Most cypherpunk resources focus on technology and skip the social layer. Big mistake. Technology alone rarely suffices. Communities and service providers are what make it actually usable.
Communities
The community layer runs in Signal groups….
(Not Telegram. Telegram isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default and treats its users like spyware. It’s not cypherpunk. A cypherpunk who organizes on Telegram — or Discord — is a placebo cypherpunk.)
…or on Signal, increasingly on SimpleX for metadata-sensitive things, and on Nostr for open discussions. People organize a biohacker meetup there. Raise Bitcoin for it without bank accounts — crowdfunding through btcpayserver, zaps, or via Satoshi tickets. They put together the talks themselves. And then that six-month conversation that follows every event, which is the real value of any gathering, keeps going in those same groups. This is what a parallel polis looks like from the inside. Today.
Communities matter because through them we find each other, help each other, test our ideas. Through communities we find suppliers for things we need, friends, people to do things with.
A community is also hard to quantify — if it’s properly cypherpunk, almost nobody outside it knows it exists. On GitHub you see stars. You see technology users in providers’ P&L statements. But a community is every discussion group, and you’re in dozens of them. Except a discussion group is rarely just about discussion.
Product and service providers
The other part of the social layer is service providers, and we talk about them far too little. As if those who provide services for money are somehow lesser — as if we’re afraid to speak well of companies because they’re commercial, primarily motivated by profit. It’s a strange bad habit.
Who actually operates in the cypherpunk world? Liberation.travel for residencies, non-CRS bank accounts, all the know-how around that. Proton for email and VPN. Silent.link for anonymous SIM cards. Bitrefill for gift cards (proxy merchant) and eSIMs. Hardware wallet manufacturers – Trezor. Swap operators. Individual OTC traders. Proxy merchants who buy what regulators made it impossible to buy and ship it to you.
The cypherpunk scene sometimes looks down on these people because “they want to charge fees.” That’s statist thinking sneaking back into cypherpunk practice. The unspoken assumption: services should be funded by taxes or volunteer labor, and a paid merchant is an inferior substitute. In a stateless society, private merchants are all you’ve got.
Payment as gratitude
Paying someone in crypto is a thank-you for what they did for you. Be grateful when you pay. Someone was there and solved your problem when you had it.
You want them to be there next time. The most reliable way to ensure that is to help them stay profitable. A service you depend on, whose provider can’t pay rent next quarter, is not a service you can rely on.
The market is the division of labor. These people can solve your problem better than you ever could, and you pay a fraction of what it would cost you to do it yourself — in time and stress. Meanwhile you earn well doing what comes naturally to you, because nobody else can quite do it the way you do. It cuts both ways.
Proxy merchants deserve particular recognition. They deal with first-realm (normie world) regulators so you don’t have to. They add privacy as a side effect. They can arrange things that would otherwise take months of paperwork, if you could manage it at all.
Commercial providers like Proton, Silent.link, Bitrefill, swap operators, and hardware wallet manufacturers aren’t perfect. You might disagree with some of their technical or product decisions, or with their politics (Proton sometimes kisses up to the EU). You can disagree with all of that and still want them to be profitable, because when they exist, the second realm is better than it would be without them.
(Another example: Proton does not take Monero, only on-chain Bitcoin. Still better privacy than a credit card in most cases. But because of the The law of cryptocurrency isomorphism it does not matter – you pay with whatever you want, they receive what they want. I built anypay.today to solve this problem – it’s a frontend that makes private payments with Lightning easy. Just scan the QR code and pay privately with a Lightning wallet).
To solve the “I want to pay for everything with my Lightning wallet” problem, I created a simple front-end. It’s called anypay.today and you add it to your phone’s homescreen as an app.
You scan any QR code (or paste a payment request) and pay with your Lightning wallet (great privacy and instant payment, no need to wait for confirmations) and you can pay anywhere.
Don’t be dogmatic. A parallel polis built only on volunteer work will collapse. A parallel polis with profitable merchants who make a living from it — that’s the one that survives.
In my novel Tamers of Entropy, the main characters are precisely those providers. That social layer, without which the technological one would make no sense. And yes, profitable entrepreneurs too. Worth reading 🙂
Tamers of Entropy (juraj&lisa)
Conclusion
Cypherpunk and crypto-anarchy aren’t just zero-knowledge proofs, anonymous electronic cash, anonymizing networks, and cool technology. They’re mostly people who understood what this strategy for expanding freedom is actually about — people who help each other, whether in communities or on a commercial basis.