"We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do."
*— Eric Hughes, [The Cypherpunk's Manifesto](<https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cypherpunk-manifesto.txt>), 1993*
In 1992, three Bay Area computer scientists launched a new mailing list for discussing cryptography, mathematics, politics, and philosophy. They called the members of this mailing list the cypherpunks: a portmanteau of cyberpunk, a genre of dystopian sci-fi, and ciphers, a set of steps for performing encryption.
Source: May/June 1993, Wired
The cypherpunks prophesied an imposition of government censorship and surveillance on the web. According to the cypherpunks, the only tool that could ensure the Internet's freedom was something called cryptography. Put simply, "Cryptography is the science behind creating codes and cyphers that allow people to transmit information in a private and secure way." [Link]
The cypherpunks were deeply suspicious of government control over monetary policy. They envisioned the internet as a space where currency could exist outside of the control of government and centralized banks. They believed cyberspace could not be truly free unless it had its own form of money that was kept safe through the shield of cryptography. They spoke of an era when the use of cryptography would spread across the world:
"Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible. For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society."
*— Eric Hughes, [The Cypherpunk's Manifesto](<https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cypherpunk-manifesto.txt>), 1993*
But, in attempting to create a currency free of government and corporate interventions, there was a technical problem no one had yet been able to solve for. Something called the double spend problem. [Link]
"Double spending is the risk that a digital currency can be spent twice. It is a potential problem unique to digital currencies because digital information can be reproduced relatively easily by savvy individuals...Physical currencies do not have this issue because they cannot be easily replicated, and the parties involved in a transaction can immediately verify the authenticity and past ownership of the physical currency." [Link]
Imagine if someone were to have a "digital" 10 dollar bill. If the bill is entirely digital, then it is being stored as data somewhere on a computer. What's to stop someone from copying and pasting those data files to create two 10 dollar bills? If the duplicator were to pay two people with copies of that digital bill, how would anyone know which one is the "real" one?
Source: "The Cypherpunks," Haseeb Quereshi
This ultimately becomes a counterfeiting problem, however the notion of counterfeiting only really makes sense when there's a physical bill that can be duplicated. In the digital realm, everything is duplicatable, because it is just information stored as 0s and 1s in code. [Link]
From 1990 - 1998, the cypherpunks explored a number of different approaches to building private digital money on the Internet that attempted to solve the double spend problem.