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Well this is the thing I've been thinking about: Rosenberg expected full out attack from the feds, but maybe the more devastating attack is what we are seeing: regulatory wishy washiness, choking onramps and offramps, irregular prosecution where some people occasionally get very scary sentences, but most do not.
I don't think we are free to transact: many aspects of a trade are made very difficult at the moment.
many aspects of a trade are made very difficult at the moment
How inherent to the technology is that, as opposed to being a result of people not wanting to take the tradeoffs?
My understanding is that you can buy pretty much whatever illicit material you want over the internet and it seems like transactions to people in sanctioned countries are trivially easy to pull off.
But I think I'm making the argument that there is a very big difference between possible and common. I think that we have all felt okay about our current level of oppression, but the reality is that many of us aren't using these free markets. Nor are we willing to extend ourselves enough to do so. It's easier to follow the channels that are permissioned and surveilled. And that's where a lot of the earlier cypherpunks maybe got it wrong: they thought there would be overt strong repression, when the government opted for inconvenience.
No disagreement on those points
We won't really know if the free internet has won, until it is fully subject to attack. It seems like we're able to transact freely.