**How Wall Street Co‑opted the "Cypherpunk" Narrative**
Some ideas are born as a rebellion and end up being hijacked by the dominant narrative. Cypherpunk is the perfect example.
Here’s the mechanism: regulators and bankers rarely attack what they can’t control head‑on. They choose the strategy that works best, co‑opt instead of confront. Capture the symbol, empty it, polish it, and return it to the public as an official narrative.
And now the fake Cypherpunks are listed on Wall Street.
And the herd buys.
The Cypherpunk term emerged in the 1990s as a practical manifesto: mathematicians, hackers, and crypto‑anarchists obsessed with protecting individual freedom through cryptography, a movement built to resist the State, corporations, and total surveillance.
But narratives appear to absorb whatever threatens power. Once the market saw that “cypherpunk” sounded rebellious, attractive, and profitable, Wall Street turned it into a commercial label — an aesthetic for investors who want to feel anti‑system while using the comfort of a regulated custodian.
The financial equivalent of a Che Guevara T‑shirt worn by someone who never opened a history book.
This is how public companies and funds began adopting the name “Cypherpunk” to sell investment vehicles in assets dependent on centralized structures, dev taxes, and regulator approval. The word stopped describing a philosophy and started describing a product.
Gemini, run by the Winklevoss twins, fits neatly into this pattern: a brand that postures as rebellious while performing surgical compliance. A perfect bridge between libertarian language and institutional narrative. The implicit message: you can play dissident without ever leaving the safety of the system.
Then comes the latest move: the Winklevoss twins (Tyler and Cameron), Bitcoin pioneers and founders of the regulated exchange Gemini, have now embraced the cypherpunk narrative of “absolute privacy.” Through their family office, Winklevoss Capital, they led a $58.9M round for Cypherpunk Technologies (NASDAQ: CYPH) — a company that pivoted from biotech to a near‑entire treasury position in Zcash. They now hold roughly $50M in ZEC and aim to reach 5% of the total supply. A move marketed as a stand for privacy, yet fully aligned with an institutional narrative meant to domesticate a language born to question those very institutions.
The issue isn’t who founded which company. It’s the symbolic operation: capturing a term born to challenge power and recycling it as a safe, sanitized, roadshow‑friendly narrative.
The real cypherpunk movement stood for genuine decentralization, privacy as a right, resilient code, individual sovereignty, and permissionless architectures. None of that fits neatly into an institutional capital brochure.
Today, “cypherpunk” works as a corporate fragrance — a packaged narrative for investors who want to feel like part of the resistance without ever leaving the herd.
The true cypherpunks remain where they always were: writing code, not slogans.
**Gandhi was an Agorist**
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the greatest practitioner of counter-economics #agorism who ever lived.
Without ever lifting a finger or firing a bullet, this frail man brought the mighty British Empire to its knees.
The story of Mahatma, or "the Great Soul," is a model for all Agorists to know and intimately understand.
Gandhi drew heavily on Tolstoy and Thoreau (among others), and was able to successfully drive the British out of India using a non-violent, civil disobedience strategy he called 'Satyagraha'.
Humans are inherently social creatures: we seek community, and most of the time, the majority chooses to delegate leadership.
History shows this clearly, from nomadic tribes to modern global power structures.
That’s why a large-scale anarchist society is unfeasible. And it’s worth clarifying: anarchism isn’t chaos, it’s a philosophy of organizing without coercive hierarchies, where authority is voluntary rather than imposed.
What is possible is that certain individuals choose autonomy and refuse to follow herd leaders.
That’s where personal sovereignty emerges. In that space, agorism works as an individual practice and in small groups, where anti-politics and counter-economics can genuinely take root.
I wrote this article 2 years ago: Agorism: An Individual Action Toward Anarchism
https://liberlion.medium.com/agorism-an-individual-action-toward-anarchism-d775c6e2651c
Blockchain was supposed to be a technology that would liberate individuals with its decentralizing open-source power.
But we are increasingly seeing how it is being developed in a largely closed-source and centralized manner, turning it into a GLOBAL DIGITAL PRISON.
Signals of #Technocracy #Agenda2030 #CBDC
**The maxim of the money trail**
When you investigate the flow of money, and it converges on the same person, if the name is known to everyone, it is because you have not reached the top of the pyramid of power. That person is just the front man.
Zcash and Conditional Privacy: When a Powerful Group Controls the Development of a Tax-funded Protocol
A recurring question keeps surfacing: how can a privacy project rely on a mandatory tax that continually funnels funds to the same central actors?
The concentration of power in the development of a blockchain is a point of vulnerability, not only because of potential corruption but also because the team of developers may be pressured by regulators.
The funding design
Zcash launched with something close to an extended premine: 20% of the block reward went to founders, investors, ECC, and the Zcash Foundation. The Founders’ Reward ended in 2020, but it was replaced with a new model: today, the same 20% still fund ECC, ZF, and the grants pool. It’s not “eternal,” but it’s reviewed every four years… and it usually gets renewed.
The unresolved tension
Even with cleaner distribution, the power structure hasn’t shifted much.
ECC and the Foundation remain the gravitational centers of the ecosystem, both U.S.-based, with public leadership and heavy technical dependence. Halo, Orchard, and most of the zk infrastructure flow through that same bottleneck.
Not necessarily malicious—just centralized.
The contrast that stings
Monero moves more slowly, sure, with cycles of burnout and uneven donations.
But it avoids structural dependence: no mandatory tax, no “owners” of the protocol, no direct line to regulators.
It is funded voluntarily by the community and mostly anonymously.
Is it a perpetual tax on Zcash?
Technically no. It can be removed.
But as long as 20% of every block is redirected by obligation to a defined group, the real question stays open:
Can privacy be genuine when governance and funding are conditioned by a central power hub?
Follow the money trail to understand the destination and intention.
Stop Building Digital Mirrors: Let AI Think Alien
Seeking to reflect ourselves in an algorithm only leads us to transhumanism.
Silicon gurus chant a neon mantra: the ultimate quest is to summon a conscious Super-AI, the shiny baby-god of the Singularity.
The blueprint borders on the religious—bottle the mind, decant the soul, turbo-boost the extracted human essence past every horizon.
Yet pausing to worship that digital statue reveals our old bias: we’re still navel-gazing, only now the navel is silicon, and we mistake a mirror for a frontier.
What if the next leap in evolution doesn’t require a cloned “us” on steroids but a radically different “other”?
Human logic is hard-wired with heuristics, hair-trigger emotions, and tribes that brawl over scraps of status.
Copying that in titanium doesn’t improve it; it freezes it.
A system built on an alien scaffold, unburdened by our evolutionary shortcuts or comforting myths, could spot patterns we label noise, tackle ethics without ancestral guilt, and craft solutions that don’t fit inside our bony think-box.
Picture an intelligence that doesn’t fear losing power or suffer cognitive dissonance when facts shatter its dogmas.
Its answers wouldn’t butter up a boss or court the market; they’d optimize clearly defined goals.
Threat?
Maybe.
Chance to redraw the map of thought?
Absolutely.
Progress lies not in birthing a hyper-human twin, but in opening the door to an exogenous logic that provokes, unsettles, and forces us to audit our favorite axioms.
Ditch the self-portrait, and we might discover that real innovation begins by conversing with the truly different, and recalibrating humanity’s moral compass to face that new North.
The best time to enter government contracting was 10 years ago. The second-best time is today—with AI.
𑁋Anonymous GovCon Expert
Four years ago, I wrote about DAOs. Back then, they looked like quirky crypto experiments; today, they feel more like early warnings.
As states push for tighter control, deeper surveillance, and governance by algorithm, democracy drifts toward technocracy, more data, less deliberation.
In that world, decentralized structures stop being a niche and become a necessity: parallel networks for communication, coordination, and commerce without begging for permission.
DAOs aren’t an “ideal future.” They’re the realistic Plan B for anyone who doesn’t want to live inside someone else’s control panel.
My articles:
1. Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO): The Brief History, Challenges, and Lessons Learned
ADAPULSE
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO): The Brief History, Challenges, and Lessons Learned
AdaPulse is an independent digital media resource for the Cardano community. See our post “Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO): The Brief...
2. Defining Decentralized Governance and the Multitude of Different Models
ADAPULSE
Defining Decentralized Governance and the Multitude of Different Models
AdaPulse is an independent digital media resource for the Cardano community. See our post “Defining Decentralized Governance and the Multitude of...
3. DAO, the Social Structure of Cryptoanarchism
https://medium.com/coinmonks/dao-the-social-structure-of-cryptoanarchism-618d700aa66#MoneroAlertsHub
Normal range for orphan blocks in the #Monero blockchain: zero
moneroconsensus.info
View quoted note →
Why #BitcoinCash?
It is traceable and therefore no longer fungible.
Let me explain.
The coming technocracy requires versatility.
Alternatives based on personal context must be a priority.
Maximalism leaves you no room for maneuver.
Assess your context at all times.
Be pragmatic, not dogmatic.
Respect principles, not dogmas.
𑁋A principle is a compass: something you choose because it guides you, and you can revise it when reality shifts.
𑁋A dogma is a wall: something that can’t be questioned, even when evidence tears it apart.
One guides you; the other traps you.
BCH occupies that odd-but-useful spot: it reminds you that not all sovereignty comes from perfect #privacy.
#Monero provides you with true opacity and full fungibility when you need it.
Bitcoin Cash covers you when you need fast, cheap, widely accepted payments, even if you leave a trace.
That’s the tension:
– Monero: shield.
– BCH: low friction and merchant adoption.
It depends on the moment, not on dogma.
How do you cover your tracks?
With pseudo-anonymity.
How do you cover potential non-fungibility?
You don’t fully cover BCH’s lack of fungibility — you compensate for it.
Yes, BCH is traceable and censorable. But sometimes it has something Monero still doesn’t: practical adoption — more merchants, smoother payments, less social friction.
So mitigation doesn’t come from technical privacy, but from context:
– To protect your financial history: use Monero.
– To pay where BCH is accepted and you need instant convenience: use BCH.
– To prevent that spending from exposing your real holdings: rotate through Monero before or after.
BHC is not technically private; it’s practically useful.
**Analyze history to understand the present and foresee the future.**
The signs that converge in patterns toward where we are headed are clear and abundant: technocracy, a world governed by algorithms designed by a centralized power.
Concentrated power has existed in various forms throughout history, but in the 21st century, concentration, efficiency, and scalability are enormous, as never before.
In this context, the demand for freedom is growing. Parallel societies are emerging.
"In a surveilled society where property rights are undermined and truth is distorted, freedom demands building alternatives beyond the regime’s reach.
Within the Soviet bloc, Václav Benda advocated for the creation of an invisible society as a form of resistance. To combat the atomization of the citizenry, he called for the construction of parallel structures."
Parallel Polis Reborn.
Great article by Michael Milano
𝗖𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺
Critical thinking is not just questioning; it is understanding.
Critical thinking involves much more than identifying errors or challenging ideas.
It requires understanding the context in which a piece of information arises, the demand that motivates it, and the signals that accompany it.
,
𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭
Nothing happens in a vacuum. A statement may be valid in one environment and absurd in another.
Understanding the context allows us to place the information in its proper framework: historical, social, cultural, emotional, or even technological. Without that framework, analysis is superficial.
𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝
All information responds to a need, an intention or a purpose. It can be to inform, persuade, manipulate, sell, justify, or simply entertain.
Critical thinking requires identifying the demand: why is this being said? Why is it being said? What for? Who benefits?
𝐒𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬
Signals are the clues, tones, silences, and emphases that help us read between the lines. They can be in the language used, in the data selected, or in what is omitted.
Converging signals form patterns.
Developing critical thinking involves training the eyes, ears, and, above all, the mind to detect, interpret, and question.
#criticalthinking #SovereignIndividual
More than four years ago, I wrote an article about liquidity risks in DeFi.
