The Figures

Categorisation

Below, we list the figures represented in the NFT collection, grouped by an area in which they have been most active. At times, there is a large amount of cross-over: There is no stopping a person from being active in all of the groups. We list figures under the group where we feel they have made the greatest impact. The categories are –

1. Mathematicians and Scientists
2. Cryptographers
3. Cypherpunks
4. Programmers and Computer Scientists
5. Blockchain and Other Engineers
6. Journalists, Bloggers, Podcasters and Lawyers
7. Whistleblowers
8. Odds and Sods

Completeness

The NFT collection is not meant to be exhaustive, so you will find large gaps in these lists where you feel others should be honoured as well. You can add your recommendations for a future release below.

Landscape

The central idea of the collection is Cypherpunks – those militantly claiming privacy for all citizens, regardless of state opposition, often by building it themselves. This central idea is extended to the other fields –

Cryptographers developed the underlying techniques the Cypherpunks leveraged; Mathematicians and Scientists developed the underlying maths that the cryptographers used.

Cypherpunks are programmers who build on the programming of the Programmers & Computer Scientists that came before them. One of their crowning achievements was building the Bitcoin blockchain. This blockchain might lack effective privacy, but it changed forever the state’s monopoly on fiat currency slavery, along with the attendant regular theft of citizens’ savings. Bitcoin also was the inspiration of others to come afterwards, building decentralised ledgers and the technology of Web 3.0, the decentralised internet where the privacy-stealing unicorns are disintermediated, and citizens again use technology without the controls and monitoring of the state and exploited by their unicorn partners in a fascist totalitarian.

We salute the Blockchain and other Software Engineers for following in the cypherpunk’s shoes and building software to promote liberty. Some have made the decision to take their stand against state overreach and commercial malpractice as Journalists, Bloggers, Podcasters and Whistleblowers.

There is a sense that all these groups have a similar mission and commitment. We salute them.

Figures

Mathematicians and Scientists

Ada Lovelace, British countess with astoundingly diverse accomplishments. Helped Charles Babbage with his difference engine.

Albert Einstein was a giant of mathematics and theoretical physics. His life was an inspiration to those who followed him. The rise of Hitler early in his life led to his immigration to the USA. He was not afraid to speak out on politics and society, similar to cypherpunks.

Charles Babbage, mathematician, cryptographer, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. So Babbage covers many of the areas here for cypherpunks, but he lived at a time when that word had never been used.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German polymath who worked in Maths, Statistics and Calculus and developed some early mechanical calculators. He did a lot of work to develop binary numbers, and his calculus ratiocinator anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. 

John Napier, Edinburgh mathematician and discoverer of logarithms.

Cryptographers

Cryptography is the encrypting of plain text to cipher text and decrypting back again. It is as old as history. It is sought out by all who wish to keep private that which may be seen by others, particularly the military. The complementary activity is cryptanalysis, which decodes some adversary’s cipher text into plain text without the algorithm and keys being supplied. It was practised before machines and computers sped up the process.

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.

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, a conceptual simple machine with a tape reader/writer that he showed was capable of computing anything computable. Also, on computability, he worked on the halting problem, showing the impossibility of writing an algorithm that could detect whether or not another computer program would halt or not. His work on Enigma was dramatised into the movie, “The Imitation Game”. The title alludes to his test for artificial intelligence, The Turing Test.

Herbert Osborn Yardley, an American cryptologist. He founded and led the cryptographic organization the Black Chamber, which broke Japanese diplomatic codes.

Martin Edward Hellman, cryptologist, mathematician, and inventor of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. He is a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate and has applied risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence.

Matthew D Green,  cryptographer and security technologist, specialises in applied cryptography, privacy-enhanced information storage systems, anonymous cryptocurrencies, elliptic curve crypto-systems, and satellite television piracy. He worked on Zerocoin and Zerocash and influenced the development of Zcash.

Whitfield Diffie, 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. He was also very much part of the computer industry, working on Lisp, PDPs and working for Sun Microsystems. He should be considered a cypherpunk for criticizing the NBS proposed Data Encryption Standard, largely because its 56-bit key length was too short.

Cypherpunks

Cypherpunks were a movement around the mid- to late 1980s, principally composed of mathematicians, scientists, cryptographers, and computer programmers, but also including journalists and activists.

