Looking back through the years, and our community's history and development, one cant help but feel the echoing words of the past and contemplate the process that made bitcoin and blockchain technology possible as unavoidable omens of truth, made by pseudonymous masterminds that in a not so distant past gave shape to an idea, a pure and crystal clear concept, buried in the subconscious of the nascent Internet-dwellers and their soon-to-be popular culture.  

It seems surreal for us in the year two-thousand-and-nineteen to consider that the seeds of our new paradigm have been planted three decades ago. Many of us share with that genesis, our birth. Others have been around for a little more, but still were in infancy and unaware of the consequences that these events would bring forth.Today it is evident that these ideas silently forwarded through mailing lists and published in discrete and unfashionable websites, have been the foundation on which a whole subculture of advocates of freedom, (and technology as the way to achieve it) have built the underlying web of software protocols that give us such freedom today in ways they were already foretelling. 

They did more than predicting.

They anticipated the war on terror and the surveillance state. They knew what we would be up against in the future, they were just getting ready for it, and gathering up the resistance to it in every way they could. 

Knowledge is power, and they knew this well; an organized and well educated group of activists could make the difference for the coming age of hyper-communication that the Internet was projecting. The tools were outstanding cryptography even for today, and the software they coded themselves, which was still being used not long ago, have been the starting point for an all out arms race on processing power and algorithmic supremacy, which among other things contributed to the development of the much dreaded quantum processors. 

And one of these tools became the next evolutionary step to make bitcoin what it is today, and putting aside everyone's moral stand on the issue, the reality is without it this movement would not exist. 

The specter of Crypto-Anarchy roams free

Of course it is onion routing and the Tor-project, which enabled the infamous deep web markets which later made bitcoin their primary medium of exchange, and inadvertently proved the concept of Satoshi's whitepaper to a wide enough crowd, many of which were tech-savvy drug manufacturers or distributors, that saw in bitcoin a way to bypass the banking system or regulated and proprietary applications to move money around, and to protect their identities from the people they were transacting with.

This, with all of its less popular implications, is not a side-effect to the invention of unconfiscatable and programmable money, it is the main use case there is to this technology. The free exchange of goods and services, and later the practical store of value on a sound monetary standard, regardless of moral judgement, regardless of society's boundaries but most of all disregarding state control and policies leading to censorship. It may be overwhelming to think in these terms for the first time, since it implies a list of immoral services and goods being sought and provided. But nevertheless they will be, even if bitcoin ceases to exist.

The free-market is not an ideology designed in a fraudulent school of economics aligned with the kleptocrats of our age, it is a trait of our human nature. Since the dawn of humans as a cognitive species there was a continuous flux of commerce, and it was not morally hindered, even in societies which forbid certain practices there was the general acceptance to acquire said goods and services from foreigners. These practices need not be named as it is enough to turn on the six o'clock news to see they are widespread.

These are what some of us might consider a taboo in some cases, pertaining to the moral system of our present, in other cases it is not so much a taboo but a cultural norm, and the most extreme examples are downright abominable. But can it be helped?, Is it possible to live in a world where these forbidden acts don't appeal to the counter-culture, or the borderline sociopath in the worst cases? It is not for us as a community to decide, it must be a debate of human society as a whole.

What bitcoin and crypto in general must change is the underlying rot of the fiat system, which stifles the real free-market. 

Onward and upwards

The next step in our journey is a thorn-ridden path, a mud-bank in the middle of the river, which does not let our ship sail through. It is the inspiration of this article. The painting of the Boatmen of the Volga river by Ilya Yefimovich Repin depicted in the cover, symbolizes the endless effort it will take to overcome the hardships this dying system will throw our way. That many of us may not see it to the end, others may be incarcerated, and others too afraid to speak up. But we will prevail in the end.

To quote one of the seed planters of the past :

"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money."

Whenever there is strife, and all odds seem against you, remember that together we will prevail. That this technology will set us free. That this idea has survived for more than three decades in its current form, and has evolved in the midst of the exponential technological advancement of our era to guard against all attempts to control it, bitcoin is a living organism and every one of us sustains its life. You are not alone, and in every node and every peer you will find standing ground to keep pulling the rope, for our ship of freedom to reach its destination.