We must defend our own privacy – Eric Hughes
The Digital Age led to centralization and created powerful middlemen (agents). These agents had opportunities to abuse principals through surveillance and censorship.
Cypherpunks are a loosely organized community of technologists, cryptographers, and privacy advocates. They believe that privacy is necessary for an open society. They build, share, and deploy cryptographic systems designed to guard user privacy.
Cryptography restored individual control over data and communication, but did not eliminate the agency problem. Most systems still required a trusted middleman to settle disputes, or keep the master ledger ... continued