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.

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.

Andy Müller Maguhn, principally known as a hacker and a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), in true cypherpunk style, defends the privacy of others when siding with the parents of the deceased hacker Boris Floricic, better known as Tron, to protect his identity. Although parts are disputed, it is clear he had a close association with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

David-Lee Chaum, computer scientist, cryptographer, and cypherpunk, did the important initial work on decentralised blockchains with his paper, “Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups”. He invented digital cash and developed eCash. Like all cypherpunks, he was very focused on digital privacy and did a lot of work in the space.

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.

Ian (Avrum) Goldberg, cryptographer and cypherpunk. He broke Netscape’s implementation of SSL with David Wagner by exploiting a flaw in its random number generator.  He was a Tor Project board of directors chairman and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.  He is a member of the Cryptography, Security and Privacy group as well as the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI).

Jacob Appelbaum, like many Cypherpunks, combines hacking, programming, and journalism. He was a member of the Tor project, has been published in Der Spiegel, and has been associated with wikiLeaks.

Jillian York, EFF,  “one of the leading scholars on Internet control and censorship”, author of “Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism and Morocco – Culture Smart!: the essential guide to customs & culture“. Where early Cypherpunks focussed on enabling privacy through effective public-key infrastructure (PKI), Jillian has focussed on revealing how surveillance is used against citizens to limit their freedoms.

Jon Callas, programmer, UX designer, computer security and cryptography specialist, co-founder of PGP Corporation. He worked on Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP.

John Gilmore, programmer, cryptographer, Cypherpunk, civil libertarian, activist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Cypherpunks mailing list. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU Project (Gdb, Gnash, pdTar, gnuTar). He authored BOOTP, which evolved into DHCP and was an early employee of Sun MS. He founded the  FreeS/WAN project to promote the encryption of Internet traffic – very much a Cypherpunk move.

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.

Nick Szabo, a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer, developed the phrase and concept of “smart contracts”, popularised by Ethereum. This takes the early work of the cypherpunks in digital privacy and liberty and extends it not only to decentralised currency (Bitcoin), but also decentralised computation in Ethereum and similar smart-contract blockchains. The cypherpunk vision of every citizen being able to communicate privately and hold decentralised currency gives birth to every citizen now being able to engage in decentralised finance with that currency. This challenges the state-controlled banking system introduced by President Nixon in the 1970s Bank Secrecy Act.

Phil Zimmermann, programmer, computer scientist and cryptographer. He developed the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software, which became the battle line for the cypherpunk movement. Since winning the Second World War by secretly deciphering German Enigma messages, the Five Eyes secret services have been intent on secretly deciphering all communications everywhere. PGP, which uses public-key encryption and the web of trust for privacy, signing and non-repudiation of messages, disrupted this vision. There was quite a spat, with Zimmermann finally winning out by publishing the source code as a book and using constitutional amendments for his defence. This high-court win changed everything. Citizens were allowed to use encryption to maintain their privacy, but the secret services were allowed to circumvent it where they could. Phil’s view? “The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier”, and “the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months”.

Satoshi Nakamoto is 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. Check out the linked Wikipedia article for speculation of who it might have been.

Timothy C (Tim) May, as an engineer at Intel, would know his fair share of mathematics. He was a cypherpunk and the founder of the crypto-anarchist movement, a separate but closely aligned movement with cypherpunks. He authored the  “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” and the cypherpunk FAQ, “The Cyphernomicon”. His work would have had a significant influence on Bitcoin and Wikileaks.

Wei Dai, cryptographer, programmer, Cypherpunk. He developed the Crypto++ cryptographic library and created the b-money cryptocurrency system. He identified critical Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) vulnerabilities affecting SSH2. Wei Dai’s b-money was developed before Bitcoin and was credited in Satoshi’s white paper.

Programmers & Computer Scientists

The act of writing computer programs makes one a computer programmer. Computer scientists study the science of computation – what is and is not computable, the algorithms to compute things, the complexity of algorithms, the classification of computable problems, the classification of programming (and other) languages, and the programmatic methods used to translate and compile programming languages. Naturally, programming and computer science are intertwined, and conceptually, at least, one could do one without the other, but eventually, the two should come together.

