Youtor
21st February 1848 The Communist Manifesto first published
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=Mcz_4MvPlOE
Part four of a four-part documentary series about the cypherpunk movement of the 1990s, which led to the creation of bitcoin. • Written, shot, edited, narrated, and graphics by Jim Epstein. • Licence: Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed) • 𝐅𝐔𝐋𝐋 𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐏𝐓: • The fall of the Berlin Wall was important to me, said Zooko Wilcox, who was 15 in 1989. It seemed like the end of history —a reference to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay—and a time when national borders would cease being the walls of prisons, he recalled. When Wilcox discovered the internet a few years later, he saw it as part of this pattern where borders and distance stop being barriers to people. • Wilcox, who today is the founder and CEO of a company that oversees the development of the cryptocurrency Zcash, was an early participant in the cypherpunks email list. The list, which launched in 1992, became a gathering place for a global community interested in using cryptography to allow individuals to communicate and transact on the internet privately and without interference from a central authority. The cypherpunk movement more broadly would go on to influence WikiLeaks (Julian Assange was a participant on the email list), BitTorrent, Tor, and bitcoin, among other freedom-oriented technologies and initiatives. • Wilcox dropped out of college to work at David Chaum's startup DigiCash, an attempt to build a privacy-preserving payment network on the internet based on a series of groundbreaking papers that the legendary cryptography had published in the 1980s. • Because of the cypherpunks and because of the science papers of David Chaum, Wilcox told Reason, economic freedom seemed inevitable. Humans will no longer [be] constrained by national borders and distance from cooperating and sharing resources and helping each other. • Three decades later, we're a long way from realizing the economic freedom and online privacy that Wilcox and other early cypherpunks anticipated, but since the invention of bitcoin and the launch of the cryptocurrency industry, a new generation of cypherpunks has emerged who are convinced that it's now possible to make good on the movement's original vision. • There was also a divide within the original cypherpunk community over whether cryptographic tools would lead to more individual freedom, free trade, and the spread of democracy, or the collapse of government altogether. The cypherpunk movement's most influential figure was the physicist and intellectual provocateur Tim May, who coined the phrase crypto anarchy. He saw the fall of the Berlin Wall as evidence that the societal institutions we take for granted could collapse in short order, just as they had in the Middle Ages. (May passed away in 2018 at the age of 66.) • We saw the little principalities, the monarchies, the religious, the papal states—we saw those collapse probably as a result of … printing, May told Reason, • May penned a one-page summary explaining how cryptography would upend society titled The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. • So I just sat down at my little Macintosh and loosely patterned this after the Communist Manifesto, he told Reason. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, he wrote, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. • The idea that excited May and many other cypherpunks, according to the novelist and writer Paul Rosenberg, author of the Free–Man's Perspective newsletter, was that we can be protected from anything without—from the observers, from the watchers, from the imposers of the past upon the future that we're trying to create. • May was skeptical of the idea that humanity was witnessing an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism, as Fukuyama wrote in his famous essay (later expanded into a book)—or that it was possible to overcome tyranny through collective action. He embraced a technology-based theory of historic change that was summed up by the movement's tagline, cypherpunks write code, a line from the mathematician Eric Hughes' 1993 essay, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. • What Eric meant by 'cypherpunks write code' was, 'Don't be one of those guys who goes to a Libertarian Party conference and sits about getting somebody elected to the Los Gatos City Council,' May told Reason. That way lies madness. • • This post is for educational purposes only ; it is not an investment advice. • 𝐎𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐑𝐃 • Email: [email protected] • LinkedIn: / olivierbossard • Twitter: @olivier_bossard ( / olivier_bossard ) • Facebook: Olivier Bossard ( / olivier.bossard.hec ) • HEC: https://www.hec.edu/Faculty-Research/...
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