The idea of a private, state-independent currency originated from the early innings of the “Cypherpunk” movement. Cypherpunk refers to a group of people in the late 1980s and 1990s, who recognized the necessity to protect people's privacy online by using cryptography:

Privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Long before Cambridge Analytica, long before the Great Firewall of China, long before the Snowden revelations, the cypherpunks saw it coming: A regime of online censorship and surveillance that would eclipse the open Internet.

The technical roots of Cypherpunk ideas have been traced back to work by cryptographer David Chaum on topics such as anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems, described in his paper "Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete" (1985). Over the next several years, these ideas morphed into the cypherpunk movement.

Much the work and writings of that movement would later become the foundation of Bitcoin:

In late 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, titled a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system", to the "Cypherpunks" mailing list. He conceived Bitcoin as an alternative to the current financial system: