Thread by @PelleB

1. Many people entered the crypto and decentralization space over the last couple of years because

- it’s cool
- want to get rich
- I can use it against people nice people like us don’t like

2. They’ve missed the fundamental reasonings why crypto and decentralization is necessary and why we started this in the first place

3. Early 90s the US had just won the Cold War. It acted with a incredible arrogance externally but also internally.
Strong crypto like I use to connect to the twitter server now was illegal to export without a weapons export license.

4. The #cypherpunks which was mainly a group of libertarian and AnCap nerds started fighting against this. To stop censorship and the centralized control of a single world government.

5. As a movement we succeeded in the first crypto wars by finally allowing future people like you to not be spied on, regardless of who you are en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wa…

6. Censorship is not just about speech though. Money and trade is even more under attack nowadays.

An entire dark NGO called the FATF was started by the OECD to do just that on a global scale and has forced even the poorest govts to comply against the benefit of their citizens

7. The hard thing about freedom of speech and trade is that you have to accept both speech and trade you don’t like.

True liberty is about allowing people to say and do dumb shit.

8. Now like always most people feel they belong to one side. The good side.
Truth is politicians do bad shit regardless what side they are on.

9. For young democratic millennials today it may be hard to understand that the crypto wars were mostly fought against the democratic government of Bill Clinton

We continued to fight against it under W, Obama and Trump. And whoever the idiotic president is wherever we live.

10. Decentralization is not about a good side or a bad side.

It’s about making sure that no side no matter how good or bad censor the speech or actions of others.

11. So like many old cypherpunks I also shudder at all of this back and forth from both sides trying to censor each other using decentralized pressure on centralized authorities.
We are probably even more worried by people in the crypto community join in the frenzy.

12. The only decentralized solution to speech you don’t like is to block, to mute, to argue loudly.

While absolutely permissible in a free market, censorship by large privately owned services gives more power to centralized services short term.

13. Ironically this may be the real downfall of centralized services as decentralized services finally can solve real pain points of real people (nice or not)

14. Just realized maybe the arrogance of the US government in the early 90s is exactly the same as the arrogance of today’s Web 2.0 empires. We won. The rest of you just shut up.

It is our job not to shut them up, but make them irrelevant. Like they did with old media.