Hello, World!

I am writing to you this evening, as a random guy on the internet, a shitposter, using a crypto wallet as a sign-in on a decentralized platform, being able to use any name I wish to use. You have no idea who I actually am, and that is a beautiful thing. The only thing you know is that everything I post after this, if anything, is the same person.

Although I do not like to share much about myself, I feel a little bit of background is necessary. I am a man who grew up in a different time and world than what we have today. As I was growing up, other kids were worried about who their next boyfriend/girlfriend would be, how to climb the social ladder, and getting good enough grades to make their parents happy and go to college. I, however, grew up online in a world that lasted for a brief amount of time and was the most beautiful place to ever exist.

The world that I would call home, is one where you can be whoever you want, do whatever you want, and information was endless. No matter what you wanted to learn about, the information was there and readily available, with a community behind it you can talk with. Some of you may have experienced something similar, although I am sure you are aware and have seen that some things are not allowed to be discussed in current days. In the world I call home if you weren’t allowed to do it or talk about it, everyone did it and there were no repercussions for it. We were free.

As I was growing up I knew this was a secret world, a world that had an expiration date, a world that most other people would not be interested in. Although, when I stumbled across Bitcoin and the idea of crypto in 2009, I realized there was more to this world than I had imagined. Like many people in the early days of bitcoin, I was amazed by the idea of anonymous currency, taking down the banks, and buying drugs online. Many of you may say right away that bitcoin is not anonymous, but I would argue that it was at the start.

Let me take you back to the early days of bitcoin before everyone knew what it was, and whenever you told someone about it they chalked it up as another weird crazy tech fad. In the early days, you could easily mine a few bitcoin every day from a standard computer with a graphics card. You could leave your computer running all the time, generate bitcoin from your processing power, and use it to buy stuff online without an identity attached to it. THIS was where people really got excited, and like all good things, it came to an end.

In the early days, there were no crypto exchanges, there were IRC chat rooms. If you wanted to buy bitcoin the common practice was to find someone online, get a money order, send them the details and cross your fingers they sent you Bitcoin. Over time, exchanges came into play, exchanges went under, and we were introduced to the current world of having to attach your identity to an exchange in order to be allowed to buy Bitcoin. Around this same time, is when the cyber laws started to crack down and people started to go to prison for what they did or said online.

At this point in time, there was a divide in the community. Many people looked at Bitcoin as a good investment and provided their identity, and others looked at it as one of the last hopes of freedom in a post 9/11 world. I do not blame the investors, although this was never about money for me (although a very cool bonus), this was about being able to live in the place I always called home, a place of true freedom. As time went on, the people who saw the potential of what we could have slowly gone away. As the investors came in, the regulations came in, and the voices of the believers in a better future slowly went away.

Many people have the mentality that privacy is not a big deal, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Many people also are not familiar with where this all began. No one knows for a fact where this idea of freedom through technology, cryptocurrency, and everything else originally started from, although my belief is this journey began with the Cypherpunks in the early 1990s.

My life is currently dedicated, as it has been for a long time, to being free, to crypto, and to building a better future through technology. As time goes on, the world I call home goes further and further away, while at the same time having more and more potential to be somewhere we all call home. My future publications (if any), I assume will primarily fit within this world and the future I see. This future is still within grasp, we can still use technology to create a better world, and crypto plays a large factor in this. Some of us never left home.

To end this introduction, I will leave a few snippets of A Cypherpunk’s Manisto, as it will always play a large role in my life.

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” - Eric Hughes - March 9th, 1993 - A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

“We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech 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. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands 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 transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.” Eric Hughes - March 9th, 1993 - A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto