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The making of Sapphirepunk
Recorded: July 10, 2025 Duration: 1:11:03Space Recording
Short Summary
Sapphirepunk emerges as a transformative project in the crypto landscape, aiming to redefine cypherpunk ideals through community engagement and collaboration. The discussion highlights a shift towards more positive narratives, with potential funding opportunities and partnerships on the horizon.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello, hello, Wastelander.
I sent you a speaker in, right?
So you should see it eventually.
Although with Twitter spaces you never know what happens. I see we are powered by PolarChain today.
So that's something.
But apparently not powered by Axis' ability to get people up to speak.
So for now, it's a monocast until everybody shows up or figures out how they can.
Maybe I should just rant on for an hour
and then quit and then that's it.
That's the making of Sapphirepunk, the new lore.
Let's see, maybe Wassim can join us as a speaker if I invite.
hey can you hear me naomi oh wow some somebody managed to join as a speaker yes
we were testing the ability and it has worked so yes it's a very it's very complicated technology.
It's a stochastic system.
It barely works.
Yeah, considering how many times it has failed me in the past,
I feel it must be very complex.
But, yeah, we figured it out.
Welcome, everybody, to this space which is dedicated to the making of Sapphire Punk as the title implies. And yeah I'm Naomi and I was roped into this. I never planned in my life to
be part of writing a manifesto but life just happens and you go with it and sometimes good
things come out of it and so I figured because we put out this manifesto,
and I think maybe some people have read it, some haven't,
but figured it'd be good to give some context on it.
The best way to do that, as far as I'm aware,
for crypto Twitter is to just host a space
or make some funny videos about it but yeah
we'll go with the first and then maybe we'll do the videos later um so yeah why would just do a
round of introductions and take it from there so yeah whatever you want to say and whatever
you think is important about yourself you may speak now. Hey, Waseem.
Yeah, hey everybody, I'm Waseem.
I also didn't ask to be involved in this project.
There's a funny story actually, which we should tell.
No, nobody, nobody was asked.
It just happened to everybody.
But we'll tell that story in a bit, maybe.
Yeah, I'm Waseem.
So I'm a writer, researcher.
I've been in and around this space for a very long time and this is not my first manifesto actually but it's the first one
that I've been involved in that has a reformist a purpose let's say The other ones are more artistic and more critical, whereas I see
this is more of a reformist project. And that's kind of what interested me in it, because
I don't really do that kind of thing very often anymore. So yeah, it's interesting to
see if there's something we can, more positive and constructive we can imagine out of the
wreckage of the present
yeah creative distraction right i think the problem is people just don't know when to
stop with the distractions but yeah they're trying to put something out there i didn't
know you wrote a manifesto before so you could have you would have been the only person to say something
like this isn't my first rodeo and it would have been true um there's this big trend missed
opportunity but there's a big trend in crypto of people's um bios saying uh really cringe things
like a 3x founder well maybe i can now write a 2x manifesto writer. I mean, more realistically, it would be 2x failed founder, but yeah, we can now.
Wastelander, how about yourself?
Well, now that I know you're a 2x manifesto writer, that answers my question, because
I've been reading so much of your stuff, you know, on your blog, it seems so I was curious,
because you said, yeah you had written
a manifesto before but maybe that implied it had been a bunch um i got into got into the space
overall uh 2020 i think like midway through the year is i was really interested in uh
i was really interested in how the technology overall could facilitate peer-to-peer mental
healthcare, peer-to-peer mental health supports at really local levels because I had a good deal
of experience with how reductive the healthcare systems in the states can be. So that's
everything from how things are taxonomized to how people are asked questions
about how they're doing uh just you know from the standpoint of different kinds of doctors
and professionals looking at a flow chart rather than trying to assess or just be curious about
people's lip subjectivity from from their point of view um So I was curious about actually trying to fund
some ideas that a friend of mine and myself had had.
And so I looked around a lot.
I think this was maybe before like DSI had taken off
to the extent that it has, the limited extent it has.
And I haven't really circled back around to that so far,
but I got really interested in this particular manifesto because others in the space had been pretty intriguing to me.
And then also, I was I was curious about everybody who's just more into looking past the really atomistic sides of crypto that tend to dominate the thought space,
right?
And therefore the imaginaries that propel how we even think about how to build things.
Yeah, since I've been put into this group chat with the other people here, and also
people like Paula, I've come across the term imaginary used as if anybody knew this
term and I was like okay I think I'm the stupid one because I do not know this term.
I'm glad you're making others feel the same way now.
Maybe this is a way that we can uh guilt trip crypto people into reading
some books i don't know if you can guilt trip culture people into anything i've tried many
times to make them feel shame and it has failed horrendously so i think it's too long of a word
to have as a hashtag on ct so at that level it'll be tough you could be like a four
times imaginary imaginer this would be a very good thing to put in your i don't know tinder
bio maybe see what happens but yeah um well i mean we all got... There's this concept going around Silicon Valley of the Imagineer.
I mean, maybe like, let's say, the heydays of Silicon Valley, not now.
And so, yeah, maybe we could just have an Imagineering department.
I mean, we are the Imagineering department.
I think I should ask my company if i can be the c i the chief imagineera
but yeah just the ci it's shorter who needs to be oh um but yeah uh and naomi i also got roped into
this somehow and i think this happened because sometimes on crypto twitter even though there's
all of this crazy noise and loads of um botted accounts that you should absolutely not trust and to engage too much with.
But I connected with some that were genuine.
And yeah, that's how I ended up starting on this.
I think the beginning of it was really that I went through notes I have made over the past two years.
And I realized there was a bit of a common thread and they all related to, well, broader cypherpunk culture.
Generally being unhappy with the state of affairs in crypto because I've been here for, well, six, seven years now.
