Practicing Cypherpunk: Privacy, Peer-to-Peer, and Staying Free with Bitcoin | BTC Prague 2025 Panel

At the BTC Prague stage, we explored what it truly means to live as a cypherpunk today — not as a fringe ideology, but as a practical, personal strategy for freedom. From cryptography to Bitcoin, the tools are here. The only question is whether you have the courage to use them.

The People Who Became Ungovernable

I’ve been reading lately about the people of Zomia — a region in Southeast Asia roughly the size of Europe — who have spent over 2,000 years developing strategies to avoid state capture, slavery, and excessive taxation. They didn’t need to change the world around them. They simply adapted, traded when it was safe, and disappeared when it wasn’t. That idea resonates deeply with me when I think about cypherpunk philosophy.

We are not growing carrots in the hills. We live on the internet. But the strategy is the same: become harder to capture, harder to control, and harder to coerce — not through violence, but through technology.

The Tools Are Already Here

The original cypherpunks had a clear mission: build technology that empowers the individual. And over the past few decades, we’ve largely succeeded. We have secure communication through tools like Signal. We have digital cash through Bitcoin. Cryptography has moved from something people had to legally fight for — the early PGP developers nearly went to jail — into everyday life.

As AI and large language models grow more powerful, more people will understand why keeping your data close matters. Right now, corporations may know more about you than you know about yourself, and they are using that data to direct your behavior. That’s not abstract. That’s happening now.

What Crypto Anarchy Actually Means

Anarchy comes from the Greek — “an” meaning without, “archon” meaning rulers. It simply describes a system without coercion. Most of us already live that way toward each other. We don’t steal from our neighbors. We live peacefully. Crypto anarchy — or what we might more comfortably call voluntaryism — uses cryptography to extend that principle into the digital realm.

What I find liberating about this philosophy is that it doesn’t require convincing the whole world. You don’t need to win an election. You don’t need a revolution. You just need to interact with like-minded people and use the tools available to you today.

Privacy Is Not for Criminals — It’s for Humans

One of the most important things I can say is this: no privacy, no freedom. Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. It’s about being able to develop as a person. Every time you have a hierarchy, it is prone to abuse. We saw it during the pandemic. We saw it under the USSR. When social pain is applied to anyone who questions the accepted line, you need the ability to think, experiment, and speak without being destroyed for it.

I wear a mask and maintain a separate Bitcoin identity partly to protect myself from AI and data harvesting, but also because your physical body is the only thing that can go to jail. Separating some of your identity and your economic activity from your physical self is not paranoia — it’s prudence. Conditions can change fast. A society that feels free today can turn dystopian quickly.

Resistance Is the Foundation

Any security technology — encryption, Bitcoin, even a safe deposit box — only works if you are willing to resist an attacker. Resistance is axiomatic. If someone comes with a wrench and you hand over your seed phrase, no cryptography can save you. If you keep holding fiat while inflation destroys your savings, Bitcoin cannot help you either.

What cypherpunk technology has done is shift the game theory. It has decreased the cost of resistance and increased the cost of attack. You don’t have to use it — nobody will force you. But it is available to those with the