Posts tagged cypherpunks
Vinay Gupta has not raised $257 million in an ICO. He is not yet a Bitcoin billionaire. He is not a Thiel Fellow, nor a Thiel Lad (to translate to his native Scottish vernacular). With Bitcoin reaching new highs monthly, the dominating headlines often miss the point of cryptocurrency because it was never about the money or the brand. It’s about interesting people doing interesting things, and Gupta has quietly impacted the world in his own way, doing a lot of thinking over the years (136,000 tweets worth). Gupta helped coordinate Ethereum’s 2015 release, working as a project manager on strategy and communications. He worked as the strategic architect of Consensys, the leading crypto venture studio, and as the designer of Dubai’s National Blockchain strategy. In addition to being the Blockchain Fellow for Digital Catapult, a UK government-funded initiative to increase the amount of innovation in the country, he has two current projects.
via https://www.forbes.com/sites/rahulsingireddy/2017/10/18/vinay-gupta-on-why-ethereum-is-the-future/#1251ba8b56f2
At the time, Jude and I were contracted to write a novel titled How to Mutate and Take Over the World. I wanted the fiction to contain the truth. I wanted to tell people how creative hackers could do it — mutate and take over the world — by the end of the decade. Not knowing many of those details ourselves, we threw down a challenge on various hacker boards and in the places where extropians gathered to share their superhuman fantasies. “Take on a character,” we said, “and let that character mutate and/or take over.” The results were vague and unsatisfying. These early transhumanists didn’t actually know how to mutate, and the hackers couldn’t actually take over the world. It seemed that we were asking for too much too soon.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4036040/cypherpunks-julian-assange-wikileaks-encryption-surveillance-dystopia
HavenCo’s failure—and make no mistake about it, HavenCo did fail—shows how hard it is to get out from under government’s thumb. HavenCo built it, but no one came. For a host of reasons, ranging from its physical vulnerability to the fact that The Man doesn’t care where you store your data if he can get his hands on you, Sealand was never able to offer the kind of immunity from law that digital rebels sought. And, paradoxically, by seeking to avoid government, HavenCo made itself exquisitely vulnerable to one government in particular: Sealand’s. It found that out the hard way in 2003 when Sealand “nationalized” the company.
For the last two years, I’ve researched the history of Sealand and HavenCo. I used the Wayback Machine to reconstruct long-since-vanished webpages. I dug through microfilm of newspapers back to the 1960s. I pored over thousands of pages of documents, only recently unsealed, from the United Kingdom’s National Archives.
http://bit.ly/Hh0Vzf