Bitcoin, the star cryptocurrency, has a punk past and cultural effects that, with its massiveness, build an influential global movement every day.
Bitcoin - the cryptocurrency that spreads in price and popularity, and the financial status quo of the world defenestrates by word of mouth and perhaps creeps up inside - is an antisystemic invention of a vanished utopian little group: The Cypherpunks.
We are talking about a countercultural reaction, like that of those American writers of the 1950s who forged the beat movement, the ideological basis of the hippie phenomenon.
It was at the end of the 1990s when the digital revolution and its incipient reach to the masses gave reason to unruly young people, with minds as privileged as they were brave, to imagine an onslaught against the instituted that today is already beginning to manifest itself in a cultural key, with speech, aesthetics and visible imprint.
Those pioneers were anarchists who did not deny capitalism as a mode of human economic organization, but they did abhor all corporate or state intervention. Consequently, they exalted individual freedom as the highest standard and placed it as the north of their actions. None other than Julian Assange - the later creator of WikiLeaks - was among them.
In this ideological kit, cryptography came to be thought of as the technical guarantee for the protection of personal freedom.
In the face of the avalanche of vigilant elements that the computerization of society implied, the cypherpunks concentrated on finding a way to protect data and individual actions so that they would be unsafe by states and corporations.
During the following decade, at the beginning of this millennium, the North American real estate crisis arrived. In 2007, many traditional banks failed, mortgages became unsustainable, interest rates skyrocketed, and the economy cooled. It was a blast of a gigantic magnitude.
In short: cypherpunks, cryptography and the explosion of the american real estate bubble made possible Bitcoin, the utopian dream of the elimination of financial mediators.
This is how in 2008 an unknown person, Satoshi Nakamoto, who was never known who he was but who was supposed to be a group of people, sent a message to almost a hundred cryptographers around the world to study his project through the specialized forum metzdowd.com.
Satoshi attached a founding letter (his famous “White Paper”) where he explained that he had created an economic system based on user-to-user exchange, anchored in a deregulated currency, which protects the privacy of holders through a cryptography system of extreme security (Blockchain) and that records all operations in an inviolable accounting book audited by community users, who, in turn, generate assets in that currency by validating such transactions (they are called "Miners") .
Following the message from the hidden creator, one of the recipients downloaded the proposed software and agreed to create a program to store the coin. It was Hal Finney, a libertarian developer and staunch defender of cypherpunks notions, who until his death vowed not to be Nakamoto himself.
Thus was born the first virtual wallet. And Nakamoto sent him 10 bitcoins. The economic system that banks fear today because it leaves them out of business had materialized.
Bitcoiner speech is romantic. Well, he assumes for himself the epic: a creative crusade for a world without intermediaries, for the decentralization of the economy, the fall of the great financial empires, the possibility of an internationalist exchange of assets without restrictions and for individual privacy from the transnational eye algorithmic (Big Data) that sees everything.
Such a paradigm, spreading in number of people, had to necessarily generate a subculture, which radiated this worldview, spreading the cyberpunk idea of Satoshi Nakamoto in a vehement way.
But for Bitcoin to succeed and stabilize, it must still be assumed as a tool for the exchange of goods and services. Today its volatility prevents it. That is why the “Satoshi Boys” (convinced bitcoiners) applaud every non-speculative transaction. End... or Beginning.
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