The Cyphernomicon — Interactive Edition

A navigable, searchable, outline-preserving reader for Timothy C. May's 1994 Cypherpunks FAQ, with a foreword by Setvin Noether on how the document connects to Bitcoin and cypherpunk history.

Live site: https://sauerninja.github.io/Cyphernomicon/ (update this link if you rename or move the repo)

What this is

The original Cyphernomicon is a ~700-question, 20-section outline FAQ, written in a Mac outline editor and distributed as plain text on the Cypherpunks mailing list. This edition:

• Parses the original outline structure (section → subsection → nested bullets) into a proper tree, preserving May's own numbering (12.5.3, etc.) as permalinkable anchors.
• Renders it as a collapsible outline in the browser — expand a section, collapse back to headings, jump straight to a numbered passage.
• Adds full-text client-side search across all ~3,900 indexed passages (⌘K / /).
• Adds a foreword connecting the document's digital-cash and crypto-anarchy sections to what came after, including Bitcoin.

No build step, no framework, no dependencies — static HTML/CSS/vanilla JS, deployable as-is on GitHub Pages.

Structure

index.html              cover sheet + foreword + table of contents
chapters/*.html          the 20 sections
assets/css/style.css      design system
assets/js/site.js         sidebar, search, outline controls
assets/data/search-index.json   flattened search index
assets/data/sections.json       section metadata
LICENSE                   MIT — covers the code/design/foreword only
NOTICE.md                 explains what is and isn't MIT-licensed

Regenerating the site

The HTML pages are generated from the original per-section Markdown source (kept in src/ if you're rebuilding from scratch) via a small Python pipeline: an outline parser converts each section's plain-text outline into JSON, then a template step renders that JSON into the final HTML pages and search index. No third-party packages required — standard library only.

License

• Code, design, and the foreword — MIT. See LICENSE.
• The Cyphernomicon text — © 1994 Timothy C. May, all rights reserved, reproduced here for historical/educational reference. See NOTICE.md before reusing the document text elsewhere.