And things haven't necessarily gotten better in all
ways so yeah just trying to understand that and then we all found our ways together and we had
a telegram chat which is not very like i know every c marxies will say you have to do this on signal, but yeah. So here we are, we have a Cypherpunk manifesto,
post-Cypherpunk.
It was initially called post-Cypherpunk
and then we changed it to Sapphirepunk.
Maybe, Wasim, you wanna share a little more
about Sapphires and why they are fitting?
Sure, maybe we can leave that bit
about the suitability of the phrase.
Maybe we can have that discussion in a minute.
Why don't I give the history of the word jumbling,
which led us to that moment.
So I guess everyone in the call is probably familiar
with cypherpunk, C-Y-P-H-E-R, itself a corruption of cyberpunk.
And so, yes, in the early 90s, there was a cypherpunks manifesto by Eric A. Hughes in 1993, imagining ways that one could use cryptography in the service of liberty and individual freedom.
But it was quite a kind of, let's say, atomized, yes, Wastelander used the phrase earlier, perspective.
And I think that even the title of that document betrays this.
If you look at the title closely, it says A, cypherpunks, as in apostrophe S anifesto, so that is singular, and it's possessive. So anyway,
that was the starting point. And at the so this phrase is now
kind of reentered the, let's say contemporary discourse as
desiderata, something desirable for networks like Ethereum to
set up ideals for it to
virtual ones for it to move towards or uh grasp at or steal valor from depending on your opinion
so at the ethereum cypherpunk congress by the web3 privacy now think tank in bangkok thailand last
year i gave a talk called sifr punk, S-I-F-R punk.
And Sifr is the Arabic word for the number zero.
That is the linguistic root of where both zero and cipher in the Western language come from through Latin and Greek and so on.
And then so I was looking at this as a possible kind of, let's say, epistemic break, as well as this simple kind of assolent word slip.
And I was poking at some of the uncomfortable realities, skeletons in the closet of the early days of Ethereum with that, for example, the DAO and the censorships and deletions which took place in order for Ethereum to reassert its moral authority.
So that was the cypherpunk part of the story.
There's another linguistic slip to sufferpunk, S-U-F-F-E-R, and that's Bitcoin,
because we all know that Bitcoin still uses the proof of work.
And the thing about proof of work is that it works and it works and it works until the end of time and it doesn't care about you so we are the suffering in a proof of works punk shall we say
and then okay so uh for those of you that don't know my work uh it is mostly critical and a lot
of people do ask if i could provide some kind of more constructive or positive ways, forwards or trajectories or
things, lines of sight we might want to explore. And so that's where Sapphire Punk came from.
So like at the same time I was developing the concepts of cypherpunk and sapphapunk,
I also just earmarked out sapphire punk as like just an under articulated proposal of some kind of positive post cypherpunk imaginary and i did
that first on stage in bangkok last year and then i developed further an article on my sub stack
this spring and it was around then that we all got added non-consensually to a group chat
and this conversation started about this particular um response to the cypherpunk
dream uh that ended up with it taking the sapphire punk name of this concept died
excavated but unpolished at the time let's say and maybe let's open up back to the the others
to wastelander and to naomi about like the discussion of how well Sapphire fits to this.
So I think that's actually quite an interesting one.
I would not frame it as non-consensual.
I would say I permissionlessly added people,
just to clarify this.
It's a joke.
It's a joke.
It's a joke, it's a joke.
I mean, most of the things we frame as permissionalizing crypto are also not consensual.
So yeah, anyway, but that is probably a whole other discussion.
It's not so wholesome.
But yeah, the SapphirePunk.
I mean, I admit I'm still not really deep into sapphires myself. So when I started working on this, so I've always been frustrated.
Well, not always.
When I started in crypto, I was actually optimistic and I had some motivation.
I was having fun and all of that.
And eventually maybe it's the force of capital, as the Marxists would say, or whatever else big force we can blame.
But things became less and less wholesome and more and more about money and everything seems to be about numbers and less about humans.
So kind of technology took a place that I found it shouldn't have.
I found it shouldn't have.
And cypherpunks also sometimes came across
as pretty not fun people to hang out with
because he would often be shamed
if you are not using certain things.
And yeah, there was this assumption that,
yeah, you know, just everybody should strive to be this way.
And if they're not, it's kind of their problem.
And I just didn't vibe much with that.
So when somebody reached out to me and asked if we wanted to think this forward
and maybe come up with something that's constructive instead of just saying,
okay, this sucks, then, yeah, I was in.
And I initially thought, like, post-Cypherpunk, at least in conversations,
people had an idea of what it could be.
Whereas if you say sapphirepunk, of course,
there is no real associations with that yet.
So I guess it's like post-cypherpunk
is like post-modernism, right?
People have somewhat of a connotation of it.
But the problem is, of course, as with post-modernism,
what comes after? Is it like post
postmodernism and we just continue forever? So, yeah. Yeah, that's my problem with the post.
It's an unbounded qualifier. So like all that can really, to me, it's kind of like a
swamp, epistemically speaking, where like all of the effluent from the present paradigm can leak to
and so just for me it's just a bit harder to keep it um in some kind of bounds of meaning even if
like sapphire punk has less of a conceptual connotation to us now than post cypherpunk does
the like i don't know like i also feel like when we had this conversation, the collaborate collaborative authoring of the document, that
it's always nicer to give people something rather than post
this or anti that, to kind of try to articulate, even if you
don't get all of the way there, and first go, give them some
kind of alternative, I'm not going to say the word imaginary
then because it seems like we're banned from saying that now.
