It’s been a life of hacks for Dr. Adam Back, the CEO and co-founder of Blockstream. One of the few people quoted on the Bitcoin Whitepaper, hacking highlights of Back’s life are brought to life in the latest animated Crypto Story from Cointelegraph’s video team. Over a game of Jenga in a park, Back told Cointelegraph that he’s always had a “kind of security mindset.” From his days as a student, he tinkered with door codes, pin pads and locks, testing out code and gaining access to places he “wasn’t supposed to have access to.” Back talks through the creation …

All revolutions have their dogmas, and the cryptocurrency/blockchain insurgency is no different. It’s an article of faith among crypto adherents that decentralization will solve many of society’s ills, including the problem of governance. Vili Lehdonvirta — an Oxford University social scientist, book author, and former software developer — disagrees. “The underlying technology will change and it’s already changing,” he told Cointelegraph last week. “It’s becoming less blockchain-like, less like the original idea of a trustless system,” especially after the Ethereum Merge, where corporate-like ‘staking’ entities will be needed to “uphold the integrity of the chain,” in his view. Indeed, crypto …

“DAOs are very powerful token-based coordination mechanism that any person now can wield outside of the legacy financial system”, said Silke Noa, core-member of the AssangeDAO, which recently raised $53 million in support of Wikileak's founder, Julian Assange. According to Noa, the fundraising campaign was "a huge success" that showed how the power of a DAO can have an impact on political and social issues. The DAO mechanism allowed anyone willing to support Assange's to make a donation in ETH and become a member of the organization. In exchange, AssangeDAO members received a proportional amount of governance tokens, JUSTICE, which …

It’s the classic Anonymous modus operandi: a monologue worthy of a super villain, a perceived attack on an individual right or public good, some guy in a Guy Fawkes mask, and a whole lot of fizzbang-wowie video effects and voice distortion. But as the hacktivist collective takes aim at a new target in Elon Musk, the latest “expect us” threat prompts the question: who cares? Yesterday, a video purportedly from the Anonymous collective warned that there is now a joint intelligence working against him: Oh fuckhttps://t.co/f8A4baYgWU — Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) June 5, 2021 The monologue was meandering, noting that “your …

Satoshi Nakamoto announced the Bitcoin whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list on Halloween 2008. It could be the case that this was a meaningless coincidence, but when we take into account the meticulous planning behind Bitcoin’s launch party, the chosen date begins to take on more significance. Halloween is the carnival time, a ritual day when one can pretend to be someone or something else, whether a comic book superhero like Batman or Superman, or another eternally popular choice for Halloween, a Ghost — a spirit, much like Satoshi, that is neither dead nor alive. The carnival tradition goes back …

An anonymous post on the Cypherpunks mailing list from 21 years ago discusses the idea of “ecash,” and the speculation in the crypto community is that it might belong to a pre-Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto. “Cypherpunk” refers to a movement that emerged in the 1980s advocating cryptography and other privacy-enhancing technologies as tools for promoting social change. Many of the early Bitcoin supporters were part of the Cypherpunks mailing list, including Adam Back, Hal Finney, and Nick Szabo. We do not know with any certainty whether Satoshi Nakamoto was ever part of the forum, but he surely would have been familiar …

Jameson Lopp — a crypto industry figure and self-proclaimed professional cypherpunk — described Bitcoin (BTC) as the first step in a broader transition to an anarcho-capitalist society. Lopp’s comments were made in an interview on the Stephan Livera Podcast, published Dec. 29. According to Lopp, Bitcoin is an experiment that — if successful — could make the transition to an anarcho-capitalist society possible: “I believe that Bitcoin is a very interesting experiment that if is successful in the long run could not only revolutionize money, but revolutionize how we think about governance.” Lopp explains further that a “more self-sovereign, anarcho-capitalist …