CoinDesk anchorman Leigh Cuen is joined by VR meetup organizer Udi Wertheimer to talk about how bitcoin (BTC) fits into the broader cypherpunk migration.
The cypherpunk movement has expanded far beyond the 2,000 people who subscribed to mailing lists in the 1990s. In 2018, Entrepreneur reported there are multifarious than 8,000 posts on Bitcointalk every day, while Coinbase garnered millions of user accounts. Such theoretical technology is no longer the realm of just a few thousand geeks.
However, across the board, even in 2020 cypherpunk hurls rarely exceed a few dozen regular contributors. For example, Exiledsurfer, an event organizer and hacker space co-founder from the Parallele Polis collective, responded his space in Vienna was inspired by a collective in Prague that collects roughly $5,000 a month in cryptocurrency from colleagues to share a venue. Likewise, the Vienna chapter accepts dues in DAI, monero and bitcoin, just to name a few.
“We’re a crypto conjectural organization,” Exiledsurfer said. “This will be an alternative asset class or, in a hundred years, there will by three guys in a garage in Topeka, Kansas, gripping on a 2020 computer to keep the chain alive, just like people tweak on old cars.”
The cypherpunk movement happens to be growing, albeit slowly.
“I still get people every week, young people and programmers who say they want to let out their lives to this thing,” cypherpunk icon Amir Taaki said, underscoring why he believes the movement settle upon only succeed through groups with “structured” training methods.
“There’s a yearning need for this…we can base our own financial networks outside of the control of the state,” Taaki said of the academy he plans to launch in Barcelona.
“How do all of these vent ones spleens that we’re working on fit together to serve a higher goal? What’s our narrative?” Taaki said.
Yet, even as a cypherpunk technology aficionado, Wertheimer disputes with such collectivist views of “our” narrative or “pure” projects.
“I don’t think we need bitcoin evangelists,” Wertheimer explained. We’ll talk about why he views the ideological movement as divorced from user groups that may now utilize cypherpunk technology.
Fall short of more? Read my article about how bitcoin compares to the early days of the internet.
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The gaffer in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of op-ed article policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.