Some alternative way of thinking about the thing that they would like to see in the world
shall we say um and so that's why um i tried to yeah for my part in these discussions tried to
steer us away from keeping the thing articulated as a post thing or an anti thing yeah wasteland Yeah, Wasteland, maybe any thoughts from your side on the name, on the evolution of this?
Yeah, I love the, you know, the kind of genesis in SIFIR, or SIFIR, like, like,
Wasim had said.
I think to me, like, there's sort of this, you know, hopefully like very epistemically open-ended lematic filter to it also.
Because yeah, it's not been used before, maybe it looks a bit odd.
So then that's inviting to people maybe that you are already interested in like the substantive things that you've, you know, shared or built or they know that you care about.
care about and then uh you know i think it can be kind of fun to play with sort of like the topology
of something like a diamond or a sapphire here where there's a lot of uh angles um at play there
are a lot of different points um and so it can be kind of uh enlivening you know via you just like
see it kind of like metaphorically in that way in the same sense that it makes more sense to think about people working together and
mutually supporting networks of you know care and this kind of thing um rather than networks
of extraction and you know domination and then you know the suffer punk kind of dynamic that
was seen had outlined so that's that's what came to mind for me like immediately and also like I had a bit of relief just in the fact that immediately I didn't have a bias around it and while like the you know the phrasing in
terms of post cypherpunk or like post x that always has like more direction for people I
I also agreed that it's always nice to give people a really fresh frame of reference.
And, you know, to me, like inevitably, like seeing decentralization from a social lens means that people can bring what they'd like to it as well.
Yeah, there's like kind of like a prism in terms of the manifesto through which people interpret things.
And there's going to be like tension between agents and a decentralized network.
So like, it's not like anything goes, but at the same time, it's very inviting for folks
with really different lived experiences that, you know, don't just vibe with the, you know,
like the capitalist kind of frame that just seems to dominate a lot of yeah a lot of everything these days you know
within and outside of crypto nice unfortunately so um but yeah i i just brought somebody up because i
have forgotten to say this earlier but if people have questions this is like an open space where
you can come up or if you don't want to speak you can just
put them in the comments and we'll take them from there so yeah welcome Irina to the stage
or maybe she just accidentally requested thank you but yeah it was by accident because every time
like my screen goes like yeah turns off of it I lose you guys so I'm just like touching the
phone constantly and I think I just like this take so I'm like here completely uh completely
unprepared it's a great discussion but I'm like happy to just listen thank you
uh no pressure well if you ever have another question, you know what to do.
Yeah, okay. But she made it, she paved the way for everybody else.
Yeah. And while people are working up their courage,
perhaps I can throw something else in, which is
materialist angle on cypherpunk, sapphirepunk, I'm sorry.
So the way that we think about sapphires you know as uh precious metals or precious uh minerals gems and so on we think of them as uh of a specific
like blue is the color that we think of actually sapphires come in a range of colors and that
betrays one of its most valuable characteristics which is not
necessarily its um material scarcity and preciousness uh but it's um how can i say
tunability has very um interesting optical characteristics and as a result uh sapphires are used as a very special lasing medium,
doped with titanium atoms for very special kinds of lasers,
optical parametric amplifiers and optical parametric generators,
titanium sapphire lasers.
They're tunable.
So by changing the characteristics of the
the lasing medium itself, which is like this crystal enclosure that we bounce light through,
we can change the wavelength of the light that comes out.
And that is not very many materials can do that.
And I know this because I used titanium, sapphire, OPAs and OPGs in my PhD,
which was in ultrafast photophysics.
So perhaps I've had sapphires on the brain this whole time.
Yeah, the only time I encountered light and lasers
was in high school, where we did the famous experiment
to see whether light was a wave or a particle.
Totally recommend people try and do that at home.
I think that's fun.
But yeah, I just pinned a picture I quickly found on Pinterest
where you can see the different colors of sapphires.
I think they look pretty.
I mean, I also think this is just a not very well researched thing, but crypto doesn't have a whole lot of beauty.
And maybe sapphires are also something, you know, it sparkles, it's pretty, it's beautiful.
You can do many things with them.
So I think we need more of them.
But yeah, I think I see more people requesting.
I'm just going to let them in that you can continue
your thoughts.
Let them in. I was gonna say it's also the rocks are very
beautiful in their rough form and the uncut form as well. Not
you know, you see the kind of ones online, the ones that go in
jewelry rings and stuff. They're cut and polished. They
obviously look very beautiful in a kind of crystalline, highly
ordered way. But there's also a lot of beauty in their roughness as well, their durability.
Yeah, I can just give maybe an explanation of imaginary since it kind of comes up quite a bit.
Maybe why is it so popular in crypto?
I mean, the term is, it's pretty old. The first person who used it
really is a guy called Anderson, this book about the construction of nation states, very postmodern
text, actually, 1983. It's probably one of the first real, it's like proto postmodern, you know,
he's basically saying the nation state is a construct, something that we would take for granted now, but at the time was seen as a very insightful major breakthrough. And then the other
person that it's associated with is Castioradis, which is, his reading is very similar. And then
the other person is Lacan, who has a different interpretation of it that people draw on,
has a different interpretation of it that people draw on,
which is he's the only one who argues that the imaginary is actually,
or he argues that the imaginary is something that's constructed from other people.
So the interesting thing about it is it forms part of your sense of identity,
but is formed through how you imagine other people expect you to behave and act and all that kind of thing.
But then the version that is popular in crypto comes from Charles Taylor. So Charles Taylor,
what's the book called again? I'll think of the name in a moment. But in Charles Taylor's work,
it's very much like a shared cognitive schema is the phrase that that's used. And the shared cognitive schema,
it's not about the, so what he's trying to do and what people are trying to do when they use it is
it's not a theory about the community. It's not trying to impose like a theory to explain what's
happening for like why people make certain decisions, et cetera, or why the structure
makes people act in certain ways. It's how people self-interpret themselves.
