Jarrad Hope
Jarrad came to Bitcoin in early 2011 through agorism, counter-economics & crypto-anarchy, seeing that Bitcoin could operate a monetary policy in a hostile environment, he began to view public blockchains as a voluntary social order, one that didn’t depend on a monopoly of violence. From there he participated in early attempts to generalise the bitcoin script to advance institutional libertarianism, ultimately becoming an early contributor to Ethereum. While Jarrad advances privacy technologies through developing an e2e and p2p private messaging client & super app, Status, he realised that privacy technologies are not enough and now is advocating for self-sovereign crypto-networks, the realisation of a latent cypherpunk dream, the crypto-state.
Sessions
Crypto has spawned an entire industry. Today, we command $1T in capital with which to pursue the depoliticisation of money and the creation of a decentralised financial system. Fifteen years on, the political formula that underpinned crypto's rise – with its origins in libertarian, extropian, and cypherpunk ideals – remains largely unchanged. In the absence of political thought development, we remain unable to understand the true nature of blockchain-based orders. In this talk, Jarrad views crypto through the lens of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s political works and those of other elite theorists. By casting the space as a new centre of power, he hopes to shed light on who we are, and what our futures may hold.
We stand at the precipice and the end of the empire. From this will emerge political strains vying to define the next emergent era.
The original vision of crypto was to expand the space of freedom, rendering a parallel economic society free from the influence of state domination. Gradually our community was infiltrated by statists and scammers who clouded that vision.
States will react with force by combining the IRS with the CIA, increasingly unmasking their authoritarian tendency as we raise the stakes. For inevitably, cybermoney controlled by markets will transcend fiat money issued by states. The high priority is to step up our game and start moving towards the realization of this eventuality.
We must get back on track, and formulate a paradigm that can enable us to unlock the original promise still latent within this tech. But still important questions remain on metaphysics, philosophy, strategy, and tactics. This panel will discuss the core heart of our movement- its vision.