The following is from Lucky Green's announcement on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/lucky.green.73/posts/10155498914786706):
Tim May - Cypherpunks co-Founder, Discoverer of Radiation-Induced Single Event Upsets in Integrated Circuits, Uncompromising Firearms Proponent
Word has reached me that my dear friend, co-conspirator in many things and for many years, fellow Freedom Fighter Tim May passed away earlier this week at his home in Corralitos, California.
Death appears to be from natural causes pending autopsy. I.e. Tim did not die in a hail of bullets as so many who didn’t know Tim all that well and largely from his public writings had predicted.
(...)
Tim’s realization that any Manifesto, Constitution, or Bill of Rights wasn’t worth the paper it was written on absent a broadly armed (and heavily armed) population left many of his critics and admirers alike confused. As with so many of his assertions, Tim was correct in this analysis, though his assertion that “private ownership of firearms is a public good” will likely not be as soon widely accepted as his assertion that “private ownership of strong crypto is a public good” was. As such, Tim leaves behind a very large firearms collection.
Please raise a glass of Bourbon, can be any brand, doesn’t have to be the expensive stuff, it didn’t have to be for Tim, to Tim May!
Ad Astra, Tim!
RIP, Tim.
Cypherpunk Movement, leaded by Tim May is an established ideology and movement since the late 80s. At the time, they were the most prominent supporters of individual privacy and digital liberty. It was them, who helped to build the EFF DES cracker to expose the lies of FBI about DES’s security, and forced the U.S government moving to the 128-bit encryption standard. It was them, who successfully stopped the NSA’s plan to install mandatory encryption backdoor on the telephone system. And it was also them, who fought against the regulation of cryptography through various means, and effectively ended it.
They were also the earliest researchers on practical technology to defend privacy. The very idea of an anonymous communication system was purposed by David Chaum in 1981, and implemented as Type I Cypherpunk Anonymous Remailer. By purely coincidence, the syntax used in the control messages allows the user to chain multiple remailers, and hence the concept of Onion Routing was discovered. Cypherpunks also recognized the importance of cash — an anonymous payment system in the past 3000 years, urgently needed a electronic version to stop the enablement of a surveillance state in the digital age. The original vision was also purposed by David Chaum, but it faced various difficulties, especially the problem of consensus and double-spending (Chaum's own centralized payment processor was good, but did not succeed commercially, but check GNU/Taler!), so it was under constant discussion throughout the entire 90s, until Satoshi Nakomoto, presumably a Cypherpunk, purposed a workable, but perhaps less-favorable solution 10 years later. The inventor of computer firewall, Steven Bellovin, and the first developer of a commercial firewall, Marcus Ranum, were also cypherpunks. The entire concept of deniable cryptography was also invented by the cypherpunks, specifically, first implemented in a Linux Full-Disk Encryption program by Julian Assange.