“We cannot expect governments,
corporations, or other large, face-
less organizations to grant us pri-
vacy out of their beneficence. It is
to their advantage to speak to us,
and we should expect that they will
speak. To try to prevent their spe-
ech is to fight against the realities
of information. Information does
not just want to be free, it longs to
be free. Information expands to fill
the available storage space. Infor-
mation is Rumor’s younger, stronger
cousin; Information is fleeter of foot,
has more eyes, knows more, and un-
derstands less than Rumor.
We must defend our own privacy
if we expect to have any. We must
come together and create systems
which allow anonymous transac-
tions to take place. People have
been defending their own privacy
for centuries with whispers, dark-
ness, envelopes, closed doors, se-
cret handshakes and couriers. The
technologies of the past did not al-
low for strong privacy, but electro-
nic technologies do. We the Cypher-
punks are dedicated to building
anonymous systems. We are defen-
ding our privacy with cryptography,
with anonymous mail forwarding
systems, with digital signatures and
with electronic money.”
Well, what does that mean? Even tho-
ugh the Blockchain technology in its
contemporary form is encompassing
much more than the original manifesto,
it illustrates that Blockchain is not just a
technology. Anyone evangelizing Block-
chain as a platform is missing the entire
point
—
it is inherently a social move-
ment. It’s value is built upon societal ad-
option of a “protocol” without any one
single person able to alter it without the
network’s approval. It is owned by the
people in an unprecedented way. That is
all very abstract, so to really understand
the difference, let me compare it to other
“trending” technologies — like AI.
My friends and I have always been de-
eply interested in figuring out which
technologies we thought would push
humanity forward, so when I decided
to devote my future to this industry and
its mission, I was naturally questioned
about how it could possibly be more im-
portant than other frontier technologies
like AI and gene-editing. I had a tough
time answering that question, until I
realized the question itself is funda-
mentally misleading. Trying to compare
Blockchain with AI in terms of societal
impact is like trying to compare demo-
cracy with the steam engine:
One is a shift in a cultural paradigm
upon which a society is organized, whe-
reas the other is a change in what a so-
ciety is even capable of doing.
Different, somewhat parallel, frames of
thought
—
none particularly more im-
portant than the other.
Megaphone