Cypherpunks also known as privacy advocates consider digital currencies to be the holy grail to provide for privacy guarantees. For a very long, privacy advocates have longed for a digital form of cash that will provide the guarantee for privacy.

A privacy advocate is someone familiar with data privacy and cybersecurity, thus acting to ensure that users’ privacy rights are honored.  Privacy advocates come from different backgrounds ranging from government agencies to non-profits, from research institutions to independent consultants.

There are 3 elements in privacy: Secrecy, anonymity, and solitude. It is a state which can be lost, whether by the choice of the person who is in the state or through the action of another person.

Public-key cryptography made ecash a possibility; however, centralization was a major problem in early-day digital currencies. The important goal of digital money envisioned by early-day advocates is censorship resistance and money that is beyond the reach of corporations and governments.

Irrespective of how much mathematics was incorporated into the programming, some administrators were capable of blocking certain payments and they inflated the monetary supply.

Several advances happened in the evolution of digital currencies and each one of them made one step forward. The “Byzantine Generals Problem” prevented the formation of the decentralized money due to issues like the inability to arrive at a consensus to validate payment and to prevent the double-spending problem.

On Friday, October 31, 2008, Nakamoto shared his White Paper or concept note for Bitcoin. The subject line was “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper” and the author wrote, “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”

Things changed from there. The decentralized ledger was placed in the hands of thousands of individuals where transactions were documented by timelines and the transactions were continually updated in all ledgers.

Cypherpunks wanted to preserve human rights like the right to associate and the right to communicate privately in the digital realm. They knew that cryptography would be the best defense for the individual.

Cypherpunks believed that there is no point in lobbying the government to create better policy but to invent and use technology, which the government could not stop.

They made use of cryptography to bring in social change.  Thus, Cypherpunks wrote and continues to write code to defeat surveillance. Thus, the key is to prevent corporates from understanding the contents shared over private cryptographic technology and also to prevent governments from spying on their citizens.  And, now we are in the world of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Zcash, and more.