They were wrong about the dystopic effects that cryptography would have on society. I noticed this reading through their popular essays of the 90s. Ultimately every government, school, application, client, and server adopted cryptography and the internet went mainstream. Of course the cypherpunk ethos lives, but I wonder what we're wrong about, because I feel something in this regard. The motif of the archived cypherpunk mailing list is this:
They're very much like us, startlingly so, only with 80s and 90s lingo.
And so many of their problems then, they seem so trivial today. I think we're wrong about bitcoin L1 being the layer people use and interact with. Few will. And still fewer over time. Mainstream masses are not coming to bitcoin because they give a damn about privacy or decentralization. Look at the top 10 apps (spyware) on Apple's Appstore and tell me otherwise. They won't be maxis either. They'll be users. And they'll come because it speaks the language of the masses (tap, swipe, click) and because their own money becomes (on the x-axis of any given year) more volatile than bitcoin is. They won't understand how bitcoin works anymore than they do the car they drive, the Internet, or their television.
And that's fine.
But with this comes potential tradeoffs in terms of censorship resistance, and too, directionally centralizing forces. This is why it's so important to get Lightning right. We're at the point the internet was in the early 90s, where design patterns are critical. And I get frustrated seeing this fascination with messing about L1, trying to add forks, drivechains, vaults, covenants, and other junk it doesn't need. I mean fuck, I don't even know anyone with a Taproot address yet. All concerns need to move from BIPs to BOLTs.
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