"Already today many records are kept of our financial dealings - each time we purchase an item over the phone using a credit card, this is recorded by the credit card company. In time, even more of this kind of information may be collected and possibly sold. One Cypherpunk vision includes the ability to engage in transactions anonymously, using "digital cash", which would not be traceable to the participants. Particularly for buying "soft" products, like music, video, and software (which all may be deliverable over the net eventually), it should be possible to engage in such transactions anonymously. So this is another area where anonymous mail is important." [Hal Finney, 1993-02-23] View quoted note →

"Though I believe that the essence of Muslims all around the world is that rebellious nature against norms once you see truth." Our job when orange pilling is to take that instinct, that old Bedouin refusal to bow to anything but God, and wake it back up. The trick is getting people to see that the same nomadic spirit that crossed deserts now has to migrate into cyberspace, which comes with its own harsh terrain and logic. View quoted note →

This is really what all criticisms of Bitcoin ultimately come down to: "I don’t like that you possess something no one else can seize, freeze, dilute, censor, or gatekeep. I don’t like that you can opt out of the system without asking permission. I, or someone I trust, must have the final say over how you use your property." View article →

"You'll see these folks attacking anonymous remailers, cryptography, psuedonymous accounts, and other tools of coercion-free expression and information interchange on the net, ironically often in the name of promoting "commerce". You'll hear them rant and rave about "criminals" and "terrorists", as if they even had a good clue about the laws of the thousands of jurisdictions criss-crossed by the Internet, and as if their own attempts to enable coercion bear no resemblance to the practice of terrorism. The scary thing is, they really think they have a good idea about what all those laws should be, and they're perfectly willing to shove it down our throats, regardless of the vast diversity of culture, intellectual, political, and legal opinion on the planet." [<an50@desert.hacktic.nl> (Nobody), libtech-l@netcom.com, 1994-06-08] https://cdn.nakamotoinstitute.org/docs/cyphernomicon.txt

Before any real Bitcoin circular economy can exist, you need a community capable of holding a meaningful share of its wealth in bitcoin. That should be the foundation. If people can’t sit tight through volatility and uncertainty, there’s nothing to circulate in the first place. Storing value demands far more patience and discipline than spending it, and I'd say that that cultural shift has to come before everything else.

X just keeps getting worse and worse. Barely any way to reach your audience. It's getting harder and harder to build a community there. Legacy social media is dying as it just keeps getting overrun by Indian bot farms. Being on Nostr just makes sense. The engagements here are a lot more meaningful, and people pay me sats for my posts.

4.12.3. "Is the Cypherpunks agenda _too extreme_?" - Bear in mind that most of the "Cypherpunks agenda," to the extent we can identify it, is likely to provoke ordinary citizens into _outrage_. Talk of anonymous mail, digital money, money laundering, information markets, data havens, undermining authority, transnationalism, and all the rest (insert your favorite idea) is not exactly mainstream. 4.12.4. "Crypto Anarchy sounds too wild for me." - I accept that many people will find the implications of crypto anarchy (which follows in turn from the existence of strong cryptography, via the Crypto Anarchy Principle) to be more than they can accept. - This is OK (not that you need my OK!). The house of Cypherpunks has many rooms. View quoted note →

Genuinely worth a listen. This might be the single best podcast episode for explaining Bitcoin to normie Muslims who are stuck inside traditional finance frameworks. He breaks down a lot of the core ideas from @Saifedean Ammous's Bitcoin Standard in a way they can actually digest. He’s basically the Muslim Michael Saylor! (minus the riba vibes, obviously, I just mean the orange pilling energy)

SAIF LOVES US AND WE LOVE SAIF View quoted note →

DON'T DO IT DON'T DO IT DON'T DO IT

SAIF is the only thing that is able to fuse both cypherpunk sovereignty and hyperstitional cybernetics into a single Islamic civilizational engine by giving both a shared metaphysics + moral telos, and a coherent mission for building actual power in digital frontier View quoted note →

Nostr is just the continuation of the cypherpunk mailing list View quoted note →