Like all great tales in fiction, remarkable things often have a little-known backstory, and Bitcoin is no exception. Bitcoin originated from a mysterious group called the Cypherpunks.

Initially, the group was just a simple private gathering in 1992, organized by three retired tech luminaries: Eric Hughes, a mathematician from the University of California, Berkeley; Tim May, a retired Intel employee; and John Gilmore, a computer scientist, along with twenty invited friends. The gathering was mainly to discuss issues related to programming and cryptography.

After this meeting, everyone felt this format was excellent, and it gradually evolved into a monthly gathering. At the first meeting, Jude Milhon, a hacker and cryptography writer, officially named the group "Cypherpunk."

Typically, after an organization is formed, it has a shared belief. The creed of the Cypherpunks can be glimpsed from the group’s foundational document, The Cypherpunk Manifesto, written by co-founder Eric Hughes. It includes this passage:

"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."
Thus, the group’s shared belief was to use cryptography to create a world where freedom and personal privacy could be perfectly protected, thereby achieving individual spiritual freedom in cyberspace.

From then on, the group began to grow steadily. They established an open mailing list forum to connect with cryptography enthusiasts worldwide. In a short time, the mailing list attracted the attention of other enthusiasts. Geeks from around the world freely expressed their views, discussing topics ranging from mathematics and cryptography to politics and philosophy—covering almost everything. The shared belief was the protection of personal privacy and libertarianism.

In such an atmosphere, it was no surprise that some Cypherpunks began considering the decentralization of "currency." In fact, as early as 1982, a pioneer named David Chaum proposed an astonishing idea: he wanted traditional currency to be transmitted freely and anonymously in a fully digital form over the internet. He designed Ecash, based on Chaumian blinding technology, but Ecash never gained popularity because it relied on a centralized intermediary.

Over the next decade, from 1997 to 2007, the Cypherpunks began attempting to turn this vision into reality:

● In 1997, Adam Back designed Hashcash, introducing the concept of computational difficulty (the precursor to Proof of Work).
● In 1998, Chinese-American cryptographer Wei Dai designed B-Money, proposing the idea of decentralized consensus to create currency.
● In 1998, Nick Szabo designed BitGold and introduced the concepts of Proof of Work (POW) and smart contracts.
● In 2005, Hal Finney introduced the concept of "reusable proofs of work," combining the ideas of b-money and Adam Back’s computationally difficult Hashcash to create cryptographic currency.

Although these projects ultimately failed, their efforts were not in vain. Layer by layer, foundational technologies were refined—POW, digital signatures, smart contracts, and other core concepts were pioneered over two decades by successive generations of Cypherpunks. The idea of digital cryptocurrency was passed down like a torch, finally blossoming in 2008.

When the financial crisis struck in 2008, on November 1st of that year, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, building on the theories and practices of predecessors, published the Bitcoin whitepaper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" on the Cypherpunks mailing list, opening the door to the next decade.