beautyon on Nostr: It is not true that Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era ...

It is not true that Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is over.

The exact opposite is true.

Bitcoin was written after the mid-seventies Home Computer revolution took place and “ended”, putting the power of software development in everyone’s hands at a cost of essentially zero. Before that, to develop and run software, you had to book time on a large UNIX machine at a University, and that was only possible if you were enrolled as a student at an institution with a computer. Computer illiterates don’t know any of this important context and history.

Bitcoin was written on widely available, ubiquitous commodity computer equipment available from Walmart to Radio Shack. It was written in programming languages that were free and on operating systems that came for free with the machines they ran on. None of this was true previously; the cost of a commercial software license for AT&T UNIX was $30,000, out of reach for all but companies and educational institutions. Even the single user license of $150, whilst not an impediment for the die hard, was eliminated when Bitcoin was written by GNU. Universal availability of computing made the software development revolution possible. It meant that anyone anywhere could write software without permission, admission to University or supervision of any kind, and then they could distribute to anyone anywhere it without permission at a cost of near zero.

In the early days, software was distributed by mail order on floppy discs. Then it was distributed by BBS systems over telephone calls modem to modem. Now it is distributed over the Internet, for free. The commodification of computers and elimination of the cost of tooling to write software, remote connecting and expanded access to every form of intellectual pursuit in software from game development to book writing and research.

Can you see what’s coming next?

Universal access to programmable synthetic money in the form of Bitcoin will mean that anyone anywhere will be using Bitcoin. Nation States, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds’ are irrelevant to this, and will continue to be downstream of the innovators from the public, just as they were and are with the Internet, email and Bitcoin. Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds did not develop Bitcoin (or email or the web), and could not have developed it. They could not have imagined any of them, nor had they the skill to implement it. (See Paul Krugman’s predictions about the Internet being no more important than the Fax machine, or his most recent predictions about Bitcoin. What a joke!) The members of their impotent class will be, at best, peers on the network, like everyone else is. They are no longer special, privileged or required. At all.

That’s the whole point of Bitcoin, in case you didn’t know.

Jeremy Alaire famously said many years ago of the Bitcoin ecosystem, “It’s time for the grown ups now”. He was 100% wrong, and ended up peddling altcoins and unethical stablecoins because the immovable and immutable object “Bitcoin”, resists partially informed incomers with their clever plans to improve it. This feature of Bitcoin (and it is a feature, not a flaw) is what is currently being missed by FinTech bros, WallStreet Wonks, tenacious tangentials and other people who have just come to the ideas that spawned Bitcoin; reality no longer operates by proclamation of the self anointed.

It is a good thing that a small number of Americans are finally capitulating to Bitcoin, however in addition to capitulation, their parochial “Policeman of the World”, “my way or the highway”, “our institutions and governance models are the only possible way forward” mindset is best abandoned by them; no one on Earth wants to hear it, everyone is fed up with them, Bitcoin can’t hear it, and all real Bitcoiners ignore it.

The subconscious urge to control everything is strong in many characters; this is why rebellion is cast in a negative light by Statists. Change is not rebellion. Change is the essential process of all existence. Change is coming to what money is and how it is mediated, and in this change, the old players are removed from management, oversight, design or input of any kind. They are excluded. They are exsanguinated.

Yesterday’s men can’t conceive of any power outside of the familiar structures from their past; “the big boys” will always be the great powers. They don’t seem to realize (why should they?) that Bitcoin is sitting on top of something that has already completely eroded the power of many venerated “staple of modern life” institutions to great effect and universal benefit

Journalism: Junked
Music Distribution: Marginalized, Decimated
Publishing: Pulverized
Dictionaries: Destroyed
Telephone Companies: Trashed, Castrated
Censorship: Cauterized and Circumvented
Government Postal Services: Gutted, Piked, Slaughtered

Only the most naïve of people thinks the entry of Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds as peers on the network abolishes Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, cypherpunk era. On the contrary; the spread of Bitcoin makes Cypherpunk and the culture of rebellion the norm. It is Cypherpunks that are the innovators, and they’re continuing to prove it. Look at how one software company, Blockstream, run by a Cypherpunk, is providing financialization services to a nation state that were unimaginable before Bitcoin. All of this is obvious to anyone who can think.

The Cypherpunks and their direct descendants are building the new companies, software and services that cannot be revoked or “supervised” by outsiders, cowards, Statists, carpetbaggers, thieves, Socialists, and other human moths attracted to the bright flame of Bitcoin.

Look at Nostr for another example. While everyone downstream of Twitter as consumers complained bitterly about it, one man decided to offer a possible solution to it. No one saw it coming, or even thought it possible. Now, like it or not, an ecosystem has the very real potential (because it is real) of emerging on it, where the people using it cannot be told what to do or say.

This is exactly analogous with what happened with Bitcoin. Wall Street Wonks complaining bitterly about “the corrupt system” could not imagine Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin…existed, and now it cannot be stopped, like it or not, and its nature will not be changed because Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is not only not over but will never end. This is a safe prediction to make; look at how features of the web are developed, through the IETF process. The people at the coal face are doing the hard work of fundamental design, and corporations have nothing to do with it beyond paying the salaries of the designers; the “big players” don’t have a say in how things actually work.

Apple learned this the hard way by trying to introduce a new protocol called “AppleTalk.” Launched in the mid-1980s, AppleTalk was designed to facilitate networking in Apple environments, allowing Macintosh computers to connect and share resources seamlessly. Despite its initial success within Apple’s ecosystem, AppleTalk struggled to gain broader acceptance due to the dominance of other networking protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP. Over time, as the industry standard shifted towards TCP/IP, Apple gradually phased out AppleTalk, officially discontinuing support for it in 2009. “2009”...a special year, wasn't it? This is exactly like Wall Street trying to “take over” Bitcoin and change it. It cannot happen, and there will be no “The Grownups are Here Now” moment in Bitcoin. History indicates this strongly, but you have to know your history in order to understand this.

These are just a few of many examples showing the nature of the change and who is being excluded as a consequence. Everyone who has the power to create software and services is fed up to the back teeth with being told what they are, what they can do, what they can say, how they must implement software tools, and being on the bottom rung of the perverted “Society” where Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds have control over what money is and how it is allowed to move.

That’s over chaps.

The masses using Bitcoin at every level are together far more powerful than any Nation state, hedge fund or sovereign wealth fund. The masses using Bitcoin as money is an absolutely inevitable outcome, and it will happen on the terms of the Cypherpunks, not Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.