• John Perry Barlow published the "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996 to defend the rights of netizens by releasing software without the need for government permission or restrictions.
• In 1993, Eric Hughes published the Cypherpunk Manifesto, and in 1988, Timothy May published the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto, advocating for privacy tools and their independence.
• In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper on the Cypherpunks mailing list, which was the first example of a truly independent and decentralized organization.
• Over the past 25 years, corporate internet has emerged, and governments have used global information systems for surveillance and control.
• These early visionaries predicted the future development of the internet and urged the adoption of privacy and resistance technologies.
• Bitcoin is the first independent and decentralized organization, marking the beginning of a social and economic revolution.
The cypherpunk ideal is not about doing whatever you want freely, so the cypherpunk ideal is about freedom of speech, as Hughes wrote, it is also about open-source code, it is also about freely releasing tools for everyone to use to protect their speech rights or privacy rights, so it's not about companies being able to trade secrets without regulation, but about releasing code as a public good to the world, which is an important part of cypherpunk.
Blockchain doesn't do well in many aspects, they are expensive and inefficient, but one thing they do well is that they can give power and agency back to individuals who would otherwise rely entirely on companies for online transactions, and this is a space worth fighting for.