How Cypherpunks, Technoanarchists, and Ethereum Build Post-State Futures - mmlado.eth

GM. A friend once told me to buy a graphics card to run a program that created monetary value. I wasn't new to distributed computing. Think set you at home. But this was different.

2011 Bitcoin mining. I tinkered. sold BTC on shady IRC chats via PayPal for 10 to 20 bucks a coin and cashed out my last coins in 2013 when BTC was at around 100 bucks that this was at my fiance's suggestion. It's a tidy profit. Oops, sorry.

Uh she said we bought coal for the winter. First, I warm my room with GPU heat. Second, with the coal. Third, I warmed up to the idea of a decentralized future. No turning back.

In 2017, I mined again, this time, Ethereum. Programmable money blew my mind. I sold for profit, but the real win was the rabbit hole. Fast forward to 2019. Work handed me a crypto wallet project.

Turns out I was the only one who could decode the cryptic crypto thingy. I dove into cryptography consensus mechanism and block blockchain fundamentals. Hooked again. I joined ETH Belgrade as a speaker in 2023 and become a volunteer helping whenever the chaos needed me. Today I'm here to connect a few dots.

I dig into why I'm still here kneede in this weird wild blockchain world. Long before I read the manifesto, I I was already living the cipher funks. I encrypted emails. I encrypted my phone before it was the default. Experimented with custom ROMs.

Guid guarded my keys with UB keys. No clue or mo a move moment existed. Uh privacy wasn't a buzz word. It was muscle memory. But what even is privacy is the right to selectively share to control what parts of your identity you reveal and to whom.

Autonomy, boundaries, the digital equivalent of closing a door. Then I discovered them. Tim May, who skipped quoting to write the crypto anarchist manifesto, arguing Matt could replace institutions. Eric Hughes, who defined digital privacy in a cipher funk manifesto and launched the mailing list that organized a revolution. Phil Zimmerman who put strong crypto in everyone's hands via PGP because privacy is right.

Their work isn't history. It's tooling. Protons PGP guts graphin OS on my phone. Ubiki guarding my keys. Cipher punks don't die, they compile.

Anarchy isn't lawlessness. It's a system where we write the rules. Technology doesn't just enable this. It demands it. The centralization is the technist lifeblood, spreading responsibility across nodes, resisting co-option by governments, and replacing hierarchies with voluntary coordination.

Programmable blockchains. They're not just infrastructure. They're immutable constitutions. Governance rules etched in code enforced by Matt, not intermediaries. Trust isn't granted.

It's provable. But this is this isn't about abstract protocols. It's a hands-on rebellion. Paying with cash to opt out of surveillance. End to end encryption to reclaim privacy.

sliding my phone camera because my hardware, my rules. When I worked on a client's hardware wallet, I realized securing keys isn't just an engineering. It's a political manifesto. Every line of code, every solder chip says, "This is mine. This is mine."

The future isn't built by institutions. is forged by people who code, solder, and vote with their own hands. Bitcoin taught me ownership isn't a privilege. It's a right. With just a sweet phrase, I held absolute control over my value.

It kept my identity private, hid my assets in plain sight, and let me transact without begging for permission. No bank could censor it. No institution could gatekeep it. But that was all it wanted to be, a base layer for money, static, predictable. I left.

I left because Bitcoin simplicity felt limiting. I craved novelty, experimentation, and the thrill of building beyond money. Ethereum was the spark. Suddenly, code could enforce trust. Smart contracts could replace intermediaries.

Yes, most still use it for money 2.0, but for someone who speaks its language, the potential is limitless. DeFi, Dows, NFTs, privacy tools. The list grows daily. Second, my BTC still stings when I see its price today.

But the real ROI wasn't the coins. It was a decentralized values I had absorbed along the way. Sell sovereignty, resistance to control, and the belief that systems should serve people, not the other way around. Bitcoin gave me freedom. Ethereum gave me cam.

It gave me a canvas. And while Bitcoin lead the match, build a forge, a lab where ideology meets code. But Bitcoin stayed the spark, a perfect unchanging base layer. Ethereum became the place to ask the hard questions. Can decentralized infrastructure replace institutions?

Spoiler, not yet, but we're building. A techno anarchist dreams of a world computer, a shared machine where anyone could deploy trustless apps. Ethereum delivered but lit limits. Scalability bottlenecks, choke throughput, driving fees so high they they become gatekeepers in disguise. Access had its own flow.

Payto play wasn't freedom. You needed ET just to use ET. Ethereum score wasn't broken, but it was unfinished. A monolith straining under its own ambition. So the system broke itself apart.