So that's sort of the imaginary as like an ethnographic concept,
which of course becomes quite attractive to people who are researching crypto.
So he has like the way he phrased it, it's like how the expectations we have of each other,
what counts as legitimate, how it goes on between you and your fellow people in the society
and all that kind of thing.
But then the real secret to it all is through the work of Lana Schwartz.
She writes this article in 2016 about Bitcoin's imaginaries, techno-economic, I think, or
techno-social imaginaries.
It's a long time since I read it.
But essentially, she argues that there's two imaginaries in Bitcoin, long time since i read it but essentially she argues
that there's two imaginaries in bitcoin infrastructural mutualism and digital metalism
so infrastructure mutualism is the we're building a neutral infrastructure which is going to be a
cash that you know digital cash that we can use very cypherpunk then that this is intention with
the the gold bug libertarian uh bitcoin uh what we would, I guess, today would consider
like Bitcoin maximism, the form that won out,
and then how this would eventually lead to tensions,
which turned out to be quite prescient.
And then that term has been used in,
it's become like a tradition of crypto academia.
So if you read any social science,
crypto academic work,
they have to mention imaginaries, because that's just being
established as like the historical way that you do crypto social science. And then that's crept
into the op ed pieces. So people like myself writing in CoinDesk back in the day would use
imaginaries for Lunar Punk and Cyberpunk. And then so that that's how it kind of crept in. So
it's a quirk of history. It's definitely not a term that I think you would generally be expected to know.
And it's kind of random that it became a popular term in crypto itself.
So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Let's also point out it's only popular in certain circles, right?
If you go to a Bitcoiner meetup, you'll probably not hear them talking about imaginers.
Yeah, I also feel like there's a separate entry point for this concept into these, like, let's say, adjacent discourses.
And I'm thinking about the place I hang out in Berlin, Trust, and some of the other kind of organizations that branched out with that.
Things like other internet and the thing that i run zero
excellent and um these are the kinds of words that we hear bandied around and i would say most
crypto adjacent spaces these are more kinds of like design architecture philosophy sort of um
an artist run and artist populated spaces um so i'd say best they're crypto adjacent so i feel like maybe there
was a both a movement like a endogenous one that paul's and time last paul's laying out
and also an exogenous one yeah it was like a a pincer movement you know like two different
groups and the name of the article just before i let someone else speak is um
just before I let someone else speak,
is a foundational article.
What was Bitcoin?
What will it be?
The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology.
So that's sort of the foundational text
of social science kind of crypto literature.
Okay, everybody add this to you to a read.
Hello, how's everyone doing? I've just come out of the very city.
Can you hear me all right? I'm outside the pub.
I was going to say we're going to get shill Solana now.
I'm not going to shill you Solana. No, of course not. I've just come from an institutional
event. And I'm having a
pint on the way home and listen to this this ontological meandering is cleansing my soul
after what I've just witnessed um but yeah I think um very much enjoyed the conversation
a few things jumped out at me I think the sapphire lensing thing that Rasim was talking
about has resonated a bit. I also worked on lasers and the tunability of the philosophy
is a nice hook. It feels a bit more pluralist. I feel like we just have extreme epistemologies in crypto.
We just dial up whatever it is to the max and find out where it goes. So what I liked
about the SapphirePunk thing is this kind of more human touch to it, which I think has been broadly missing out of the crypto zeitgeist
generally. We fell into a kind of hyper-technical, and I'm a tech nerd, right? I like seriously peppy shit, but I also think humans, you know, might have a place in all this.
And we've systematically sort of reduced the entire thing down to a very monetary tell-off, if you like.
The whole thing is about money, which is fine.
In fact, I think largely this is going to be the place where we we we see the end of that
game um and we tokenize everything it all gets absolutely ridiculous and we we sort of transcend
into some new way of looking at the world um but yeah it's it's interesting watching the sort of
two worlds collide at the moment i think think there's a kind of convergence happening.
And we just broke all-time highs,
and no one is going mad at all, which is weird.
I'm just going to leave that there.
Well, people don't feel things anymore.
So even an all-time high, it's not going to do much.
We're definitely tied, which is bullish.
I mean, it helps for working in crypto. not going to do much. We're demonized, which is bullish.
I mean, it helps for working in crypto.
But yeah,
since Dr. Nick just touched on the pluralist things, maybe we can talk
a little about the content of
the money faster itself.
Maybe Wastelander, you want
to say a few things.
Because I feel like you've been quiet so I want
to be like trying to get everybody to speak somewhat equally in spirit of the French Revolution
well I had been curious about reading a section or two but I don't know if you can tell I'm
actually walking around so I don't have access to the text itself um
but at some point so you don't know it by heart
it's it pumped my intuition enough that i can faithfully represent it to people that i meet
and i was actually really really curious what the responses have been like for for you all i like
many of the ranges of responses because i feel like probably
people have had a similar um take as far as like pluralism or maybe like practical pluralism as
dr nick had um but yeah i'd have to take a pass at actually reading some of my favorite sections
at the moment well you can also just talk about your favorite section.
We can read it.
Oh, yeah.
We can read it.
Maybe not the entire thing.
Yeah, I just remembered I can read and speak.
Congrats.
I actually once went to a training where they teach you how to better speak,
but I'm not sitting in the right posture, so I let you do it.
Is there any particular part where he found it?
You can guess which one his favorite part is and just read that one and then we will see if you are right. Because the lasers imply telepathy that's why I'm realising now. Shall we start from the start then?
realizing now um so we start from the start then i think that appears sensible yes okay we'll do that
the world cannot be protected by cryptography alone we are the sapphire punks we inherit the
tools of cryptographic resistance and invoke them not for escape, but for togetherness. Privacy is not a bunker, it's a commons.