Alfred Aho, a Canadian computer scientist and programmer known for his work on algorithms and compilers, is the ‘A’ in the programming language AWK and co-author of the Dragon books on compiler design.

Bill Joy is a computer engineer, chief scientist, and CTO of Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded.

Bram Cohen, computer programmer and author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001. Peer-to-peer protocols were an important forerunner to decentralised computation and showed that sufficiently incentivised, individuals would collaborate on the internet around a protocol that provided mutual benefit. In 2024, decentralised physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), which build on these ideas, are taking off. Copyright holders have had a hard time with BitTorrent, in a similar way that the state had with private communications.

Brian Kernighan, a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. He is the ‘K’ in the programming language AWK. He worked on NP-complete problems and the Go programming language and recently (2022) worked on improvements to AWK.

Dennis Ritchie, computer scientist with degrees in Physics and Mathematics. He was the creator of the C programming language which for a long time defined the category of mid-level programming languages. He worked for Bell Labs on switching circuits and the Unix operating system (OS), the precursor to the open-source Linux OS that powers much of the internet and has found applications far afield. He also worked in cryptanalysis and the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. Everyone who has worked on BSD and Unix/Linux OSes generally owes Dennis Ritchie somewhat of a debt.

Derek A Atkins is a computer scientist specializing in computer security. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Donald Knuth, “father of the analysis of algorithms,” is a theoretical computer scientist and author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming.  He is also the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system. Though, to our knowledge, he never was involved with the cypherpunks, he held strong views on software patents, particularly to trivial solutions, opposing the granting of patents by both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Organisation. Knuth managed to find beauty in his work and shared it with all of us. He encouraged us to find it also with literate programming, showing how close programming and natural language could be.

Gavin Andresen, programmer who developed Bitcoin core, took over from Satoshi when Bitcoin’s success was far from a done deal. He also established the Bitcoin Foundation, later leaving software engineering to head the Foundation.

Jeffrey (David) Ullman, computer scientist who works in compilers, theory of computation, data structures, and databases. He authored the Dragon and Cinderella books.

John McCarthy, computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and a founder of the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI). He developed the Lisp programming language and influenced ALGOL, developed time-sharing and garbage collection.

John von Neumann, mathematician, physicist, early computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He contributed to so many areas. In computing, linear programming and numerical analysis. His name is associated with the single-memory, stored program architecture (what most of us today think of as a “computer”), commonly called von Neumann architecture, but it is also the work of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. He also worked in sorting algorithms (merge sort), Monte Carlo methods and much else besides.

Ken Thompson, computer scientist and programmer at Bell Labs, working closely with Dennis Ritchie. He designed and implemented a lot of Unix and is the author of the ‘B’ programming language, which he later revised, producing the ‘C’ programming language. He later also developed the Go programming language at Google. His long career has benefitted humanity greatly: There is a sense that he built a great part of the ‘machinery’ of computing that is pervasive today.

Leonard Adleman, computer scientist and one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm. He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computing.

Linus Torvalds, programmer and creator of two open-source projects, Linux and Git, was born from a need to develop the Linux kernel. Linux brought Unix to open source; Git pioneered a distributed version control system (SCCM). There had been a number of version control systems previously, but Git totally took over and now dominates. Open-source Linux changed the operating system landscape forever. Now, there are hundreds of Linux distributions finding applications in diverse industries. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie designed and developed a great computing platform, and Linus Torvalds opened it up to the world.

Marc Andreessen, programmer and businessman. He wrote one of the earliest web browsers, Mosaic, which later became Netscape, which helped popularise the world wide web.

Niklaus Wirth, computer scientist that designed the Pascal, Algol-W, and Modula-2 programming languages and many more besides. Much like Knuth, he understood that expressing algorithms well was the key to good programming and to that end he wrote better and better programming languages to assist with it. His law is that “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”

Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, public intellectual, and political activist. His classification of languages is referenced in computer science as the basis for considering automatic translators for programming languages in compiler design. Like the cypherpunks, working in highly academic, fundamental maths and sciences does not preclude political activism.

