An industry that dreamed of being above politics has become synonymous with self-dealing
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By sigwinch 2025-05-1811:22 The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published.
I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.
Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity. We’ve seen it time and time again and fail to learn or understand the lessons.
I’m a child of the 90s. The exuberant promise of the wonders of free access to information really fell short and transformed the world in odious ways. We gave access to a vast swath of human knowledge, but instead consume gambling, porn and think the world is flat.
Crypto is no different. We created a means to transfer wealth like the modern financial system without any controls… and shocking… we created a fertile environment for cons and criminals of all stripes to operate at greater scale than ever before.
By throw0101b 2025-05-1814:01 > Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity.
See Penny Arcade comic from 2004:
* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
By topranks 2025-05-198:08 Further crypto is slower, less efficient and a way less convenient to use than centralised systems powered by traditional databases.
So while the regular internet might be host to Wikipedia as well as social media, the ONLY people switching to crypto payments are those who are willing to take the hit to evade the authorities.
By martin-t 2025-05-1812:30 Because the people who control the narrative are _redistributors_, not _builders_.
Broadly speaking, I divide people into builders and redistributors according to their primary approach to life - not just their job but their belief system - both how they seek to keep themselves fed and what they enjoy doing.
The thing is, builders are driven by the need to create and that's what occupied most of their time and energy. Sure, they publish their stuff but that's not their primary driver.
Then redistributors notice what they've built and see ways to make money off of it. And because good advertising is way more effective at convincing people to give you their money than simply having a good product, in the end it's them who end up building the narrative because it's them who invest way more time into publicizing the thing.
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(Note I am not saying all redistributors are bad, there are plenty of honest and socially positive jobs which don't build stuff but have a positive outcome for everyone involved. But I feel like increasingly more and more of the population is preoccupied by how to make the most money with the least effort.
Maybe I need better terminology and split redistributors into two categories.)
I'm not so sure that cyberpunk is dead, it's just that Billy Idol has better things to do with his time than try to co-opt something his manager read about in WIRED. The broken-circuit-boards-and-leather NiN aesthetic lasted for so long that it can't really be revived, which is 100% fine. I think now that a ten year old laptop that can run Linux, tor, and i2p is worth $20 means that now is more cyberpunk than ever.
Maybe a better way to rephrase my point: money won and took over other sources of value. Technology became the biggest section of the economy.
Case in point: this site is called Hacker News and it’s run by a venture capital investment firm. Those two things (hacker/cyberpunk culture and VCs) would probably have seemed almost antithetical in the 90s.
By sigwinch 2025-05-1813:02 Your original point is clear. In the 90s, these technologies and movements did not mandate supplication to authority, which meant some area where punk could still breathe. And atrophied.
By trustsafe 2025-05-1813:10 I think money won some thousands of years before cyberpunk showed up.
Hippie and punk were really the same thing, with different haircuts. Both were useless beyond selling lifestyle.
"cyberpunk" always carried an aesthetic baggage that accomplished nothing, but there was still something there, and it is still there, if you know where to look. I think the deterioration of the political situation in the US and Europe has people dusting off their cyberpunk inclinations. I know that it has lit a fire under me.
By ggandv 2025-05-1813:22 I’m not so sure that’s a valid dichotomy. The cypherpunks were heavily anti-government libertarians and probably overlap a lot with the local VC crowd over a certain age. The cypherpunk I remember best was a horrible person who used to rant incessantly about gassing Jews on ba.foods and other usenet groups. To cast them as anti-capitalist altruists or even slightly left leaning is not very accurate.
By surgical_fire 2025-05-1812:23 > The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it
This is not 1995 anymore, when there was an air of naive optimism about technology, and everyone thought that would only be a force for progress and good.
When crypto was on the rise, many people warned against it. There were many who were skeptical.
Those who were building it were in on the grift. Gesturing to some shadowy cabal of people that subverted crypto into something it was not meant to be is just giving a pat on the head to people that were willingly building something very destructive for their own damn benefit.
"I was just summoning demons because they look cool, I didn't expect those evil cultists to sacrifice a child in a pentagram" is not a valid line of defense.
By lawrenceyan 2025-05-1815:021 reply Ideological capture is something that any system inevitably faces once it becomes large enough. But the point is to evolve and grow, not stagnate on a fixed concept.
Personally, I think Solana does the best at balancing the original cypherpunk ethos while ultimately driving towards the future with crypto being the rails for natively programmatic global commerce.
By lawrenceyan 2025-05-1823:51 The FTX collapse of 2022 was a blessing disguised as a curse. All of the VCs and speculators offloaded their SOL during the bear market.
You have to remember that for about a year and a half, everyone thought Solana was dead / doomed to fail.
> the media is largely dominated by institutional players
and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with
Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated.
How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local journalism and independent voices. We now have no local journalism and no independent voices that are staffed and budgeted for doing real, investigative journalism.
Now journalists say what their corporate parent tells them to say; the ones who refused were fired years ago. The ones who stuck around work really hard to obscure this fact because they're clinging to their jobs in a declining industry. We went from a press that was the envy of the world to a cartel of decaying shills. Either reform the industry and break up the monopolies or just terminate it and fire everyone.
Commerce subsidizes journalism. Or art. Or any other "hobby", where i do something, that feels right for me.
I have time on the side, because working for the man gives me the freedom to do things other than surviving.
Long lives commerce and capitalism.
By safety1st 2025-05-199:50 This comment obscures/deflects from the issue. The issue is not that journalism is commercial.
The issue is that journalism is monopolized. The industry was restructured into an anti-competitive cartel.
It is oligarchic now, not capitalistic (it is no longer a free market).
I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems.
Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.
These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.
I'm not sure the evolution you're describing is as much of a change as it might superficially appear to be. The modern crypto participants may look different than the original enthusiasts, but the philosophy of being free from authority and regulations is still 100% there. It's just that instead of it being about scrappy cypherpunk rebels, it's about billionaires who want to use their wealth to supplant governments and usher in a techno-feudalism future or whatever. Of course some folks are just in it for the get rich quick scams, but there is an obvious ideology around the cryptocurrency space today that is still anti-authority but for all the wrong reasons.
By topranks 2025-05-198:18 Yeah. It reveals the basic truth that if we have no government, laws or regulation we ultimately end up with the rich and powerful controlling things and doing what they want.
By topranks 2025-05-198:16 It’s the natural result of the technology’s original goal to be “unstoppable” and beyond regulation or laws.
Makes it a perfect place to run investment frauds, scams, Ponzi schemes and other activities that would be illegal in the regular financial sector. Also attracts criminals, tax evaders and money launderers.
Meanwhile it’s slow and cumbersome enough that anyone not seriously motivated to operate beyond the reach of the law stick with existing systems for convenience.
