Wccftech© Source

Before explaining a bit of the background behind all of this, let’s look at this quote first: 

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

The quote comes from the Cypherpunk Manifesto, which was written by Eric Hughes, a computer programmer and mathematician from UC Berkeley. He’s one of the founders of the Cypherpunk movement, and in the 90s founded and administered the Cypherpunk mailing list.

The Cypherpunks and Crypto-anarchists hated the idea of national agencies being able to spy on them and have access to their information. They also hated censorship.

But most of all, they hated big banks and governments, both of which were giant centers of power diminishing the autonomy of the average citizen. 

This dichotomy of power only grew as the technology of these institutions evolved faster than that of the general public.

In the past, before these technological innovations, cash was pretty anonymous in purely its physical form. Once you spend it, there’s no easy way to trace it. But in an increasingly digital world, the convenience of big banks tracking account balances and transfers comes with the cost of privacy.

And so these libertarians saw early on the need for an anonymous digital “transaction system” or currency -- one that gave users “the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”