CY8ERPUNKS

Timeline

Era 6 · 2005–2015

The cypherpunk payoff

  1. 2005

    Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

    (2005). Vinge's idea becomes a mass movement with a timeline attached.

  2. c. 2005

    Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    (2019, but describing this period). The definitive account of what happened to the WELL's promise.

  3. c. 2006

    Daniel Suarez, Daemon

    (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) — autonomous software seizing economic power. Widely ignored, very relevant now.

  4. 2008

    Bitcoin whitepaper

    (Oct 2008, "Satoshi Nakamoto"); The cypherpunk program actually ships — 16 years after Hughes's manifesto. Note the genesis block contains the Times headline about bank bailouts. Political statement in code.

  5. 2013

    Snowden disclosures

    (June 2013). The panopticon thesis confirmed at scale; the cypherpunk position vindicated and the crypto-anarchist position made mainstream-adjacent.

  6. c. 2014

    Ethereum (2013 whitepaper, 2015 launch)

    "Code is law" taken literally, with all the failure modes that implies (The DAO, 2016).