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. He is responsible for (i) the GNU Project, (ii) the Free Software Foundation, (iii) GNU Compiler Collection, (iv) other GNU software and (v) the GNU General Public License (GPL). rms was early in this fight, and a lot of what he innovated was taken up and developed further by others. And that is exactly the nature of the freedom he fought for. A lot of GNU software is now part of Linux; the GNU GPL inspired others to write similar licences, such as the MIT and Creative Commons (CC) licences; the FSF is still fighting the fight; and the GNU Compiler Collection is an open-source tour-de-force, relied on and contributed by many. In the same way that later Linus open-sourced the Unix OS into Linux, rms open-sourced language compilers into the GNU Compiler Collection, showing that open-source compilers can be more than a match for those developed professionally by corporations.

Runa Sandvik,  programmer, computer security specialist and founder of Granitt.  She is noted for her work in protecting at-risk civil society groups, including human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists. She worked on Tor and interviewed Snowden.

Blockchain & Other Engineers

Decentralised, public blockchain technology is a hugely important innovation. Essentially, it introduces ledgers that we can trust. Before this innovation, no ledger could be trusted. The problem is there is too much incentive for parties to corrupt it. Blockchains are at the heart of the Web 3.0 movement to disintermediate the “unicorn + deep state” controls.

Andre Cronje is a professional code reviewer and founder of Yearn.Finance, Contributor to Fantom (directed acyclic graph), which is thriving in the ‘Stans.

Chad Barraford, Lead Developer of Thorchain DEX

Charles Hoskinson, founder of the Cardano Blockchain, which is notorious for its slow but thorough technical progress.

Ethan Buchman, one of the co-founders of the COSMOS technology stack and active COSMOS OG.

Gavin Wood, Polkadot founder and early software engineer of the Ethereum virtual machines (EVM).

Jae Kwon, co-founder of the COSMOS technology stack, developer of GoLang, and founder of Atom One fork. He is known to call out the misdeeds of governments.

Kim DotCom, once notorious for being behind a file-sharing service that frustrated USA copyright holders, is now the founder of mega.nz, a zero-knowledge file-sharing service. Zero-knowledge services are the epitome of the cyberpunk ethos—they provide privacy from the service provider and, therefore, from the service provider’s government.

Mustafa A Bassam, one-time childhood hacker, who exposed corruption and escaped jail time for being underage. He learnt his lesson and is now behind one of the most successful blockchain developments of 2024, Celestia, the modular blockchain data availability (DA) service.

Tim Berners-Lee, renowned inventor of the world-wide-web (WWW). Internet protocols had abounded for some time, but the invention of hypertext markup language (HTML) brought a level of usability that changed life on earth forever. Don’t underestimate usability.

Vitalic Buterin, Ethereum co-founder. Vitalic has been the driving force for Ethereum from the beginning, and has found much admiration for his sincere and thoughtful leadership.

Zaki Manian is a co-founder of Sommelier and a COSMOS contributor to many areas, including IBC, smart contracts, and Agoric.

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.

Erik Voorhees, Bitcoiner, Shapeshift Exchange founder. When Erik was frustrated with complying with the USA requirements of his (CEX) exchange to reveal customer data, he converted it to a DEX. This crypto-libertarian stance is so in line with Cypherpunk ideals. Erik has also been involved with SatoshiDice and BitInstant.

Journalists, Bloggers, Podcasters, Lawyers

We do not think there is much difference between the four, other than perhaps the medium – either written or audio/visual, or perhaps theatre with lawyers. They all inform and entertain us. These three take over where the cypherpunks leave off. The fight with the state over privacy and truth is also the task of journalism in our democracies. If there isn’t a separation of powers, then power corrupts all too quickly and easily. Journalism is an ever-broadening category, and below, we include all manner of journalists.

Adam B Levine was Editor-in-Chief of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast, one of the best podcasts on Bitcoin, Ethereum and crypto generally. He also published at CoinDesk.

Andreas Antonopoulos, 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. He was part of the ‘Speaking of Bitcoin podcast and also issued some select parts of his unscripted talks on the ‘Unscripted’ podcast. He studied computer science and network engineering and worked in computer systems management before discovering Bitcoin, realising its importance and changing his life to advocate for it. He has written excellent books on Bitcoin, Ethereum, the Lightning Network, and “The Internet of Money” before the concept of DeFi was understood. These books are still some of the best introductions you can get on these topics. You can also check out his YouTube channel.

