Category: Uncategorized

Nick Szabo, a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer, developed the phrase and concept of “smart contracts”, popularised by Ethereum.

St. Jude Milhon, a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing, hacker and author.  Jude was someone whose spirit led her to be a cypherpunk, and the programming and activism followed.

Hal Finney, a computer programmer militantly concerned with privacy, ran two anonymous remailers and worked for PGP corporation until his retirement. He received the first Bitcoin transaction from Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

David-Lee Chaum, computer scientist, cryptographer, and cypherpunk, did the important initial work on decentralised blockchains He invented digital cash and developed eCash.

Andy Müller Maguhn, principally known as a hacker and a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), had a close association with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Adam Back, cypherpunk embracing bitcoin and blockchains. He invented Hashcash which influenced Bitcoin, where he has also been involved and is the CEO of Blockstream, which was born out of the Bitcoin revolution. He also is very much a professional cryptanalyst.

Eric (“Cypherpunks write code”) Hughes, mathematician, computer programmer, and core founding cypherpunk, did important work to help found the movement with the anonymous remailer; he administered the Cypherpunk mailing list and authored the Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.

Adi Shamir, mathematician, cryptographer and computer scientist. He is the joint inventor of the  Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) cipher and a joint discoverer of differential cryptanalysis.

Ryan Sean Adams, co-host of Bankless. The concept behind Bankless, is financial freedom without having to have a bank account.

David Hoffman, Bankless co-host, came to cryptocurrencies through ethereum and innovated with real-estate real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain.

Julian Assange, programmer, hacker, cypherpunk, publisher and founder of WikiLeaks. In 2010, when WikiLeaks published the Chelsea Manning leaks, Julian was targeted by the United States for extradition.  You are forever in our thoughts.

We honour Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person(s) behind Bitcoin. So we do not know who he/she/they/it is/are. We probably never will. It seems fitting that someone being such a key person(s) behind such a key cypherpunk initiative should be pseudonymous and then vanish.

We honour Andreas Antonopoulos, who has been one of the best entertaining and most important speakers on Bitcoin. His arguments changed the minds of many in the early days of Bitcoin.

We honour Richard (Matthew) Stallman (rms), Free Software Foundation (FSF), programmer and father of the free software movement, to allow users the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify software.

We honour Jonathan Mohan, podcaster on the Speaking Of Bitcoin (formerly Let’s Talk-Bitcoin) podcast. This was a great podcast in the earlier years of Bitcoin and Ethereum and helped share the message.

mathematician, cryptographer and pioneer of public key cryptography. His important work on key distribution, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, gave birth to asymmetric key algorithms.

Julian Assange, programmer, hacker, cypherpunk, publisher and founder of WikiLeaks. In 2010, when WikiLeaks published the Chelsea Manning leaks, Julian was targeted by the United States for extradition.

Zooko Wilcox O’Hearn, Electric Coin Company, ZCash. Zooko is a cryptographer and a cypherpunk who worked on DigiCash with David Chaum and was behind establishing ZCash, a privacy-based cryptocurrency.

Alan Turing, mathematician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst. Until his work on decrypting the German enigma machine during the 2nd World War was made public, he was known mostly in computer science for his papers on computability, specifically for Turing Machines.

Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.