on the cypherpunk revolution


SUBMITTED BY: Guest

DATE: April 26, 2013, 2:36 p.m.

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  1. there was an insightful talk posted on wikileaks. we thought some of the following points to be particularly worthy of further investigation (quoted directly from the transcript):
  2. “all digital material can be cloned, almost zero costs, so if you have currency as a digital string of numbers, how do you stop me…”
  3. “you have a structure where you can tell whether something has been published or unpublished, you can…one piece of human intellectual information can cite another one in a way that… can’t be manipulated, and if it is censored the censorship can be found out. and if one place is censored, well you can scour the entire world for this hash, and no matter where you find you know it is what you wanted precisely!”
  4. “the effect on a single individual is not your actual goal. the actual effect is to change the system in some fundamental way.”
  5. “those people who were altruistic and not too concerned about finances and fiscalization simply lost power relative to those people who were more concerned about finances and fiscalization and worked their way up in the system. so certain behaviours were disincentivized and others were potentiated.”
  6. “so I say that free speech in many places–in many western places–is free not as a result of liberal circumstances in the west but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say, i.e. the dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not. It is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not.”
  7. “i often say that censorship is always cause for celebration. it is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. it means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think.”
  8. “if you have perfect anonymity you can fight forever, yeah. you don’t have to run away.”
  9. the talk discusses the evolving strategy of the revolutionary and many ideas were far too important to be condensed into a summary here. root causes for the disparity between public opinion and foolhardy rulers were explained (“fiscalization”). guerrilla warfare should therefore extend into the theater of communications infrastructure. autocrats and oligarchs will then need to resort to extreme measures such as disabling communications entirely and isolating people from one another. this extreme compartmentalization makes a state weak and would undermine the ruler’s control. encryption, mesh networks, bitcoins, and darknets are all tools of today’s revolutionary. media and the infrastructure to transmit it, manipulated by rulers who have lost 天命, may be circumvented using these tools to allow the people to communicate. everyone should be educated in their construction, administration, and deployment just as survivalists prepare for an apocalypse. the tools of revolution are freely available. we should apply them in our daily lives in the same way as warriors diligently train their art.
  10. it’s been mentioned that control of the state no longer belongs to the people and that this is in itself a fundamental problem. ideally the state and the people should not be at odds with one another.
  11. it can be said that the world is heading in the direction of peace and dialog. the use of physical force to oppress people is no longer fashionable. likewise, it does not help a revolutionary’s public perception if its adherents resort to violence. and so we need to pay more attention.

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