Editing Cypherpunk (section)

=== Before the mailing list ===

Until about the 1970s, [[cryptography]] was mainly practiced in secret by military or spy agencies. However, that changed when two publications brought it into public awareness: the first publicly available work on [[public-key cryptography]], by [[Whitfield Diffie]] and [[Martin Hellman]],<ref>{{Cite web |title=A Patent Falls, and the Internet Dances |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/090697patent.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210312105444/https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/090697patent.html |archive-date=2021-03-12 |access-date=2020-02-04 |website=archive.nytimes.com}}</ref> and the US government publication of the [[Data Encryption Standard]] (DES), a [[block cipher]] which became very widely used.

The technical roots of Cypherpunk ideas have been traced back to work by cryptographer [[David Chaum]] on topics such as anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems, described in his paper "Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete" (1985).<ref name="narayanan">Arvind Narayanan: [http://randomwalker.info/publications/crypto-dream-part1.pdf What Happened to the Crypto Dream?, Part 1] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191029143759/http://randomwalker.info/publications/crypto-dream-part1.pdf |date=2019-10-29 }}. IEEE Security & Privacy. Volume 11, Issue 2, March–April 2013, pages 75-76, ISSN 1540-7993</ref>

In the late 1980s, these ideas coalesced into something like a movement.<ref name=narayanan/>