The Cypherpunks are a loose group of tech-savvy and freedom-loving individuals who advocate for more privacy in the digital age and share ideas and tools that could be useful for achieving their goals.

The name "Cypherpunks" is a composition of three English words:

1. "Cipher", which stands for a "cipher", i.e. a secret text.
2. "Cyber", a word formation element that describes a virtual illusory world created by computers.
3. "Punks", a youth culture that emerged in the mid-70s and whose members can be characterized by their rebellious and non-conformist behaviour.

In short: Cypherpunks want to use cryptography to make the digital world a better place and protect the privacy of individuals.

The Cypherpunk movement emerged in the early 1990s when some libertarians and freedom-loving cryptographers and computer scientists such as Timothy May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore began to meet on a monthly basis for a kind of regulars' table. The meetings consisted of discussions on various aspects of cryptography. The group's ideas culminated in "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto", a manifesto - as the name suggests - by and for cypherpunks, which was written by founding member Eric Hughes. A must-read for anyone trying to understand the philosophies of cypherpunks. Timothy May also wrote his own manifesto, the "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto".

"Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems... Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age... 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. We defend our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money."

Excerpt from Eric Hughes' "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto"

The cypherpunk meetings eventually led to a mailing list. This now legendary mailing list already used the early Internet and e-mail.
This enabled the group to grow, spread their ideas and visions across the globe and spread worldwide.

The mailing list grew rapidly in numbers over the following years. Well-known personalities such as Julian Assange, Hal Finney (the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction) and Adam Back (the first person - apart from the inventor himself - to learn about Bitcoin) joined the list. Discussions between the group members always varied. Privacy concerns were the order of the day, with the possibility of a burgeoning Big Brother state being the greatest fear of some Cypherpunks. There were also other philosophical debates and, of course, exchanges on ideas for a decentralized currency on or through the internet.

The computer scientist and cryptographer David Chaum is considered a kind of original cipherpunk. His 1985 work, "Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete", deals with the concepts underlying cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology and methods that would allow individuals and organizations to maintain their privacy in various transactions so that these transactions could not be linked to personal data.

Chaum's "DigiCash" concept, conceived in 1983 and published in 1994, enabled the first use of software-only electronic cash technology to make payments by computer via email or the internet. Digicash, along with "Hashcash" developed by Adam Back and "B-Money" developed by another cypherpunk named Wei Dai, is considered the ancestor of what we know today as Bitcoin.

"Hashcash" was Back's method of making it too expensive to send spam. It required the sender of an email to prove that they had spent a lot of time and computing power to create an email header - not unlike the proof-of-work process that underpins the Bitcoin blockchain today. He described his method back in 1997 on the Cypherpunks mailing list.

Wei Dai also published his "B-Money" on the Cypherpunks mailing list in 1998. Dai offered a way to exchange money and enforce contracts that was distributed among a network of users, did not require the intervention of a third party such as a government and could not be traced thanks to encryption. Like the Bitcoin blockchain, his idea included a way for participants to create money through computational effort. And his proposal for how records could be kept to support the validity of transaction data and the amount of money owned by each user was also reminiscent of the Bitcoin blockchain. Except that instead of the proof-of-work concept that the Bitcoin blockchain uses, he used a kind of proof-of-stake concept.

Unfortunately, all of these concepts still had minor weaknesses and neither "Digicash" nor "Hashcash" or "B-Money" could solve the problem of double spending.