So my friend Josh is a long-time Deadhead, and he attended a lot of Grateful Dead shows in the New York area during the early 90s. Little did he know that some of the songs performed were written by John Perry Barlow, who was at that very moment co-creating the Cypherpunk movement.

It wasn't until recently that I learned about this surprising connection between his youthful music and one of Bitcoin's founding fathers. A few years ago, Josh read Barlow's autobiography called "Mother American Night" where he discovered fascinating stories about his life.

The epilogue revealed that Barlow died two days after finishing his book. Apart from writing lyrics for Weir's songs in the 70s, we knew little about him before reading this book. But as it turns out, John Perry Barlow was an interesting character with many talents - writing being just one of them.

Josh thought of him as a kind of Zelig because he seemed to know everyone. He was friends with JFK Jr., dropped acid with him and Daryl Hannah too! Interestingly enough, John also gave JFK Jr.'s first flying lesson. He met the Dalai Lama and supposedly even dated his daughter! At one point, he ran Dick Cheney’s campaigns but later on turned on him, telling him right to his face that he was Dr Strangelove!

John Perry Barlow grew up on a ranch owned by strict religious parents who only allowed televangelists on TV; due to these values, they sent him off to boarding school in Colorado Springs when they couldn’t get through to their son, who had straight "F"s as a freshman in high school.

While attending college at Timothy Leary’s Millbrook gathering place in New York State during the late '60s/early '70s (where LSD experimentation flourished), John found himself introduced Bob Weir (who would become guitarist for The Grateful Dead). They became friends and collaborators for life. John wrote lyrics for Weir’s songs in the early 1970s.

John Perry Barlow was a natural libertarian who valued freedom, had a strong distrust of government, and believed that anonymity was necessary to preserve individual rights. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor as part of his efforts towards internet freedom.

In the early '90s, he also co-founded Cypherpunks mailing list with David Chaum where they discussed cryptography, privacy, individual rights among other topics. He is credited with coining the term “cyberspace.” At this time while participating on message boards discussing these topics, Barlow continued to write songs for The Grateful Dead.

John Perry Barlow responded to the passing of the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 by writing a letter addressed to the World Economic Forum, which he titled "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." The document was his response to what he saw as governments' attempts at encroaching on cyberspace and its inhabitants. It is worth noting that Barlow's declaration gained significant attention and has since become an iconic piece in internet history. While I suggest watching him read it himself in this 2013 video, I have included the full text for your convenience.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

John Perry Barlow's contribution to the Electronic Frontier Forum ranks among his greatest achievements. EFF's advocacy and legal representation of Professor Daniel J. Bernstein in the landmark case of Bernstein v. United States secured constitutional protection for Bitcoin and similar software under the First Amendment in the United States. The plaintiffs, including Professor Bernstein, argued that restrictions on cryptographic algorithms' publication violated their right to free speech by regulating or restricting computer code dissemination.

In 1999, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiffs, concluding that computer source code is a form of communication and expression protected under First Amendment rights.

Barlow continued his pursuit of freedom by founding the Freedom of Press Foundation with individuals such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and others in 2012. Upon hearing about John Perry Barlow's death, Assange tweeted a message honouring him for his contributions to society.

John Perry Barlow devoted his life to writing and speaking about online freedom, earning a reputation as both a brilliant mind and tireless advocate. His speeches, lectures, and Ted Talks on the subject can be found across the internet.

One of his most famous quotes reads: "When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl." Translation: Only outlaws will have privacy.

A longer explanation: The statement "When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl" is a play on words that uses a substitution cipher to encrypt the message. The phrase translates to "Only outlaws will have privacy" when using a simple Caesar cipher with a shift of 13 letters. The meaning behind this statement is that if cryptography (the practice of secure communication) were banned, only those who are clever enough to create their own codes or use alternative methods would be able to keep their messages private. It implies that ordinary people would lose the ability to communicate securely and privately without fear of surveillance or censorship.

Barlow's funeral was unconventional yet memorable. He was dressed in his favorite cowboy boots and laid out on his bed while family and friends gathered around him. Bob Weir performed "Cassidy," one of Barlow's well-known songs.

It is not overstating things to say that Barlow's work laid much of the foundation for cryptographic advances leading up to Bitcoin's creation while also making it difficult for projects like Bitcoin to become illegal in the United States.