Back in the days when I had encountered email encryption, I was so fascinated with the idea of sending and receiving anonymous messages that I had to dive deeper into this. Thus I installed a PGP software to my email client without knowing that it would lead to something bigger. 

Now from the perspective of nowadays' more and more technological society, I think that the cryptology has its bigger stance. Back there in the 90s I thought that the internet was truly free and anonymous. Now some 20 years later, it appeared that it was not the case. Currently, we are not anonymous and we are not free at all in the internet, being tracked and even spied by tech corporations and governments. But there is still hope that I and all we, cyperpunks, cling to. 

There in 2008 a remarkable invention was made - a person or group of people implemented and released as open-source software a digital currency called Bitcoin. The most astonishing thing was that it was a decentralized currency, a peer-to-peer network allowing people send and receive money without any intermediaries. And when I think about decentralization, it pops up to my mind the name of one of Russia's prominent anarchist - Peter Kropotkin who described the world free of central government, a world based on voluntary associations of people. And it sounds so beautiful! But we are still not there, not even near. So today we live in a world that is dominated by a very centralized small core of people.. 

How did we arrive here? I don't know but I know that it pushed us to invent such things as blockchain and crypto which would allow us to liberate from current state. The surveillance, whether it be analogue or tech-related, forced us, to try hide things, hide names, hide everything. This is the true origin of open source and cyber-cryptography used by ordinary person. There is the government or the corporation on one side and ordinary people, empowered by technology, on the other side, fighting the corporation. “Cypherpunk. It’s just a couple of people who have dealt with cryptography in a punk way, which is: Do it yourself. Don’t ask permission,” Smuggler.

We don't ask for permission because we believe that everybody should do what they want to do without harming others but having the freedom to do it. This way the cyberpunk movement evolved in practice to crypto-anarchy which in the end became a whole philosophy of using cryptology and technology to build communities that are invisible to the state and the corporation.

Back in the days when I had encountered email encryption, I was so fascinated with the idea of sending and receiving anonymous messages that I had to dive deeper into this. Thus I installed a PGP software to my email client without knowing that it would lead to something bigger. 

Now from the perspective of nowadays' more and more technological society, I think that the cryptology has its bigger stance. Back there in the 90s I thought that the internet was truly free and anonymous. Now some 20 years later, it appeared that it was not the case. Currently, we are not anonymous and we are not free at all in the internet, being tracked and even spied by tech corporations and governments. But there is still hope that I and all we, cyperpunks, cling to. 

There in 2008 a remarkable invention was made - a person or group of people implemented and released as open-source software a digital currency called Bitcoin. The most astonishing thing was that it was a decentralized currency, a peer-to-peer network allowing people send and receive money without any intermediaries. And when I think about decentralization, it pops up to my mind the name of one of Russia's prominent anarchist - Peter Kropotkin who described the world free of central government, a world based on voluntary associations of people. And it sounds so beautiful! But we are still not there, not even near. So today we live in a world that is dominated by a very centralized small core of people.. 

How did we arrive here? I don't know but I know that it pushed us to invent such things as blockchain and crypto which would allow us to liberate from current state. The surveillance, whether it be analogue or tech-related, forced us, to try hide things, hide names, hide everything. This is the true origin of open source and cyber-cryptography used by ordinary person. There is the government or the corporation on one side and ordinary people, empowered by technology, on the other side, fighting the corporation. “Cypherpunk. It’s just a couple of people who have dealt with cryptography in a punk way, which is: Do it yourself. Don’t ask permission,” Smuggler.

We don't ask for permission because we believe that everybody should do what they want to do without harming others but having the freedom to do it. This way the cyberpunk movement evolved in practice to crypto-anarchy which in the end became a whole philosophy of using cryptology and technology to build communities that are invisible to the state and the corporation.