The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin

> Man, I wish I'd kept my Extropy magazines. I ditched them in a move about 15 years ago.

Well, for what it's worth, here's the archives I have been collecting. I also have other extropians-related files, but this is somewhat of a "I don't know what I have" issue, so it will just take some more poking and prodding for me to categorize and upload the rest.

extropians: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/extropians/

cypherpunks: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/cypherpunks/cypherpunks-199209-1...

> but I've lost track of whatever group is on the broader picture of extreme technological ambition.

Mostly it's the same groups, except not where you first found them. For example, the cypherpunks and cryptography mailing lists haven't degraded as terribly as extropy-chat/extropians.

There is a transhumanism/biohacking channel on irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap which has logs here http://gnusha.org/logs/ since 2008. (Disclaimer, I am the resident optroll.)

... and there's a bitcoin/cryptography wizardry channel on the same server in #bitcoin-wizards (but also #bitcoin is reasonable), logs can be found here: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizards/ In general, I would recommend #bitcoin for most messages.

As for the rest of the cryptocurrency world, that's a little more difficult to explain and keep track of...

You know, the weird thing is that looking back on the extropians, they weren't really all that ambitious. Sure, they would talk about DNA or something, but did any of them ever bother to spend a few hours in a molecular biology lab? And what about software, how many of them (who didn't already code) bother to pick up code slinging to advance their interests? That's not to say that they were unskilled-- many of them were extremely skilled, but they sort of showed up like that, and didn't move the needle. Oh well, different times.

It didn't go away. It just dropped the trappings of a counterculture because counterculture itself has lost relevance in a world where there is no real mainstream to be counter to.

re "Surely there's a current generation" - there are many current generations, with different flavors, distributed all over the political spectrum, ranging from militant atheism to new cosmic religions... the gravity center that holds this galaxy together is the idea that radically changing the human condition via advanced technology is both doable and good, other ideas can differ wildly among different groups.

A lot of the people I remember from the mailing list have gone on to do interesting things. Hanson is still getting people to try predictions markets, Yudkowsky has been pretty successful with MIRI (and his agitprop), Bostrom's book made the New York Times bestseller list, Broderick is up to 50 published books, etc.