In 1993, three masked men appeared on the cover of Wired magazine. Eric Hughes, a mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, Timothy May, a former senior scientist at Intel, and John Gilmore, a computer scientist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, were known as cypherpunks. Steven Levy's article entitled "Crypto Rebels" in the magazine was the first mention of these people in the media.

In late 1992, these three men invited 20 of their friends to an informal meeting to discuss important issues in programming and cryptography. These meetings became monthly and took place at John Gilmore's Cygnus Solutions. At one of the first meetings, the group was called "cypherpunks", which was a play on words between "cipher" and "cyberpunk".

The group grew and it was decided to create a mailing list to attract other cypherpunks outside of San Francisco. The mailing list became popular and included hundreds of subscribers exchanging ideas and discussing developments using new encryption methods such as PGP. This allowed ideas to spread throughout the world.

The group discussed a wide range of topics, including mathematics, cryptography, computer science, politics and philosophy. Although the group was not always unanimous, it was an open forum where privacy and personal freedom were valued.

The main ideas of cypherpunks were outlined in the "Cypherpunk Manifesto", written by Eric Hughes in 1993. One of the key principles of the manifesto was the importance of confidentiality. The manifesto also contained ideas that were later implemented in cryptocurrencies.

In the following years, several attempts were made to create anonymous transaction systems. In 1997, Dr. Adam Back created the Hashcash system, which protected against spam and required computing power to send email. In 1998, Wei Dai published B-Money, offering methods for storing transaction data. In 2004, Hal Finney created reusable proofs of work, and in 2005, Nick Szabo introduced the Bitgold project.

However, the real breakthrough came in October 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent his article to the cypherpunk mailing list. In this article, he looked at problems that developers had previously encountered and proposed solutions, including double spending. In January 2009, Nakamoto mined the genesis block of Bitcoin, and this marked the beginning of the era of cryptocurrencies.