Cryptocito, YouTuber and arranger of COSMOSverse conferences, one of the better cryptocurrency commentators, he has focussed on the COSMOS ecosystem. There are no claims to academic computer science or programming, and it might be his openness and transparency that bring in the audience. Many rely on his unbiased commentary on the COSMOS ecosystem.

David Hoffman, Bankless co-host, came to cryptocurrencies through ethereum and innovated with real-estate real-world assets (RWA) on the blockchain. Like many, he came for numbers-go-up and stayed for the revolution. He might admit to being an Ethereum Maxi, but his crypto technology interests are broad. He can be seen at some of the conferences. Bankless reports in detail on the state of crypto governance and the risks and opportunities in the market.

Don Cryptonium, a YouTuber with a light-hearted presentation style, but a deep thinker on the state of crypto. He is particularly interested in NFTs and their culture. Expect some straight talking.

Dr Bret Weinstein, co-host of the Dark Horse Podcast. He is also a guest on other podcasts including Joe Rogan. He has become a somewhat reluctant voice airing concerns for the general direction of society, including societal ills and external threats. He has an academic and analytical style.

Dr John Campbell, a British YouTuber and long-term medical educator of nurses. Author of substantial teaching texts in medicine and a doctor of philosophy. As a big believer in the success of vaccinations, his YouTube channel provided education on the COVID-19 pandemic with pleas for everyone to get vaccinated. Over time, his YouTube audience educated him on their concerns, and gradually, he changed his views, stating he wished he had never taken the mRNA vaccines (strictly gene therapy). He has become a voice and media channel for what went wrong with the response to the pandemic and the subsequent cover-up by Five Eyes governments. He continually and carefully scripts his education podcasts to avoid de-platforming on YouTube, but the Ministry of Propaganda is clearly evident in doctoring the Wikipedia page on him.

Edmund Dene (E.D.) Morel, journalist, author, pacifist and politician, rose to fame campaigning to expose the abuses in the African rubber trade and end the slave trade.  In a similar way to the Cypherpunks, he was not only an activist but, where necessary, created change by working in journalism (establishing the West African Mail) and politics. His pacifist work during the 1st world war had a heavy toll on his health. How much human suffering would have been averted had his views been better heard during his life?

Eva Galperin, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Eva is the Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and technical advisor for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She has a background in UNIX systems administration and a focus on defeating stalkerware.

Guy Pearse, author and Researcher at the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, Australia. He is the type of journalist who writes books rather than column inches. His first book, “High & Dry: John Howard, climate change and the selling of Australia’s future” exposed the uneasy alliance between state and commercial interests, which he followed up with “Greenwash: Big Brands and Carbon Scams“.  

Jonathan Mohan, podcaster on the Speaking Of Bitcoin podcast.

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. Since then, Julian has been in a series of well-publicised cat-and-mouse engagements, finding shelter in embassies. The USA deep state continues to pursue him for revealing their crimes. Currently (February 2024), in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, his lawyers are posing the pivotal question: how can exposing crime and torture be worse than committing them? The world is looking to see if there is any separation of powers in the Five Eyes countries.

Lyn Alden, Macro Economist and Bitcoiner, has a background in engineering and takes that analytical approach to the study of finance and economics. In addition to her own investment strategy practice, Lyn appears on Bitcoin and economic podcasts. She is sought out for her penetrating insights, detailed analysis and great communication. Check out her recent book, “Broken Money”.

Michael Craig Ruppert, activist, whistleblower and journalist. He publicly confronted then Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, saying that in his experience as an LAPD narcotics officer, he had seen evidence of CIA complicity in drug dealing.

Mike Godwin, Lawyer, first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),  general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, policy and privacy lead at Anonym, a privacy-safe advertising startup. Mike has worked tirelessly to promote privacy in the Internet age.

Nic Carter, Macro Economist and Bitcoiner, has been analysing Bitcoin for many years. He is a partner at Castle Island Ventures and believes “The Bank Secrecy Act is unconstitutional and must be repealed”. He is not a Bitcoin Maximalist. He is a popular contributor to podcasts.

