Library
Deep reference pieces, primers, and glossaries for Web3 privacy — drawing from classic cypherpunk texts and contemporary privacy research.
Why this library exists
We preselect the privacy material worth your time, so you do not have to drown in endless tabs. This is the slower, denser layer behind Zork's news, tools, and signals: the texts that define cypherpunk thinking, the essays that reassess it, and the books that map how power and surveillance work today.
The goal is simple: give you one place to revisit the foundations, trace how the last 30+ years of technology reshaped those ideas, and keep a living reading list for anyone building or defending privacy in Web3.
Foundational cypherpunk texts
These documents sit at the root of the cypherpunk movement. They explain why strong cryptography and networked systems were seen as tools to defend autonomy, not just as engineering toys.
- The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Timothy C. May (1988) — sketches a future where cryptography makes anonymous communication and trade routine, eroding the ability of states and large intermediaries to police economic life.
- The Cypherpunk Manifesto, Eric Hughes (1993) — draws a hard line between privacy and secrecy, and argues that if we want privacy we must build it ourselves with code, anonymous remailers, and strong crypto.
- Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, Timothy C. May (1994) — describes how digital cash and encrypted networks could enable untraceable markets, new forms of association, and economic activity that route around traditional regulators.
- The Cyphernomicon, Timothy C. May (1994) — a sprawling FAQ that lays out cypherpunk goals, threat models, and practical details, from remailers to digital cash to jurisdictional arbitrage.
- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow (1996) — a statement of intent for a self-governing internet, insisting that the old rules of the nation-state cannot simply be projected onto the network.
Re-reading the last 40 years
The next layer looks back at how the cypherpunk bet played out: what actually happened to the internet, to crypto, and to the people building around it.
- A Political History of DAOs — Kelsie Nabben (2022) traces how the cypherpunk mailing lists and early crypto experiments fed into today's DAO governance experiments, and where that idealism collided with reality.
- The Core of Crypto is Punks and Principles — Piergiorgio Catti De Gasperi (2023) argues that Web3 makes sense only if you take the cypherpunk critique of centralization and surveillance seriously, not as a branding exercise.
- Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again — Vitalik Buterin (2023) pushes back against pure financialization, calling for Ethereum to lean harder into censorship-resistance, privacy, and non-custodial design.
- Make Public Policy Cypherpunk Again — Peter Van Valkenburgh (2024) looks at how regulation and enforcement have reacted to crypto, and argues for policy that protects privacy-preserving infrastructure instead of criminalizing it.
Books: cryptography, privacy, technology
These books dig into the mechanics of surveillance capitalism, the politics of data, and the tools people use to fight back. They come recommended by the Web3Privacy Now community.
- Everybody Lies
On how search data and behavioural exhaust expose what people actually do and think.
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff
Maps how big tech turned personal data into a raw material for prediction and control.
- Tracers in the Dark — Andy Greenberg
Case studies of blockchain forensics and how on-chain activity is deanonymized.
- Extreme Privacy — Michael Bazzell
A practical handbook on disappearing from commercial and government surveillance systems.
- Cypherpunks — Julian Assange
Conversations on the political stakes of crypto, leaks, and networked power.
- Privacy Is Power — Carissa Véliz
Argues for taking personal data back from platforms and brokers, not just managing it with consent dialogs.
- Why Privacy Matters — Neil Richards
Makes the case for privacy as a structural safeguard for democracy, not a niche concern.
- The Art of Invisibility — Kevin Mitnick
A guided tour of operational security and everyday trade-offs between convenience and anonymity.
- Black Code — Ronald Deibert
How states and corporations weaponize the internet for surveillance and control.
- Sandworm — Andy Greenberg
The story of a state-backed hacking unit and what modern cyberwarfare looks like in practice.
Decentralization, economics, and power
Privacy does not live in a vacuum; it sits inside political and economic systems. This cluster looks at how institutions, platforms, and incentives shape what we can or cannot protect.
- Surveillance capitalism–adjacent work
Titles like No Logo, Platform Capitalism, and Black Box Society examine how platforms consolidate power and make data extraction feel inevitable.
- Classics on power and governance
From Discipline and Punish and The Power of the Powerless to The Utopia of Rules, exploring how control is justified, resisted, and routinised.
- Economic and systems thinking
Work like Small is Beautiful and Ecological Economics asking what sustainable, convivial technology and economies might actually look like.
Taken together, these books and essays give you the vocabulary to talk about surveillance, decentralization, and resistance without hand-waving.
Glossary and core concepts
Understanding the language of privacy is essential for spotting threats, arguing for better protections, and navigating Web3 without getting hand-waved by jargon.
Common Privacy Terminology: Web3 Privacy Basics
Privacy
The ability to control access to your personal information, activities, and communications. Privacy lets you interact and transact without constant surveillance or interference.
Decentralization
Distributing power and control across a network instead of a single authority. In Web3, decentralization removes single chokepoints that can leak or abuse data.
Cryptography
The math that makes private communication possible. Strong crypto turns data into ciphertext that only the intended parties can read.
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)
An identity model where you own and manage your identifiers and credentials. SSI lets you reveal only the minimum necessary information without depending on centralized identity providers.
Cypherpunk
A movement that uses cryptography to defend privacy, free speech, and autonomy. Cypherpunks do not wait for policy changes—they write and ship code.
Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs)
Tools that minimize data exposure by design: end-to-end encryption, mixnets, zero-knowledge proofs, secure enclaves, and more.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs)
Cryptographic proofs that show a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. Core building block for private transactions and selective disclosure in Web3.
Transparency vs. Privacy
A tension at the heart of public ledgers: transparency supports auditability and accountability; privacy protects individuals from profiling and coercion. Good systems decide which layer is transparent and which stays veiled.
Anonymity & Pseudonymity
Anonymity means acting without a stable identity; pseudonymity means using persistent identifiers that are not tied to your legal name. Web3 typically operates in the pseudonymous zone, with wallets and handles as identities.
Surveillance
Systematic monitoring of behaviour, communications, and metadata. Privacy-preserving protocols aim to make large-scale surveillance technically harder and less rewarding.
Privacy Coins
Cryptocurrencies such as Monero or Zcash that hide sender, receiver, and/or amount on-chain using techniques like ring signatures, stealth addresses, and zero-knowledge proofs.
Privacy by Design
The principle that privacy should be a default property of a system, not an optional add-on. Data minimization, end-to-end encryption, and safe defaults are part of this.
Data Sovereignty
The idea that individuals—not platforms or states—should decide how their data is collected, processed, and shared. Web3 pursues this via user-controlled keys and decentralized storage.
Threat Actor
Any entity—state, corporation, attacker, or insider—that can exploit data or infrastructure to compromise privacy or security.
Metadata
Data about data: who talked to whom, when, from where, and how often. Even when content is encrypted, metadata can reveal sensitive behavioural patterns.
Privacy-First Protocol
A network or application that treats privacy as a primary design constraint, typically using strong encryption and minimising data retention to keep user activity opaque by default.