Crypto’s Rebel Roots: How a 1993 WIRED Cover on Cypherpunks Foreshadowed the Blockchain Revolution
Three decades before Bitcoin hit ATHs, a ragtag group of privacy radicals graced WIRED’s cover—armed with encryption, anarchist ideals, and zero trust in central banks.
The Cypherpunks’ manifesto now reads like a blockchain whitepaper: digital cash, pseudonymous identities, and systems that cut out middlemen. Too bad their utopian vision now fuels speculative trading desks and rug-pull NFT schemes.
Lesson? Every disruptive tech eventually gets co-opted by finance... but the encryption wars they started still shape crypto’s DNA today.
Satoshi, is that you?
Around the same time, MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir and Adleman developed a separate public-key method, RSA, which had far greater potential than the government-created Data Encryption Standard, which didn’t use public keys at all.
WIRED’s article also detailed the plight of cryptographer Phil Zimmermann in the wake of his invention of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) — a mighty, free alternative to RSA that utilized RSA patented technology without permission.
Zimmermann went to great lengths to build PGP, missing five mortgage payments and “coming within an inch” of losing his home. But he wasn’t selling the software — he simply released it into the wild (internet bulletin boards), “like thousands of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind,” he wrote.
Still, the US government made Zimmermann the target of a criminal investigation for munitions export without a license, which was still ongoing at the time of WIRED’s piece.
Two years later, Zimmermann published the entire PGP source code in a hardback book released by MIT Press — allowing anyone in the world to build their own privacy tech all by themselves.
Exporting books is a First Amendment right that should trump any restrictions on the exportation of cryptographic software. The investigation was eventually closed and the Feds brought no charges.
Loading Tweet..To say that there might be no Bitcoin without the Cypherpunks is a severe understatement. Satoshi Nakamoto himself may very well be underneath one of the many masks featured in WIRED’s article.
Here’s how deep the parallels go: at multiple points in Levy’s writing, one could easily sub Bitcoin-related terms into any number of sentences describing the fight for accessible cryptography:
“Diffie recognized that the solution rested in a decentralized system in which each person held the literal key to his or her own privacy.”
“In the Cypherpunk mind, cryptographyis too important to leave to governments or even well-meaning companies.”
“You can have my encryption algorithm…, when you pry my cold dead fingers from my private key.”
I’ll leave you to read the full piece, which is still available online, if nothing more than to reinforce the significance of the “crypto” in “cryptocurrency.”
After all, very real individuals fought years for its existence.
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