Robert Breedlove of the What Is Money podcast is a Bitcoiner. His podcast goes deep into the question of what money is. He has varied guests on his show and has a deep, philosophical understanding of money, fiat currency, gold and Bitcoin. He is also a guest on other podcasts and a well-regarded apologist for Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack, What Bit Coin Did podcast. Peter’s superpower is asking dumb questions of brilliant people. He has a throng of well-chosen guests who he does not always see 100% eye-to-eye with. All the better. He is a Bitcoiner, sure, but probably not a maximalist, as he’ll entertain one or more “shitcoins”, specifically Ethereum and Monero. He is naturally hard-working and runs a football club and a bar in his small town of Bedford.

Peter Maurice Wright CBE, journalist, author. His book Spycatcher, an exposé written with Paul Greengrass, exposed the failings of MI5 and claimed that the UK Security Service plotted to remove Prime Minister Harold Wilson from office and the Director General of MI5 was a Soviet spy. After its publication in Australia, which the Thatcher government tried to block, the government attempted to ban the book in Britain under the Official Secrets Act. In November 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government had breached the European Convention of Human Rights by gagging its own newspapers. Without separation of powers, there is no democracy.

Prof Bill Buchanan OBE, School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University. His ASecuritySite website shares much on cryptography. Though not ordinarily thought of as a cypherpunk, his evidence for the Investigatory Powers Bill debate in the House of Commons leans towards cypherpunk ideals, “I would say that we live in a very different world from the one that we did. We have built this cyber age within about 40 years, but the infrastructure that we have created is very fragile. We must protect citizens from hackers and so on. We must protect privacy and identity. Individuals need to be assured that they are not being spied on by cybercriminals across the world. They also need to be able to prove their own identity and the identity of what they are connecting to.” His podcast interviews of key cryptographers are worth a listen.

Dr. Robert Malone, the most significant opponent of the Five Eyes rollout of mRNA gene therapies, is also one of the deep state’s most targeted individuals. It is the cypherpunk activism all over again: spirited individuals against a well-organised and well-funded opposition. This time, though, there might be more at stake than winning the right to privacy.

Ryan Sean-Adams, co-host of Bankless. The concept behind Bankless, is financial freedom without having to have a bank account. They embrace Ethereum, non-custodial wallets and DeFi, and are very careful to avoid any criminality but maybe teeter on civil disobedience. They are cypherpunks in their insistence that we need reform of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); they are not builders of any blockchain technology. Their great contribution is in the quality and breadth of their coverage of blockchain’s current state-of-the-art, particularly their weekly rollup shows.

Saifedean Ammous, Bitcoin Standard podcast. Saifedean was a lecturer in economics until he discovered Austrian Economics and realised the error of his ways. When he discovered Bitcoin, he was early to call for a new monetary standard, “The Bitcoin Standard”, which is the title of his book. Many years on such a standard now seems a lot more likely. Key to his views on Bitcoin is the corruption of money with fiat issuance and the fact that such corruption will only ever result in the total destruction of that fiat system. Clarifying this is his other book, “The FIat Standard”, which exposes the problem with fiat currency. Since nearly all economics taught in the Western world is based on Keynesian principles of an ever-increasing fiat supply, along with excuses for its mistakes, Saifedean wrote the alternative textbook to be used as a basis of his course in economic theory. We see this as the spirit of the cypherpunks – call out what is wrong and build the solution to it. He didn’t build Bitcoin but has made many understand the need for it.

Dr. Stephanie Murphy is the co-host of the Speaking-of-bitcoin (formerly Let’s Talk-Bitcoin) podcast. Stephanie brought her perspective to a show that would otherwise have been too heavy on technical expertise and political and commercial insights. The combination of these podcasters on the show gave it brilliance.

Steven Levy, journalist and author. He writes for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicles the early days of the computer underground. Levy has published books covering computer hacker culture, artificial intelligence, and cryptography. He has done a lot to make the case for the debt we owe the cypherpunks.

Whistleblowers

A whistleblower does not a cypherpunk make. That’s true, but there is a synergy here. Cypherpunks are activists: when they become aware of wrongs against citizens, they act. They build encryption technology, get it deployed, and march if necessary to ensure citizens are informed. Whistleblowers follow a similar path: when they become aware of the wrongdoing, often against citizens, they do not become part of the conspiracy but rather act and bear the consequences, often for the rest of their lives.

Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov, Soviet secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, defected from the Soviet Union on 1 January 1928. His book exposed Stalin, for which he received assassination attempts.

Carl Fedor Eduard Herbert von Bose, A conservative opponent of the Nazi regime, Bose was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934, a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis’ paramilitary organization, known colloquially as “Brownshirts”. Whistleblowing is perilous, and whistleblowers do not always survive intact.

Chelsea Manning is a whistleblower on US Army deeds in the Iran/Iraq war. She leaked materials to WikiLeaks. The leaks shocked the world, and one can understand why the US Army would not want the information out. She is now free and may even run for the Senate; Assange is not fairing as well.

Courtland Kelley, Head of General Motors inspection and quality assurance program. He found faults in the Chevrolet Cavalier and the Chevrolet Cobalt and repeatedly reported them, with little response. He thought his supervisors were more interested in maintaining sales and their own positions than in expensive recalls. In 2003, Kelley sued GM, alleging that the company had been slow to address the dangers in its cars and trucks. Even though he lost the court case, Kelley thought that by blowing the whistle, he had done the right and proper thing. Faulty ignition switches in the Cobalts, which cut power to the car while in motion, were eventually linked to many crashes resulting in fatalities, starting with a teenager in 2005 who drove her new Cobalt into a tree. In May 2014, the NHTSA fined the company $35 million for failing to recall cars with faulty ignition switches for a decade, despite knowing there was a problem with the switches. Thirteen deaths were attributed to the faulty switches during the time the company failed to recall the cars.

David Franklin, The landmark whistleblower case involving Neurontin (gabapentin) and off-label marketing: United States of America ex rel. David Franklin vs. Parke-Davis, Division of Warner-Lambert/Pfizer. Most of the documents on the Drug Industry Documents Archive (DIDA) were made public as a result of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies Parke-Davis, Warner-Lambert, Pfizer, Merck & Co., Wyeth and Abbott Labs, among others. DIDA was founded in 2005 with the support of a gift by Thomas Greene, the attorney for David Franklin, the whistleblower in United States ex-rel. Franklin v. Parke-Davis, the case from which the first documents in the archive originated.

Daniel Ellsberg, an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making regarding the Vietnam War.

Dr. Aaron Westrick, Research Director for Second Chance Body Armor (“SCBA”)

In 2001, Dr Aaron Westrick was the largest manufacturer and supplier of body armour in the United States. Westrick witnessed a rapid decline in the quality of bulletproof vests made with “Zylon” fibre after the material was proven to deteriorate at an alarming rate in certain environments. Westrick warned top officials at SCBA and Zylon manufacturer Toyobo Co. Ltd. that covering up defects and ignoring the problem would put the lives of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies at risk and lead to disastrous consequences for the company.

In 2003, a California police officer was shot and killed while wearing a vest made with Zylon fibre, prompting Westrick to file a False Claims Act lawsuit against SCBA and Toyobo Co., Ltd. in 2004.  In 2005, the United States Government intervened in the case on behalf of Westrick. After a 13-year legal battle with the Japanese manufacturer of Zylon, Toyobo Co. Ltd., the company agreed to pay a $66 million settlement to the United States for damages.

Edward Snowden, one of the biggest whistleblowers of recent times. His case has been in the press a lot. What Snowden reveals is some of the extent to which the secret police of the Five Eyes countries spy on their own citizens. This is exactly what the cypherpunks were trying to protect against and why they created and disseminated cryptography to the masses. His reward? Well, it wasn’t a Nobel Prize. Those in the West have no reason to believe that the situation has improved at all since the Snowden revelations.

Katharine Gun, GCHQ whistleblower, revealed the United States’ request to compromise intelligence on diplomats from member states of the 2003 United Nations Security Council, who were due to vote on a second UN resolution on the prospective 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Karen U. Kwiatkowski nee Unge, activist and retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency.  She is known for her insider essays which denounce a corrupting political influence on the course of military intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Jesselyn Radack, Lawyer for Edward Snowden and whistleblower.

John Paul Vann, an American colonel, who, during the Vietnam War, reported to his superiors that American policy and tactics were seriously flawed, and later went to the media with his concerns. Vann was asked to resign his commission, did so, but later returned to Vietnam.