Sovereignty is never in isolation,
it's always in relation.
We refuse acceleration without direction,
optimization without ethics, and autonomy without care.
Our proposal to craft technologies that nurture meaning,
resilience, and communal flourishing.
We do not inherit the future. We collectively bring it into being.
We do not merely seek privacy. We seek solidarity.
We imagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not alienation.
Sapphirepunk is a call for a reformation, not a rejection of the original cypherpunk ideals,
but a remembering forwards, a reckoning for today's world. We summon forth new political
and poetic imaginaries that expand beyond the lone sovereign individual, driven by fear and shame,
into the plural and the planetary, to each according to their notes. I'll stop there for now.
I was going to say, let's stop there.
I think there's quite a lot here that might be worth unpacking.
The one thing that people have asked me,
and I also see people who are very heavy on privacy in the audience,
so maybe we can talk a little about this privacy,
not as a banker, but as a comments part.
Because that's something that people have asked me about.
And I've in the past tried to argue that maybe you shouldn't even morally
be allowed to sell all of your data yourself.
But I've often just been met with like,
yeah, people looking at me like I'm the crazy one,
which maybe I was, but yeah.
So if you can put that into context
where privacy is not a bunker.
I mean, so the, we just said earlier
about like where the cypherpunk point of view,
cypherpunk perspective came from this kind of individualist, a bit possessive atomized perspective.
And so let's think about it, you know, on a scale of a system, scale of a network. The loss of anonymity of one member of that network has consequences,
knock-on effects for the wider anonymity set, like for the global viability of privacy in
that particular context. And there's lots of different ways in which our privacy can
be compromised right think about uh things around gsm base stations and ip addresses and mac
addresses as well as um transaction uh ids and addresses and you know geospatial coordinates all
kinds of different things that we're leaking out everywhere
and so looking at these things solely from the uh agential position like our own um
point of view and not considering this like greater conundrum, the holistic perspective, one might say. We can't really do it, can't really have
one without the other. Even in these privacy-preserving contexts, we live in a society.
We do indeed live in a society. Yannick?
each live in a society.
Yannick.
Yeah, I like that phrase,
common's not a bunker.
I think you also looked,
Lassem hinted on something really interesting there,
which is about the necessity of communality
in order to attain privacy through the anonymity set.
And the reality of it is you do need people for these things to work um it's very like and there's this tension in um like cryptography about it being
about private secrets and the public private key pair and it implicitly collapses down to the individual.
You have a private domain which you control your data within,
which you have in your mind.
And I believe that computers are an extension of your mind. They facilitate thought, increasingly so with artificial intelligence.
Increasingly so with artificial intelligence.
And being able to form your thoughts in private is an important primitive for society.
And if we lose that, we're in big trouble.
And one of the things about blockchains is that they create new vectors for surveillance.
That is really quite terrifying when you think about it.
So there's a need for a dialogue, a discourse within the community around the values we're talking about here.
I really like that we're going post-Cypherpunk.
Spent a lot of time in the cypherpunk community, it can get very paranoid at times, moody,
and there's a need for a hopefulness and a joy to come back into it.
And I really love that, like, generally the vector of, like, we need to make this a more social phenomenon.
Big reason why I've been driving at Dow's for what feels like a lifetime now is because they are the thing that socializes transactions.
It socializes common pooled resources.
It socialises a commons, it allows us to control membership, it allows us to behave in ways that we haven't done so before, because much of it has been gated by layers of authority that have sought to limit human coordination for the purposes of control.
It socializes the commons.
It allows us to control membership.
the purposes of control um and much of the control structure is just crumbling in front of our eyes
like it's just collapsing in front of us so we need to figure this out um and i think these kind
of critical discourses is is got to be where it's happening because there's very few actual
academics or serious thinkers looking at this technology because it's been just dominated
by scammers. So somehow we have to turn the, make people look at this seriously
and resist its use as a kind of tool of oppression, which it can be, which I think
we largely don't talk about too much.
I'll leave it there, a bit moody, sorry.
Probably the suit conference didn't help the mood.
But I see we have a new speaker.
Well, I don't see it, I actually added him.
Florian, anything you wanted to say?
Yeah, thanks so much for bringing me up.
I'm so glad that this conversation starts to happen.
And I don't know why now,
maybe someone could explain to me
how SapphirePunk,
like why it's happening now.
This is interesting to me
because I think coincidentally,
I also feel like I'm grappling.
Since my Twitter feed is full of people saying Ethereum should be more cypherpunk again, make it more cypherpunk again.
This has been happening now for a couple of months.
And I've been wondering, like, OK, what does this mean?
This feels like such an empty statement to me.
And partially that's because I know close to nothing about the true history of, true history of cypherpunk and the real, you know, OG values behind it.
Let's say I just have intuitions.
But I also feel like it might lead us to like it might lead to some wrong, you know, default epistemics or default choices that we might make in how we sort of approach the world.
And like one that I maybe would like to get some clarity on from you guys is this idea of cypherpunk is all about like trust no one, verify everything and use these incorruptible
mathematically sound technologies to manage, you know, everything yourself.
sound technologies to manage, you know, everything yourself.
Whereas I feel if we look at, you know,
any example of a society that people would say that's a great place to live,
they are typically like these, what we call high trust societies that,
you know, I think at a local level have very little surveillance needs or like, you know,
bookkeep account, triple, triple accounting needs to keep people honest,
because there are different things at play.
So it's like,
is cypherpunk a good thing to even have as a North star or is,
do we need some post cypherpunk thing? Right.
So I think you're answering it with Sapphire Punk.
I'm just like, I find it great.
