The privacy issue: letter from the editors

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secret. A private matter is something you don’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something you don’t want anyone to know. Intimacy is the power to selectively reveal yourself to the world.

Bitcoin once again finds itself at another crossroads. On the one hand, the easy road, paved with Number Go Up, highly regulated ETF products, and state-approved supervisory stablecoins as a scaling solution for the next billion users. The other path is objectively more difficult to walk, a darker path ahead, despite the enlightening words of Eric Hughes and other pioneers of open source cryptographic tools.

On March 3, 1993, Hughes published Manifesto of a Cypherpunkarticulating the newly formed direction of the Cypherpunks: a group of Bay Area hackers and activists composed of Hughes, Tim May, John Gilmore and others under the name created by St. Jude Milhon.

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Bitcoin culture – if such a homogenous thing still exists – is engulfed in yet another culture war distraction as the regulatory moat fills with legislation that prevents self-custody while the reptilians of the penal system rise to the surface to throw out those who dared to write the code in pen.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their kindness. It is to their advantage to talk about us, and we should expect them to.

How did we get here? How have we spent the last year arguing about what constitutes spam and the ethical use of Bitcoin while completely ignoring the overflowing regulatory moat? There were more than enough signs. There were more than enough warnings. Congress drafts legislation to further regulate the internet, bills for stablecoins, bans on social media apps, while the state continues to redefine in real time what a cryptocurrency even is.

To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information doesn’t just want to be free, it longs to be free. The information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumour’s younger and stronger cousin; Information is faster, has more eyes, knows more and understands less than Rumor.

Bitcoin is a database. Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin is code. The compliance hypnotists will tell you that we need to ask permission from our local government offices to adopt bitcoin. So that we can pay our taxes in bitcoin and overcome our legal debts. Samourai, TornadoCash, Wasabi Wallet… they wrote code. Code that users around the world, in countless legal jurisdictions, have used to exchange alphanumeric strings.

People have protected their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes and couriers. Past technologies did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

Writing code is not a crime. Code is speech. The distribution code is an expression between parts of bytes, reduced to bits, ones, and zeros. Any precedent setting anything other than this is a direct violation of the First Amendment and, moreover, against the natural code of free speech.

Cypherpunks write code. We know someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do it, we’ll write it.

There are a lot of ways that the Bitcoin network can spread across the globe and how the asset bitcoin can monetize at astronomical rates without bringing an ounce more freedom to the world’s population. The definition of Bitcoin has been accepted by hypnotists to be within the purview of the regulatory moat, and thus Bitcoin is in dire need of a redefinition. Bitcoin was never about dollar value, it was never about perpetuating the UST market through Treasury backed tokens used by captured on and off ramps that require KYC. Bitcoin has never been about embracing the state and promoting the reach and influence of psychopathic criminals obsessed with changing the definition of speech and expression, code and numbers.

Bitcoin is a tool of empowerment and Bitcoin is for enemies. Well, now our enemy, the state, is empowered.

We know that software cannot be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system cannot be shut down.

Writing code is not a crime. We sat and argued about culture signaling with the entire class of drunken sports rivals as we watched accountants pick up their red pens to change the meaning of words, slowly bringing their frogs and dictionaries to a boil.

Privacy extends only to the extent of the cooperation of one’s peers in society. We at Cypherpunks are looking for your questions and concerns and hope we can hire you so we don’t screw ourselves up. However, we will not be moved from our course because some may disagree with our goals.

Bitcoin is just a ledger.

A database.

Let’s walk together in step.

Whispering numbers to a loved one cannot be redefined as a criminal act.

Further on.

The editors

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#!/usr/local/bin/perl — export-a-crypto-system sig, RSA in 5 lines of PERL:

($s, $k, $n)=@ARGV; $w=length$n; $k=”O$k” if length($k)&1; $n=”O$n”, $w*+if$w&1; die

“$0 -mod key

SW-=2;$_-unpack (‘B*’ , pack(‘#*’, Sk)): s/~o*//g;s/0/d*ln%/g;s/1/ d*In%lm*ln%/g;

Sc=”1$ (_)p” ;while(read (STDIN, Sm, Sw/2))($m=unpack(“H$w”, Sm): chop($a=

echo 160161\Um \Esm\U$n\Esn$c|dc*):print pack(‘H*’, ‘0’x($v-length$a).$a);}

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To test, save it as an “rsa” file, then do:

% chmod 700 rsa

% echo “bony rotten” | rsa -e 11 ca1 > msg.rsa

% rsa -d ac1 cal