As radical as Andresen’s dreams for Bitcoin’s future value might have been, it was something else he said that got my attention: his brief description, almost in passing, of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as “this mysterious guy who was definitely inspired by the cypherpunks.” The cypherpunks were, as I’d been obsessively researching at the time, a group of radical libertarians who had formed in the 1990s, unified around the grand mission of using unbreakable encryption software to take power away from governments and corporations and give it to individuals.
