Cypherpunks Hall of Fame | Hacker News Reader

Cypherpunks Hall of Fame

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17 pointskiray11 comments

One way you know this is LLM generated is that I'm somehow on it.

(It was also submitted 2 days ago by the same author).

And for criticizing adding security to DNS, which is like half your comments on HN, which AI is trained on.

Ordinarily I'd push back on this, but we shouldn't be having a real thread on an LLMspam story.

It's funny, trade magazines used to do these quarterly roundups of like "the 40 most influential people in computer security", because they were reliable ways to get security bloggers to link back to the trade publications. I don't know what the point of this list is!

> I don't know what the point of this list is!

To show honor and respect to you. All too often, you and your peers are not given the spotlight you deserve!

> LLMspam

I used LLM for help but calling it spam is unfair! A significant amount of research and time went into this.

I tried to warn you; "memorializing" someone with an AI-generated tchotchke will probably insult more than honor them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45951239

Good list. I'd add Hedy Lamarr, Cliff Stoll, Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games, John Draper (Cap'n Crunch), and RTM (Robert T Morris), but I'm certainly not faulting the list in its current form.

Please make a PR! I will merge!

It needs 'Compromised people' in a manner similar to the 'Compromised projects' section.

Some of these inclusions were certainly choices.

A lot of this is a matter of opinion, so I don't think it's useful to argue at length... but at least two of the people in the honourable mentions are literal convicted criminals and high-profile scammers.

Even if you're willing to discount their motive for advancing the cause of cryptocurrency, as far as I'm concerned, neither should these people be given any kind of honourable acknowledgement, nor is it even settled that cryptocurrencies are a net-positive for society, or that they serve their intended purpose, for the most part.

To elaborate on that last part: Bitcoin, a crypto asset which at this point is substantially not used as a currency, is still proof-of-work, which at that scale is immensely environmentally impactful; in the cases where Bitcoin is still used as a currency, a considerable amount of that exchange volume is in support of scams.

Looks like there are definitely some (maybe most) of the seminal names in cryptography on here... but cypherpunks aren't just "people who worked on cryptography". At least in the strain I'm familiar with, proper "cypherpunks" had a specific ideological bias. Depending on who you ask, or how you interpret things, that bias might be described as "anarchist" or "anti-government" or "pro individual" or "libertarian", or something of a similar ilk. So... not sure how many of the people on this list would identify as "cypherpunks" if asked (assuming they were around to ask at all).

Still, there's some interesting reading there. I'm seen worse lists submitted to HN. :-)

Honestly the most shocking part of this is the typeface choices. Monotype will be in touch.

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