In A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, it is written:
"For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves."
I believe many who hold the Cypherpunk ethos today are deceiving themselves.
Flouting the law in public, when doing so has no benefit to yourself, is usually counterproductive.
The world of online supporters of liberty and privacy is heavily compromised by State Provocation Advocates and CypherQuixotes. I suspect many of them are agents provocateurs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur)
There is too much advocacy for flouting the law outside of the privacy that is afforded by strong encryption. Privacy was the primary driver of the Cypherpunk movement. Operating under your true name in full view of the public, government workers, or corporate employees was not something that the Cypherpunks worked to promote. Instead, they created software that allowed users to shield their activities from prying eyes.
The US government attempted to restrict the publication of encryption code. Some individual Cypherpunks took the calculated risk of wearing T-shirts that violated the law in order to challenge the constitutionality of those laws. They reasoned that the laws would probably not hold up in court. This turned out to be correct, when the US Federal courts ruled that code is speech.
The Cypherpunks did not foolishly violate the law at random. Instead, they put pressure on the law in order to get it reversed. They did not want the use of privacy tech to require flouting the law in public. Such requirements are burdensome to users and disincentivize them from using encryption.
Cypherpunks won the legal battle for their right to publish code, but the same freedom does not apply to running code. Many people have been thrown in jail for the crime of running code. The code often involves encryption, but users are in jail due to the aspects of their computing activities that were not encrypted.
Permissionless decentralized networks should avoid requiring users to flout the law in public in order to participate. Networks with such requirements will struggle to achieve or maintain widespread use.
In A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, it says, "We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write." But many privacy advocates do care if others don't approve of the code we run on publicly accessible servers, because running certain code in full view of the public can severely endanger our lives, liberty, and property.