and many others at Stanford.
“They are trying to repeal end-to-end encryption. They are trying to repeal math. I don’t think they can do that”
Ralph Merkle
Inventor of Merkle trees and Merkle’s puzzles — co-credited with Diffie–Hellman key exchange; foundational contributor to blockchain, nanotechnology, and cryonics.
First public-key distribution scheme ever proposed. He proved the concept was possible before the math caught up. Inventor of Merkle trees/ Hash trees: A binary tree where leaves are data hashes, and parents are hashes of children. Within crypto, block headers contain Merkle root → prove a transaction is in a block without downloading everything. Zero-knowledge proofs(zk-snarks) also use Merkle paths.
“A peer-to-peer electronic cash system... using Merkle trees to verify payments.” - Satoshi in the Bitcoin Whitepaper
Ivan Damgård
Co-inventor of the Merkle–Damgård hash construction; pioneer of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC); founder of privacy-tech companies that turned theory into real-world secure systems.
Without Damgård, no SHA-2, no efficient MPC, no private blockchains. He took cypherpunk dreams of "privacy by math" and made them deployable at scale.
"Cryptography is about giving people tools to protect themselves, even against powerful adversaries."