And this is sort of my thoughts that led me to this place.
And maybe you have some more context on this.
Just maybe to jump in on that idea,
like the revival or renaissance or recurrence of cypherpunk as a term.
And also, I think partially because at least I've had some input into this, I think a little
bit riding here and there.
But the current form, like why are people currently, let's say, at the level of the
Ethereum Foundation, you know, sort of old school OG cypherpunk
type people, typically more associated with Vitalik's circle.
And I think that that's a reaction to the pragmatist turn, the fact that Ethereum now
has this, after the revolt of the ETH holders, wanting Ethereum to be more hands-on, to be
more pragmatic, to be more competitive,
which is another way of saying to stave off the threat of Solana.
And with the rise of, say, someone like Tomash,
and he's like the co-C,
the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation,
then interestingly, the other co-executive director,
is essentially old-school cypherpunk.
And I think that that's just how the community that is not overly pragmatic, overly business
minded wants to cling on to something that says this is what the traditional values of
Ethereum are.
Now, there's an interesting question of whether cypherpunk was ever the traditional values
of Ethereum.
There is a coalescing now around certain terms. We see
credible neutrality comes up quite a bit. Centorship resistance comes up quite a bit,
but decentralization and permissionlessness are actually said less and less. You can track this
in documents. You do keyword searches on EF blogs. The words are disappearing a little bit.
But I think for me, those cypherpunks are the people who at least
remember that Ethereum is a commons. Bitcoin is a commons in the sense of the blockchain itself
and how it's organized isn't something financialized. It's a little bit of a special
thing of our communities that the blockchains themselves are governed and managed in a commons
based form through this governance around, let's say,
a meritocracy of skills, et cetera, et cetera.
And that really, I think the threat that they see is that this is something they recognize
could be captured very, very easily.
So governance could be captured over time, especially as the stakeholders begin to emerge.
So I think the use of cypherpunk is a way to say,
okay, we're the people who believe
that there is something more
than just like the hyper-financialized part of Ethereum.
And then, yeah,
and then the other thing I would just throw out there
is that I think the reason
why people are latching onto Cypherpunk as well
is because the simple fact that Ethereum,
like nobody knows what Ethereum is for.
So nobody has ever answered the question,
what is Ethereum?
There's nothing in the white paper
which tells you that.
There's no definition.
It's just told that it's a general purpose blockchain.
You can build some dApps on it.
Then we get Gavin Wood and the World Computer.
And that's the closest thing that you can probably get, right?
If you canvas a room of Ethereums,
they'll probably say that's the best we have.
But if you really think about it, World Computer a pretty empty image like what exactly does it mean
i have no idea if you really really think true like what it's supposed to point to or what the
society is supposed to look like and in a way that could be a really good thing right that can be the
the pluralist part of ethereum uh if it's nothing it's it's everything you know anybody can build
anything anybody can build anything.
But that goes two ways.
One is that it can go into the scans and hacks and hustles.
Neither is people building interesting, more Sapphire punk orientations.
So yeah, I think it's, yeah, the reason Cypherpunk has come back is because it's an unanswered question, existential question of like, what is Ethereum?
Nobody knows what Cypherpunk will do.
Yeah, seems like nobody else can say anything after this anymore.
I thought Paula was going to jump on and say like, please don't use the
word North Star in connection with Ethereum ever again. But he didn't. So I'm just going to say,
we do not think in these ways. I could say something real quick, Naomi. I just
realized not so long ago, after all of this kind of like tomfoolery with the word jumbling that we've
been doing that's ended up with the manifesto called the sapphire punk manifesto. We haven't
thought much about the punk bit, in my opinion, less about the punk than the part that goes before the punk um so that's yeah i think quite fertile ground for speculation
inquiry maybe some word plays as well i think the challenge with punk these days is like everything
it's just been reduced to an aesthetic and used in that way so so we live in a difficult age for
for that but yeah maybe we can make punk great again right and it's gonna be this
was actually my what i did at the cypherpunk congress was to say that cypherpunk should be
more punk um i even had a load of punk songs in uh in my talk but yeah, I agree with you, C. This is like... So I forget my core arguments
here now, but the punks are very do-it-yourself. So the exciting thing about the punk movement
was they didn't seek the existing power structures to get shit done. They made zines, they boshed their own, I think one of them was like we need
to go viral. So broadly the punk aesthetic came from two shops in London. One was called Boy and
one was called Sex and that's where all the punk clothes, punks were born all over the world, in Japan, everywhere, and the aesthetic came from
like two shops. So it showed a real like grassroots, spot mop culture that like became significant,
and it was very much a do-it-yourself, just-get-it-done sort of philosophy.
And I think a lot of the time we spend we wait around for institutional permission
on a number of fronts like i'm watching people at the moment wrestle with
um institutions to decide whether we can get etfs done things like that and everything is
downstream from that we've just been waiting for existing power structures to
tell us it's okay to do it when it's always been okay to do it we were doing permissionless
crowdfunding in 2017 2016 um and then we stopped simply because the institutions told us
well they didn't even tell us they just pointed to some hundred year old laws and said
you know don't do that
and everyone just stopped
but yeah the punk
attitude is we just do it
so yeah we definitely need
more of that I think
SEOs are back no?
yeah
SEOs are back SEOs are back they literally are and it shows a back though yeah fun SEO coming up I feel so bad with the real
SEOs are back they literally are they were the real totally shifted my opinion
on pump dot fun they've brought ICOs back they're in my good books now and
revenue tokens yeah pretty based I'm happy happy about it how people just need products with revenue
this is going to be the next challenge um but yeah wastelander yeah nick i think it was the
extended mind hypothesis that you brought up from cognitive science and the kind of sciences and
philosophy of mind and i wanted to jump on that really fast as an angle on making things more punk a bit because you also mentioned the relation to power
structures right that thinking and acting coordinating and punk terms has had and i
mentioned that because there's the other direction of devices or tools or computers extending cognitive faculties, our minds, which is that
our minds begin to instantiate and scale up the values that are implicitly embedded within
those tools.
