Ryan Lackey
Ryan discovered the cypherpunks mailing list as a young teenager in the early 1990s, telephoned NSA to order the NCSC Rainbow Series of books, and became a true believer in cryptoanarchy and the power of cryptography to stand up to nation-states and other oppressors. He’s worked on projects and companies involving Chaumian digital cash systems, offshore data havens in the North Sea, seasteading, uncensorable hosting technologies, remote attestation-based tamperproof cloud computing, and now cryptocurrency insurance infrastructure. He is currently the Chief Security Officer of Evertas Insurance and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Sessions
Cypherpunks and allies want a new world of finance and technology — individual freedom, non-violence, permissionless innovation, and human flourishing. Replacing current systems (governments built for the world of the past, complex IT systems built with layer of layer of unmaintainable patches and spaghetti, and the omnipresent fear that those more willing to initiate force against those less powerful can impose their will) is desirable, and this weekend we’ve discussed a lot about what this world will be like, and why it is needed.
In order to remake the world as we would like it, we have to make some substantial contributions as technologists, activists, and supporters to solve some of the obvious and major roadblocks to broad adoption.
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.