The real " Golden Age ' of cypherpunks? Its the late 90's and early noughties where we hit the sweet design spot.
JIM ' By “classical” thinking, “Assassination Politics” would have to be the best, tightest-security, more protected organization that has ever existed on the face of this planet. Just about EVERY powerful person would want to kill anybody who had anything to do with such a system. The codes would have to be unbreakable, the remailers would have to be certain, but most importantly, each and every participant would have to be perfectly anonymous to even have a prayer of pulling it off. Especially the operators of such a system." BELL - 1995 By flipping the script, Jim broke clear from the relentlessly privacy-centric list focus and anticipated the blockchain design breakthrough to be predicted by 2002 and produced shortly after. " Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that EVERYONE would be identified. The “donors” to the system would remain perfectly anonymous, and the “guessers” would likewise be perfectly anonymous, but the organization itself would be made up of real people, who have published addresses, who have simply decided that they have had enough of the current system and are going to participate in a PERFECTLY LEGAL enterprise by the laws of the country, and just DARE the government to try to stop them . . ." Karma is a virtual currency for peer-to-peer systems, introduced by Sirer and co-authors in 2003. It is designed to eliminate the free-loader problem, i.e. preventing malicious users from consuming resources without giving anything in return. It is the first peer-to-peer currency with a distributed mint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emin_Gün_Sirer So from 1995 to 2003 we saw the start of genuinely anarchic crypto-anarchy. No Randite, Austro-moronic idiocy required. The term cypherpunk being regularly used to conscript folks ( some who disavowed the compliment - like Phil Zimmerman ) I use it here to rope in Emin as an ' honorary '. His business-friendly mileage may vary! The point remains true even without him since Btc arrived five years later. This places the fabled " Golden Age ' even more firmly in the noughties. Them that has the gold makes the rule and who controls the present controls the past. This dazzling past is not dead - its not even past. Welcome to the intelligent, post-scarcity-anarchist, world-wide revolution!