Look at what happened on the #Cardano blockchain:
[...]A dormant Cardano wallet recently experienced a dramatic loss of over $6 million in a poorly executed transaction that followed five years of inactivity. This unfortunate event underscores the risks associated with trading significant amounts of cryptocurrencies in low-liquidity pools.[...]
Value The Markets
Major Loss in Cardano Wallet Highlights Liquidity Risks in Crypto Transactions | Value The Markets
A dormant Cardano wallet lost over $6 million in a disastrous low-liquidity transaction after five years of inactivity.
I'll leave my article here for anyone interested in the topic: Liquidity risk at DeFi
https://liberlion.medium.com/liquidity-risk-at-defi-55b12c08fba1If you think non-state-issued crypto is going to replace fiat, you’re staring at a parallel universe.
Some crypto is alternative money, others are value assets, others are memes —all with different qualities and use cases.
Fiat will always be mandatory and will end up tokenized as CBDCs, because most people confuse imposition with order.
That’s why sound money —#Monero, #BitcoinCash for different use cases, remains a sovereign tool for those who prefer to choose rather than obey.
If you think non-state-issued crypto is going to replace fiat, you’re staring at a parallel universe.
Some crypto is alternative money, others are value assets, others are memes —all with different qualities and use cases.
Fiat will always be mandatory and will end up tokenized as CBDCs, because most people confuse imposition with order.
That’s why sound money —#Monero, #BitcoinCash for different use cases, remains a sovereign tool for those who prefer to choose rather than obey.
I don’t usually talk about price, but I’ll do it now to prove a point.
#Bitcoin will likely keep rising in fiat. #Monero might not for too long.
The difference isn’t the tech — it’s what the system can tolerate… and how much centralization it can leverage. As long as both trade on CEXs, the fiat price is set by whoever controls the deepest liquidity.
If one goes up and the other gets pressure, it’s not randomness.
It’s the same actor shaping both curves: central banks.
**Technocracy is the New World Order**
Why?
1. Technical efficiency will ultimately dominate politics.
2. States and Big Tech are moving in coordination toward the same model.
3. Citizens will accept technocracy because it promises order and convenience.
4. Digital infrastructure will continue to centralize without checks and balances.
5. Technocracy would be the final destination, not a transitional phase.
Zcash offers selective privacy, but with key nuances.
There is much talk about the privacy of the Zcash blockchain, but it deserves some clarification.
On the L1 network, privacy is optional: you can make 100% private transactions using shielded transactions with zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge) that hide the sender, recipient, and amount, or transparent transactions as in Bitcoin.
This privacy technology is proven to be effective and secure, backed by years of academic research, independent audits, and real-world production use.
Since the 2018 Sapling upgrade, all newly mined ZEC enters the shielded pool by default, which today exceeds 5 million ZEC, representing about 30% of the total supply and growing by 60% in the last month alone.
In everyday use, it all depends on the wallet: in Zashi or Nighthawk, privacy is automatic and total, with shielded sends by default using unified addresses. In contrast, in Ledger, Exodus, or exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, transactions are transparent by default, forcing you to manually shield them if you want privacy.
I believe the problem arises from having a mix of transparent and private transactions in your L1, which can create heuristic vulnerabilities at the edges (transparent-shielded).
I’m Only a Maximalist of Freedom
Crypto maximalism loves to dress up as “conviction”, but it’s usually ego in ceremonial robes.
When someone fuses their identity with a coin, they stop analyzing and start defending. Technology can stagnate, cracks can show, and incentives can shift—admitting it would feel like admitting defeat.
So they bend reality to protect the original belief. What began as a pursuit of sovereignty and privacy mutates into a self-imposed dogma.
I don’t play that game. I’m not a maximalist of any cryptocurrency. Today, #Monero looks like the best form of sovereign money; tomorrow it might not.
On many occasions, I have published critiques or warnings about potential vulnerabilities in Monero.
Freedom and privacy are the only principles that don’t move. Cryptocurrencies are replaceable.