Privacy is essential to an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secret. What is private is something one does not want the whole world to know; what is secret is something one does not want anyone to know. Privacy is the ability to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Bitcoin has once again found itself at another crossroads. On the one hand, the easy road, paved with a surge in users, heavily regulated exchange-traded fund products, and state-backed stablecoins as a solution to scaling to another billion users. On the other, the other road is objectively more difficult, and a darker one, despite the bright words of Eric Hughes and other pioneers of open-source crypto.
On March 3, 1993, Hughes published Cypherbank statementillustrating the direction of the recently formed Cypherpunks: a group of Bay Area hackers and activists consisting of Hughes, Tim May, John Gilamore, and others under the pseudonym created by St. Jude Mellon.
Bitcoin culture — if such a homogeneous thing still exists — is embroiled in another culture war as the regulatory moat fills with legislation to prevent self-imposed confinement and the creeps of the penal system emerge to slingshot those who dare to write code with a pen.
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of charity. It is in their interest to talk about us, and we should expect them to.
How did we get here? How did we spend the last year arguing about what constitutes spam, and the ethical use of bitcoin, while completely ignoring the regulatory moat that is pouring in? There have been more than enough signs. There have been more than enough warnings. Congress is preparing a bill to further regulate the internet, to legislate stablecoins, to ban social media apps, while the country continues to redefine cryptocurrency in real time.
Trying to stop them from speaking is fighting the truths of information. Information doesn’t just want to be free; it longs to be free. Information expands to fill available storage space. Information is the younger, more powerful cousin of rumor; it is faster than rumor, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less.
Bitcoin is a database. Bitcoin is words. Bitcoin is code. The compliance hypnotists will tell you that we must ask our local government offices for permission to embrace Bitcoin. So that we can pay our taxes in Bitcoin and service our legal debts. Samurai, Tornado Cash, Wesabi Wallet… they wrote code. Code that users around the world, in countless legal jurisdictions, use to exchange alphanumeric strings.
For centuries, people have protected their privacy with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and messengers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.
Writing code is not a crime. Code is speech. Distributing code is expression between bytes, reduced to bits, to ones and zeros. Any precedent that establishes anything other than this is a direct violation of the First Amendment, as well as the natural law of free speech.
Cryptographers write code. We know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since we can’t have privacy unless we all do, we’ll write it.
There are many ways in which the Bitcoin network could spread across the globe, and how Bitcoin as an asset could achieve astronomical gains without bringing an ounce of freedom to the world’s population. The definition of Bitcoin has been constrained by hypnotists to be within the realm of regulatory moats, and so Bitcoin is in dire need of redefinition. Bitcoin was never about dollar value, it was never about sustaining a UST market via treasury-backed tokens used by KYC-demanding shills. Bitcoin was never about embracing the state and empowering the reach and influence of psychopathic criminals obsessed with changing the definition of speech, expression, symbol, and numbers.
Bitcoin is an enabler, Bitcoin is a tool for the enemy. And now our enemy, the state, has become an enabler.
We know that software cannot be destroyed and that a widely deployed system cannot be shut down.
Writing code is not a crime. We sat around arguing about cultural references with every class of drunken sports competitors while we watched accountants take their red pens to change the meaning of words, slowly boiling frogs and their dictionaries.
Privacy does not extend beyond the collaboration of our fellow community members. We, the Cypherpunks team, seek to answer your questions and concerns and hope to engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. However, we will not deviate from our path because some may not agree with our goals.
Bitcoin is just a ledger.
Database.
Let’s move forward together at a fast pace.
Whispering numbers to a loved one cannot be defined as a criminal act.
forward.
Editors
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl — export-a-crypto-system sig, RSA in 5 lines of PERL:
($s,$k, $n)=@ARGV; $w=length$n; $k=”O$k”if length ($k)&1; $n=”O$n”, $w*+if $w&1;
$0 -de key mod"If $s!~/^-(de)$/||$#ARGV<2;$v=$w;$s=~/d/?$v-=2:
SW-=2; $_-unpack(‘B*’,packet(‘#*’,Sk)): s/~o*//g; s/0/d*ln%/g; s/1/d*In%lm*ln%/g;
Sc=”1$ (_)p” ;while(read (STDIN, Sm, Sw/2))($m=unpack(“H$w”, Sm): chop($a=
echo 160161\Um \Esm\U$n\Esn$c|dc*):print packet(‘H*’, ‘0’x($v-length$a).$a);}
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To test it, just save it as an “rsa” file, and then do the following:
% chmod 700 rsa
% Echo “Sensitive ossification” | rsa -e 11 ca1 > msg.rsa
%rsa -d ac1 cal < msg.rsa