Cypherpunks Ethics

[John Young]

"Cypherpunks Ethics," a book published in 2022, offers a comprehensive view of the group's formation and evolution, with focus on Tim May's "Crypto-Anarchy" and Julian Assange's "Crypto-Justice."

"After presenting a genealogy of cypherpunk platforms—including Timothy May’s BlackNet, Jim Bell’s Assassination Politics, Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road, and John Young’s Cryptome—it discusses the two central functions of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks."

Cypherpunk ethics is a moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age. The movement is rooted in two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy: crypto anarchy and crypto justice. The former advocates for the use of cryptography to create a stateless society, while the latter seeks to use cryptography to promote social justice and protect human rights. The movement has implications for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. If you want to learn more about cypherpunk ethics, you can read Patrick D. Anderson’s book “Cypherpunk Ethics: Radical Ethics for the Digital Age”  (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003220534/cypherpunk-ethics-patrick-anderson)