The state always wants to intervene in all spheres of life of its citizens. For each your step, the government has a subordinate institution that will track your every move and record it in a special register.
When the Internet appeared, users took the first sip of freedom and moved there a significant part of their lives. But not everything is so simple. No one is ready to just give up power and close their eyes to such self-will. The government immediately took control of the situation and brought order to the network. Now every user is followed by all and sundry: secretive agencies, marketers, search engines, military corporations, mafia, terrorists and other structures that like to be nosy.
The expected response to such harassment is the birth of so-called cypherpunks, who are waging a virtual struggle for freedom on the Internet and even formed their own small anarchist community.
Who are the cypherpunks?
This is such an informal group of people who want to preserve anonymity while being interested in cryptography. The main idea of cypherpunks is quite simple. They claim that states are the vehicles of violence and coercion. Resisting the state is almost impossible or extremely difficult. But the fact is that technical progress has brought information to the fore in the structure of the modern economy. Information can be encrypted, and the means for strong cryptography are technically quite accessible for any individual. At the same time, no one single from the most powerful states can crack correctly implemented cryptographic algorithms. This ensures the protection and preservation of personal space, allows you to maintain anonymity on the Web, and most importantly – it opens the way to social and political changes that are not controlled by the state. Without information, government servants are powerless, and, therefore, all that is needed is to promote and distribute encryption tools in every possible way. This is what cypherpunks do.
They did a lot for ordinary users to have a little more freedom on the Web, and for the state – a little less control. Thanks to them, we have Tor, VPN, PGP, Bitmessage, KryptoKit, Siа, Storj and I2P.
Satoshi’s appearance
In October 2008, a certain Satoshi Nakamoto presented his famous white paper about Bitcoin to the world (). In it, he described many of the problems that developers had previously encountered and offered the world a new and uniquely protected electronic currency – bitcoin, as well as a distributed register – blockchain. This document has caused a lot of criticism and questions, but Satoshi did not stop and mined Bitcoin block genesis on January 3, 2009. Thus began a new era of struggle for anonymity on the Internet.
From this point on, it became possible to conduct buying and selling operations without any actions that could open your identity to another participant in the transaction. Importantly, data encryption made it possible to hide this agreement from state control.
At the moment, the state has actually admitted its powerlessness in controlling technological innovation and only total bans and totalitarian restrictions can save its desire for universal control.
Now almost everyone who has access to the Internet will be able to benefit from the decentralization and feel its healing power. Every day, hundreds of new projects appear in the world, based on the new blockchain technology.
And it seems that humanity is at the threshold of a new era of digital security.
