Bitcoin comes from the cypherpunk movement, which was basically a group of autists who actually understood cryptography, and understood that privacy is the most important human right. PERIOD.

They also understood that for the first time in history they didn't have to ask for permission to build anything. Code spreads faster than any speech in history, and is harder to censor than any speech in history.

Code = speech but with actual teeth because once its deployed on enough nodes good fucking luck stopping it.

Governments can ban it, governments can put certain individuals in jail, or murder them, but they can't stop the movement.

Cypherpunks understood something normies still dont get: cryptography fundamentally shifts power balance, because math doesnt care about your monopoly on violence.

You can't legislate away elliptic curves, you can't subpoena SHA-256 preimages you can't arrest prime numbers (though NSA tried with export controls on "munitions" lmao)

The "digital gold" narrative is midwit cope Bitcoin isn't trying to be gold its trying to be an uncensorable final settlement layer for value transfer.

Gold has $10T market cap because its hard to confiscate; Bitcoin has potential for way more because its impossible to confiscate if you do it right.

Normies complain that "toxic" bitcoiners are against the state... Yeah no shit we're against the state! The state is fundamentally incompatible with freedom.

Monarchies were more free than modern states.

The state needs money to fund wars, welfare, surveillance apparatus and an entire parasitic bureaucracy that produces negative value (every government employee is net drain on productive economy, prove me wrong protip: you can't)

Fiat is just state violence with extra steps

Cypherpunks understood: trusted third party = security hole = attack vector = single point of failure

Every system with trusted intermediary eventually gets captured by state or becomes state itself.

If you do your research, can you truly tell where the line between silicon valley Big Tech companies and the state ends?

No line exists, they're same entity, different departments.

Google/Facebook/Amazon = surveillance apparatus with better UX than NSA (Snowden docs proved NSA literally plugs into their data centers via PRISM, but normies memory-holed it in like 6 months because goldfish attention span, did you see what the Kardashians did omg)

Cypherpunks saw this coming in the 90s (read the manifestos they're all public, Hal Finney Tim May, Eric Hughes, these guys were 30+ years ahead)

Every major human rights advance was "criminal" at the time: hiding Jews in Nazi Germany, running underground railroad, Tiananmen Square protestor, Snowden leaking NSA docs, Ross Ulbricht creating Silk Road.

Ross Ulbricht got double life + 40 years no parole for running a website (literally just code on server) while actual murderers get 15-25 and serve 8 with good behavior.

SBF was in the club (parents Stanford law professors, donated to Biden, testified to Congress, on cover of Forbes) → slap on wrist (Sailer's law: state refuses to enforce rules against actual criminals but harshly punishes technical violations by dissidents)

Ross was outside the club (created actual free market with a reputation system, no KYC, no permission) → example made

Yes bitcoin is used by criminals. Criminals whose biggest crime is non-compliance with a demon