Issue #421: We stand on the shoulders of giants
Cypherpunks vs the state elite.
I saw this thread fly down my TweetDeck a half an hour ago and immediately decided it's officially a Back to Basics Friday here at the Ƀent. It's always healthy to recalibrate and put things in a long-term perspective by looking back to see how we got here, assess our current condition, and attempt to envision how all of this may play out in the future. Especially at a time when it feels like a lot of the "builders" in this "space" have completely lost the plot in regards to why we're here in the first place.
2/ c'punks were interested in cryptography and cryptographic money because they were seeking profound social change.
— Josh Harvey (@joshmh) February 15, 2019
4/ In the words of @NickSzabo4 "trusted third parties are security holes." https://t.co/srpEjGp7l0
— Josh Harvey (@joshmh) February 15, 2019
6/ Powerful techniques known only to the NSA and its ilk were rediscovered, likely improved, and disseminated, first by mavericks such as Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, and then by academics like Rivest, Shamir and Adleman.
— Josh Harvey (@joshmh) February 15, 2019
As our friend Josh points out, Bitcoin emerged from a growing cypherpunk movement driven by a deep distrust of the increasingly overarching elites in control of the institutions and technology companies that were becoming more and more ingrained with the populous. They recognized the inherent slippery slope that was beginning to emerge via software patents and reactive policy and decided they needed to do something about it, so they began to build military-grade encryption tools and share them with the world in hopes that it would give the common man a fighting chance against this ever-encroaching State controlled by a crony elite.
Some of the best minds in the world have been fighting a distributed silent war for decades against the most well-funded state apparatuses the world has ever known. And they've been winning! A generation's worth of work has culminated in their technologies getting into the hands of the masses via apps like Signal and WhatsApp after long fought battles on the Internet and in the courtrooms. Slowly but surely, the technologies they built are giving power back to the individual. The State's leverage over the individual is becoming weaker every day.
And now we have Bitcoin, possibly the most powerful tool to emerge from this movement. It is now a decade old, gaining mind share every second of every day and fortifying itself against outside attacks and future change. The people who need Bitcoin the most seem to be using it despite it's clunky UX, which is very promising. But as we turn into Bitcoin's second decade I think it is time to start focusing on making this tool as accessible as we have made military grade encryption in messaging apps. As we discussed yesterday, improving the UX surrounding Bitcoin is imperative for mainstream adoption. Ten years have proven that Bitcoin works as advertised, now I believe we need to build the outward facing exterior through which people interact with Bitcoin so it works "like magic".
Luckily, it seems like more people are beginning to adopt a similar belief.
Final thought...
I'd probably go to Mars if I was given the chance.
Enjoy your weekend, freaks!
