....seems like very few people know who or what cypherpunks are - good or bad?

Doesn't matter if anyone likes it or not. "Cypherpunk" has no unambiguous or universally understood meaning. It's a cute turn of phrase. They are/it is a mailing list. It is the subject of a manifesto written several years ago. Sometimes people get together and talk about "cypherpunk" things. Assuming that "cypherpunk" will ever have even as much clarity of meaning as a term like "libertarian" is a mistake. It does not mean "people who agree with you". The best description I can think of is that "cypherpunk" refers to the intersection of politics, economics, and technology at the micro/street level, and people who are interested in that or the macro consequences of these micro changes. The fact that someone's interested doesn't mean you can predict what they think about any of the constituent subjects. Eric Hughes' "Cypherpunk Manifesto" puts a pro-liberty spin on cypherpunkism, which isn't bad but did not predict the tension between various factions/doctrines which has emerged, some of which are anti-liberty or liberty-agnostic. The cypherpunks list has become a discussion place for those various factions as well as a target for various mass mailings and crypto-law-politics related announcements. Some traditionalists (fundamentalists? :) continue to use it for discussions related to deploying tools for privacy in a technological age but they're a minority these days. One sect has split off to "coderpunks", seeking a return to the more traditionalist focus. You can describe yourself as a "cypherpunk" if you want to but if you mean "mailing list reader/participant" it's not especially interesting; and if you mean something else you're adopting a label whose meaning is more like a thermometer than a road sign. -- Greg Broiles | "We pretend to be their friends, gbroiles@netbox.com | but they fuck with our heads." http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | |