A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) | Hacker News Reader

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993)

activism.net

56 pointsrasengan17 comments

Worth considering in light of Vitalik’s recent essay “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” which addresses how blockchains lost their original cypherpunk roots to financialization and the accompanying statist interventions.

https://vitalik.eth.link/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html

I’m convinced that ease of use is antithetical to punk culture in a lot of ways, so maybe this was inevitable.

Aesthetically easy may not be punk but punk rock is notoriously easy to play and the barrier to entry is about passion, not technical achievements.

Technology stripped to just the essentials necessary to further the ethos seems pretty punk to me.

Punk rock was very simple but it still required a skillset; most punk rock fans probably hadn't invested the time and effort to be able to participate past supporting those that did.

Punk movements seem to have always suffered from this sort of unacknowledged lack of unified or organized abilities.

And their aversion to the mainstream and anarchic tendencies often leave them and their goals in absolute limbo.

Punk rock at least had the benefit of "if you can listen and agree, you're in" though. To be remotely included in cypher/cyberpunk practically requires an education of some kind, especially in the post-"mobile OS is all I need" world.

Its funny, because cryptocurrency/NFTs/etc feels like the least punk thing i can possibly imagine

Neither is working for a multi billion dollar multinational tech firm designing ways to spy on users, get them addicted and manipulate their worldviews, but that doesn't stop most of the people who do from fantasizing and larping.

Idk, having a day job so you can fully engage in your passions without having to compromise the thing your passionate about for commercial concerns, while maybe not ideal seems at least consistent with the ideals of punk.

Having a day job is not the issue. There are plenty of day jobs where you don't have to sell out your supposed principles to pay the bills so you can spray graffiti at night. Have you seen what's happening around us? The effect of these day jobs are the thing they're supposedly fighting. They're the ones making the world worse while they call themselves the resistance. I just hope the money is worth it.

I'm passionate about peace and that's why I work 12h shifts at the landmine factory to finance hippy festivals.

It's a failure of imagination.

Research FreeRossDAO or UkraineDAO.

Literally changing the world and saving lives with the tech you can't imagine being punk.

Cope.

Wow, someone used crypto for charity work.

Don't get me wrong, that's great, but what exactly are we saying here? Fundraising for a good cause is all that is needed to make something punk? Are church collection plates also punk?

The little old lady at church is basically GG Allin

Berlin was the spiritual center of the cyberpunk movement back in the 80s.

Berlin has changed so much since then. It was a divided, post-apocalyptic city, “occupied” by two foreign powers. Lots of soldiers, draft-dogers, musicians, communists, and ex-Nazis.

Now it’s a pretty boring capital city, just like Bonn was back in the day.

I’m glad to see it’s still doing cyberpunk type stuff, like having bitcoin markets.

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554818 - Nov 2022 (176 comments)

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15103085 - Aug 2017 (8 comments)

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078524 - April 2017 (7 comments)

Completely at odds with the techno-optimist manifesto which requires complete transparency in all transactions.

Not really.

You should have the tech to have as much privacy as you want. The two ideas are compatible.

I really don't get his "technological vision". I don't know why anyone would prefer his "decentralized stack" over the "traditional stack" that he intends to replace. He doesn't even try to convince us about why it is better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com