The end game specialized layers. Athereum core become the settlement layer. An anchoring security by layer 2s or rollups as they are also known took the strain of transactions. Modular upgrades turned scarcity into abandon abundance infinite scalability without sacrificing the decentralized bedrock. But access wasn't the only flow.

The account model was glass house. every balance transaction and pattern visible to or there is there there is where zero knowledge proves step stepped in zks let you let you prove a computation is valid without revealing its inputs zkavms are already here turning ethereum's transparency into selective opacity soon you'll violate ownership without exposing your holdings execute raised without leaking strategies. And then there was the pay to- win problem. Ethereum's latest upgrade fixed it. AP4337 lets any token pay gas fees.

No, no problem. Someone else can sponsor your action actions. Turning paytoplay into pay with anything. Ethereum isn't a product. It's a movement.

A living system rewriting its code, its own code. sharding, ZKPs, state trend. Each upgrade a step forward, a future where openness, scalability, and privacy aren't trade-offs, but defaults. The decentralized world computer isn't finished. It's alive.

And like a fire, it only grows when you when we all add fuel. Those aren't just governance tools. They are the tech monarch slab where social contract get compiled into smart contracts. The dream communities govern themselves bypassing hierarchies. The reality most are still prototypes crashing into edge cases like legal systems, incentive design, and human ambition.

Governments don't know what to do with Dows. So they shoehorn them into 20th century legal bucket. LLC's, corporations, trust. Suddenly experiment in self-governance became paperwork compliance. The revolution gets a CFO unbalanced economics power concentrates.

a few whales to the de facto board of directors. Dows meant to democratize control often replicate the very system they trying to replace. And when Dows hold votes turnout is often shockingly low and why a token holders prioritize price over protocol complexity. Governance proposals are dense, technical or poorly communicated. Incentive gaps.

Voting doesn't always reward participation or punish apathy. Low turnout isn't just a bug. It's a systemic risk. A tiny fraction can dictate dictate outcomes, turning the centralized decisions into plutoaucratic referendums. Here's the hack.

Forking is the immune system of the centralized governments. If Dows goes, if a DAO goes off the rails, communities can split, take the code and try again. No court rulings, no board votes, just a git clone and the manifesto. I voted on AIP AIP1. 76% of us said no.

This was for the arbitum network, their first proposal. The decision was already made. The vote just a rubber stamp for centralized teams road map. No grassroot movements, no pen debate, just a token holder pool to leg d leg d leg d leg d leg d leg leg d leg leg d leg leg d leg legitimize a decision that has already been made. Was it a failure?

Depends on your lens. The DAO didn't die. It learned that centralization isn't a checkbox. It's a process. Dows are the endgame.

They are they are the alpha software for self- sovereign communities. They they break they get wrecked by greed inertia or regulation. But as long as forking exist the technocracy's dream stays alive. Code is governance. Power to the people always better.

Now that cryptos reached a wider audience many see only number go up not the ideas we need blockchains big players with deep pockets could exploit this imagine a threat like I see you have a nice blockchain here it would be a shame if its value crashed tomorrow suddenly the centralization isn't just about resisting government it's about resisting economic caution from entities that treat protocols like poker chips. Bruce Shiner, hopefully I didn't butcher his name that much, once said, "Security always involves tradeoffs. VPNs, tour, end to encryption, tornado cache, and other tools protect me, sure, but they also protect criminals. That doesn't mean we surrender privacy. It means we choose our battles.

Using privacy tech doesn't imply guilt. It implies agency. We make tradeoffs daily. Last weekend, I paid for a coffee at 7 in the morning with cash. got 20 small bills, a stack of cash effectively back instead of four larger bills because the register didn't have big notes, big bag notes.

Swiping a card would been easier, faster, cleaner, but it would uh create a digital breadcrumb. Every ch every choice we make chips away at anonymity. Even even building this deck was a trade-off. Yes, it was written with an AI assistant. Not because I'm lazy.

I could ramble for days without one. But for brevity and clarity, sure, a must. The model I use remember me. It learned my voice, gave sharp, sharper answers. I could use the privacy first AI that forgets everything when I close it.

But it would have been slower. Blender, less me. I'm only human. I fumble privacy. Sometimes I prioritize convenience, but I keep my world settings as low as possible.

Minimal tracking, no biometrics, no centralized login. And here's a confession. I'm not building the tools I wish existed. I dreamt of them for years. privacy first protocols that centralize infrastructures system that protects users by default but I've chosen a different path family career obligations and the inertia of good enough solutions I spent my energy on client projects on code that pays the bills not on revolutionalizing privacy and now time is a luxury I can't afford But here's the thing.