Mark Felt (Deep Throat), a senior FBI official widely known to the world as “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration. He communicated with Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein after the 1972 break-in to the Democratic National Committee.

Michel Christopher (Christoph) Meili, whistleblower. As a night guard at a Swiss bank, he discovered that his employer was destroying records of savings by Holocaust victims, which the bank was required to return to the heirs of the victims. After the Swiss authorities sought to arrest Meili, he was given political asylum in the United States. His disclosure was one of the factors prompting a $1.25 billion settlement between multiple Swiss banks and Jewish victims in August 1998. 

Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian author, journalist and former politician who has been a Member of the European Parliament. Early in 2004, he accused MEPs of all parties of falsely claiming reimbursement of travel and subsistence expenses. He produced evidence of MEPs signing the register in the morning to receive their daily allowance and then immediately leaving the building. Broadcast on German TV, the accusations caused an uproar. 

Jane Turner, FBI. Jane exposed criminal theft of property at the 9/11 crime scene by a handful of FBI agents.  She was harshly retaliated against for reporting these violations to the Department of Justice Inspector General.  After a ten-year battle, she prevailed, becoming only one of a small handful of FBI agents to win her cases under the FBI Whistleblower Protection Act.

John Roberts, chief of the FBI’s Internal Affairs, blew the whistle on alleged misconduct in the FBI.  Robert’s lawyers obtained permission for Roberts to go on CBS and make public disclosures about retaliation in the FBI.  He was retaliated against shortly after his TV appearance.

Pascal Diethelm, whistleblower and tobacco control advocate. He revealed the secret ties of Ragnar Rylander, professor of environmental health, to the tobacco industry.

Paul Jayko, whistleblower. He was an Environmental Specialist for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. In 1997, when Jayko was assigned as a site coordinator for the River Valley Schools area, he discovered that school buildings were built on the site of a former military installation, where carcinogenic materials were buried and disposed of. When he attempted to investigate the link between the site and the increased incidence of leukemia in the area, Jayko gradually lost his responsibilities and was ultimately terminated.

Richard Maok Riaño Botina aka hackerFiscalia. A computer expert in the attorney general’s office, who had been transferred from his job after compiling data documenting that phone calls from inside the attorney general’s office had been made to the phones of presumed paramilitary members in northeast Colombia.”^.  “He took all the captured cell phones of the paramilitaries in the legal proceedings, made the crossing and discovered a huge amount of coincidences, that is, paramilitaries and many prosecutorial officials communicated permanently. 

Richard M Bowen III, whistleblower. He blew the whistle on mortgage fraud at Citigroup, which helped trigger the subprime mortgage crisis.

Satyendra Dubey, an Indian Engineering Service (IES) officer. He was the Project Director in the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) at Koderma, Jharkhand. He was murdered in Gaya, Bihar, allegedly for his anti-corruption-related actions in the Golden Quadrilateral highway construction project.

Sherron Watkins,  Vice President of Corporate Development at the Enron Corporation. Watkins was called to testify before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate at the beginning of 2002, primarily about her warnings to Enron’s then-CEO Kenneth Lay about accounting irregularities in the financial statements. This massive scandal should have been averted by blowing the whistle much earlier.

Sibel Edmonds, hired by the FBI as a translator shortly after 9/11 but was fired after less than seven months. She identified herself as a whistleblower and challenged her termination; however, the courts dismissed her lawsuit for wrongful termination because the FBI would need to disclose privileged information.

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, whistleblower, alleged to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives that business leaders had plotted a fascist coup d’état against the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in what became known as the Business Plot. In his book War Is a Racket, Butler listed well-known U.S. military operations that he alleged were not about protecting democracy, as was told to the public, but in furthering the business interests of U.S. banks and corporations.

Stefan Philip Kruszewski, whistleblower. He became aware of inadequate care and the exploitation of state-committed mentally ill children through overmedication and physical and chemical restraints while working for the Department of Public Welfare, Bureau of Program Integrity for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. When he refused to keep silent about his discoveries, he was fired from his position at the state.

Toni Ellen Hoffman, AM, nurse, whistleblower. She informed the  Queensland Politician Rob Messenger about Jayant Patel, a surgeon who was the subject of the Morris Inquiry and later the Davies Commission. She originally began to raise doubts about the ability of Patel with hospital management and other staff.