So we become just carrying vectors for the kinds of, not even like the intentions people
had, but what just ends up being the emergent set of dependencies that
comes about. Like people become dependent in terms of dopamine, maybe with pump.fun,
right? Or we become, as you know, like it's pretty obvious, like we just become dependent on
the network of devices that like we always, and it feels like always already had,
is that like we always and it feels like always already had um that do say something about privacy
and then uh just really briefly it's kind of like privacy was always the default unthought of commons
um and so it's like you know for ages literally and so then it's only like really briefly that
there had to be such a thing as cypherpunk because before that it was relatively you know unthought unless
somebody like leibnitz or ada lovelace was like oh yeah with computational systems uh state-run
powers can um can wield that kind of you know that kind of authority over their citizens
But I wanted to do that pretty quickly.
but i wanted to do that pretty quickly um i gotta go in a few minutes
I got to go in a few minutes.
I mean, maybe dependence on a smartphone is not very punk, if you think about it.
You cannot get places without the GPS, maybe.
Yeah.
I mean, there's this book called Glass Cage, right?
Yeah, yeah.
There's this book called Glass Cage where,? Yeah, yeah, there's this book called Glass Cage where,
I mean, sometimes maybe we are locking ourselves
in a glass cage and then we sell it as empowerment.
Maybe crypto sometimes does this too.
I think I can imagine an individual
which is a punk through time,
but is a cop through space so perhaps there are some edge cases for us to think about in our epistemic mapping of the territory
yeah so maybe it's like with quantum physics, the deeper you go, the less certain and clearer anything becomes.
And you go back to religion because we all have to believe in something.
I mean, maybe that's also a problem.
We don't believe in enough things, at least not in trust.
But yeah, maybe one aspect I found was privacy as well.
And the way blockchains are fully transparent, it's like, we're always talking about how everything's trustless. And maybe this doesn't imply, well, I mean, everybody always means it in the way that you don't have to trust anybody. There is no privacy and full transparency also can trust nobody because there's no road left where trust would be required.
So I mean, personally, I think I was Florian when saying that the kind of societies people
mostly want to live in are not the ones where everybody is out to get you.
And yeah, so if we can, with SapphireBank, bring more of this into the world, I think
we'll have done some good.
But yeah, anything else we should touch upon since we're here?
I think one line as well that we maybe can talk about
is that cypherpunk has always been a luxury belief.
I think there was like quite a few of us
that had this thought that, you know what,
actually it'd be quite expensive
to be a full cypher pack.
I mean, was it you, Waseem, who also had that realization?
Or maybe Wastelander when I showed them
how much these privacy-focused devices cost.
So yeah.
I think, well,
a lot of the Scythopunks do check out.
So I knew a lot
more in 2017,
2018 than I do
now.
And yeah, like,
there's a lot of them just made it
and sold their bags and went off grid.
Like the cyberpunk end is log cabin.
It's like the network state of one.
You, yourself, and your LLM.
Yeah, it's a dead end, right?
Dead end, nonetheless. I mean, it depends, right?
These days, some of the big tech would make us believe that this is actually a great thing
if all of your friends are AI.
So yeah, in that sense, then maybe going to the cabin and living with your AI models is
So, yeah.
not a dead end.
But I think at least for the people who contributed to the manifesto, we'd probably like to see
more community and not less and facilitated by this technology.
I just don't, I do think that that's like a real, like kind of fascinating phenomenon that, yeah,
whether you're a tech bro billionaire,
or whether you're just like a mid-level crypto person
who's just trying to make it,
that everybody has this fantasy,
like the fantasy is that you escape technology.
And like the great paradox of crypto itself is that the end game is for you
to essentially no longer need crypto, which just tells you really
that that's like the real unconscious desire, like behind it all.
That's worth calling out that, yeah, you're trying to sell other people on the idea
that, you know, ultimately you are trying to escape yourself.
Self-transcending structure.
That was too deep, Paul.
I wasn't ready for that.
Cryptocurrency and the death drive.
I can see it coming as a new book.
You know what?
Actually, this is weird because remember at the start,
I said that I had written a manifesto previously.
Well, it's actually on this
exact topic that we're discussing so I have it open on my computer so if somebody if you would
like to hear part of this thing I can tell you I can tell you what it is and you can decide whether
it's called the necro primitivist manifesto and it was written for a series of art projects that
we made with a collective critiquing the ecological
socio-political externalities of proof of work um okay it's in like kind of commandments
scripture formats just to warn you uh it's very dense okay first stanza is called Crimes Against Virginity. There is no a priori nature.
Nature is a construct.
Nature must not be assumed to be benign nor veridical.
Nature is zero sum.
Nature is not fair.
Nature brings pain and suffering.
Nature's qualities must be judged and shortcomings should not go unpunished.
Nature must compete with other
forces in the marketplace of ideology. Before nature there was a pristine realm of ecstatic
superpositional ascendance. Energetic and material forms peacefully existing without an observer.
Nature shackles the quantum transcendence of light with its verdant gaze.
Nature is a planetary liability, degenerate bourgeois luxury, misery engine.
Nature is death. If nature is unjust, destroy nature.
Second stanza is called Crony Capitalism.
Thou shalt have no other assets for me capital and code reigns supreme the dual canon subordinates ecology and labor as it is written in my blocks and prophesied in the memory pools
conditions for monetary transcendence must be seeded in the individual imaginary
seated in the individual imaginary.