It's not late for you. I'm asking you, the builders, to take what time I'm stumbled through and run further to plant trees under whose shade you may never sit. Because the sport state future isn't about any one person. It's about all of us writing code, forking protocols, and making trade-offs that tip the balance toward freedom because cipher punks write code. Back in the day when my crypto story began, I never imagined I st I imagined I stand here asking you to build the future.

But here we are. Build like the future depends on you because it does. Ask yourself, do your tools expand human agency or replicate or hierarchies? Do they guard privacy by default or demand trust in a centralized systems? Write it down.

Share what you will build in the AT Bgrade Discord. Let's crowdsource a road map for freedom. Act now. Install one of the privacy protecting apps tonight. Scan this QR code from uh uh for my recommendations.

Tools I vetted, tested and used daily. The list will grow. Start small. Take one step then build on it. And never give privacy away easily.

Every time you trade it for convenience, ask is this price worth it? The post future isn't a revolution. It's a thousand incremental choices. You're not just coding future features. You're writing freedoms because in the end, the future belongs to those who code it.

Thank you. We have some questions now. Now is the time.

Oh yeah, there is one.

Uh thank you for the speech. Uh it looks like uh blockchains uh transaction transparency uh clashes with privacy and uh things like tonal cash uh may be illegal like some lawsuits and so on and how exactly it can be solved I mean uh in in legal field

in legal field it's a question but it's always it has always been a Right. When uh the cippher punks came along and they uh were creating uh programs for encryption, it was illegal to use it. So they use different means. There were people who were going to uh jail because of it. Because in in the USA uh uh giving away to a foreign country encryption constitutes because encryption constitutes weapons weapons grade.

because of that. So even then it was illegal but they fight it. They fought it. So we should also fight for our privacy because the the governments will always uh try to get as many information as they can and there's like a analogy how many cameras make you feel safer and where is the limit when it jumps into uh into uh

surveillance

sorry my mind skips but yeah into something that the government can follow you everywhere because there's a limit and we have to fight for those limits to be uh where we would like them to be.

Uh but the question is uh that developers of all major blockchains uh do not even try to make them p private. I mean excluding Monero for instance or some but still Ethereum, Bitcoin and so on they are quite transparent and uh maybe you know if they have some plans at least to make them more private. Uh I don't know my hope is that ZK proofs will be able to work on that. So maybe not on the blockchain layer but with CK proofs you will be able just to prove something without revealing the information where it's coming from. So you might have uh your ERC tokens like in public like have it I was on one of the speeches today that they mentioned that where you could for example hide uh when you want to transact.

So some information public some private but I never I don't believe that it will be uh ever totally uh private like protected your privacy there there will be always some trade-offs.

Thank you.

Is there another question? Maybe we have time for one more.

Uh sorry. Okay. Uh so I wanted to ask you because uh over the years over the last couple years uh web 3 in general has had a pretty negative like time at the press. They have pretty negative uh media coverage because of certain bad actors, bad apples. Uh how do you see that improving and when do you see that improving and do you see that improving at all?

Uh, I don't see it improving because the media always tries to push things that are controversial like you won't hear about good things happening on the blockchain probably because it doesn't attract so many eyeballs. They are selling real estate for eyeballs. So they always have an incentive to uh put in the worst things there and I'm not seeing that it will change but uh the landscape is changing especially in the US where it now they are more crypto friendly now even uh grandma can buying her pension funds uh bitcoin soon so that will change and but this is that is also something I'm afraid of because uh not everyone is interested in privacy. We should try to create privacy first tools, make them simple and give it uh give that to people. But they usually people all will uh choose convenience uh and yeah there is no way really to protect them from themselves.

And this is where banks came in because I give them my money and they are responsible for it. With the blockchain, I'm responsible for everything I'm doing there.

Thank you.

If that is it. No more questions. Well, thank you very very much for doing this.

There is one more. Okay.

Uh yeah. Um you mentioned the ZK and zero knowledge in general like as one way. Um I would like to know your take on fully homorphic encryption.

I'm not yet there. I I'm kind understanding the theory around it but I didn't yet go into ZKPS to learn. I it's on my long-term plans to make some ZKP circuits and see how they work and explore them. But I I'm not good at that

because like um with the ZK proof you could for example have a ledger that stores the proofs of but you need to expose the inputs you still at some point if you want to query your own balance.

Yeah. or so it's it wouldn't make uh you cannot make a private ledger of financial transactions only relying on ZK. There needs to be some encryption at some point.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's why I was thinking

Mhm.