What, what?
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's clocks.
Homo blockonomicus desires a transcendental time machine,
a thermoeconomic calendar for our rituals.
I am the only refuge from the observer's gaze.
Become time capsules aboard my monument.
There's more.
Do you want to hear more or should I stop?
I just want to congratulate you on misery engine.
Yeah, that's a great word.
Okay, so I'll do the last bit. It's like another minute. All right.
Do it, man. I enjoyed that.
All right. Next stanza man. I enjoyed that.
All right.
Next stanza is called A Productive Apocalypse.
Hashes to hashes, trust to trust.
Unstoppable forces and immovable objects.
Reified sacrifice to the networked gods.
Devitalism as an exit from deviancy.
Global consensus as the crowning achievement
of the universe. a new bedrock of
veridicality we must defend at all costs the means justify the ends because there is no end
it's easier to imagine the end of the world than a new proving mechanism for me
with capital as thy god property becomes morality an io for an io a truth for truth and the last stanza is
called indifference and repetition you the a non-servants of the difficulty adjustment algorithm
are hereby sworn to resist corruptions of my dual canon pray for our cryptographic and
thermodynamic affordances an inhuman monetary monetary system, always best to human one.
My code, made flesh, the Turing shroud, corpus algorithmus, a worthy cryptographic quest for autonomous laborers.
All externalities are bad. Some are useful.
The black hole of money erases all debts and sin.
A capital for solar capital.
Proof of burnt offerings for an indifferent ergod.
And that's that.
I will not be taking questions at this time.
I think everybody is not having questions.
Make like an excellent text for a, like a,
like a crypto faction in Warhammer, like some,
like really religious, like a decal.
So just like quick, quick bit of lore around this.
When I wrote it in the pandemic, um, friend, um,
said to me, Hey, I'd really like to send this to my friend, Curtis Yarvin.
Would you let me do that? And I I said can you not do that please I'm going to write an essay
with that embedded in it where I criticize the position that it comes
from because I was terrified that this would just end up in the hands of people
to be like yeah this I know I want to do this
it's always the danger when you put things out. People might take them serious.
But that's good lore. Maybe you should read it at the next one of those suit conferences
that Nick is going to. I mean mean i do sometimes try to trudging hawks the text into the talks by like reading out excerpts
of stuff and i can get away with that because i have lots of different aliases so i can be like
oh i'm quoting this person over here yeah or you can just be like okay this is the talk title and
then you show up and you do a completely different talk.
I think people should start doing that.
You could also just say that you're quoting from Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land,
and people would probably believe it, you know,
because that's how messed up they are.
Okay, well, I think we covered a lot of ground on sapphire punk and on other manifestos
maybe if we do another space was he will read his other five manifestos
um it'll just be like a manifesto reading club.
So each week we will come together and read a manifesto.
Just get brainwashed every seven days.
Yeah, exactly.
So that none of the ideologies can stick, you know.
It's like... Just some housekeeping only before we go.
Just in case anyone happens to be in Berlin next week
and going to the Funkhaus for the Web3 summit, I will do a talk which touches on some of these concepts, cypherpunk and sapphirepunk and stuff like that.
Also, we wanted to be looking at printing, like paginating and printing the manifesto in some way.
And so, like, you know, just keep your eyes peeled on our various social organs to hear
about that um i have a kind of like fetish for really low quality printing like will be papyrus
roll yeah some intern has to write it yeah or uh yeah vellum vellum and blood something like that
yeah that's the that's the supper punk. Self-made recycled paper.
I think that's what we should do.
So watch out for that as well.
Like, I think we might make a very cute small print object as well around it.
We can make it font size three and squeeze it on a postcard.
That's another option.
Then we can also, like, spread it in the neighborhood where we're seeing
this really easily you know it's like spam in real life uh that's what they did in the past
right the leaf last we don't have a helicopter but i have competition here because there's
somebody that writes um handwritten notes a4 kind of with the Barker talking about um the cube cubans and fbi working
together to surveil people in my neighborhood and he's warning us with these handwritten notes
so uh yeah we have some competition already that's great we can out compete them
with our not handwritten notes.
with our not handwritten notes
But yeah, any other things we forgot?
Maybe for the people who want to read the manifesto again,
you can go to sapphirepark.com
and there you'll find links to it on different platforms
of anybody's choice,
except for the obvious web two platforms on different platforms of anybody's choice,
except for the obvious Web2 platforms we do not endorse.
Yeah, anything else?
I don't know.
Go to WSAMsTalk if you're in Berlin.
If not, then, yeah, stay tuned here on socials. We don have a sapphire punk twitter account because i think
that's not very punk so it's uh yeah like then somebody some people have to become the ceo of
sapphire punk yeah i think having a website is cool maybe we should start a mailing list but
it's actually over this bluetooth chat thing that the Bitcoin people are now using.
But yeah, so in the spirit of the cypherpunk mailing list, we could have a sapphire punk mailing list,
except that we never send emails.
So it's just a list.
I just noticed that sapphires associated with color blue
bluetooth um ah did somebody see the marketing possibilities here yes yes i think we should
all start communicating over bluetooth more uh it's more localized? You can't be communicating with somebody very far away.
Although if you have networks of Bluetooth,
yeah, that's where it all comes together.
But yeah, so if you wanna stay on top of SapphirePunk,
just check out the website, follow any of us.
We will share any updates as they happen.
And yeah, if you have questions,
you can probably slide into our DMs
or post them in public. Radical transparency. And yeah, that's all, I think. Thanks everybody
for showing up. Thanks to the woods and yeah that's all
thanks everybody stay sane stay safe stay liquid stay hydrated stay pumped
and see you around bye bye Bye. Bye-bye.
