Somnia Libertatis · Seira · Paper I of III · In Preparation
Dreaming of Liberty
From the cypherpunks to the genesis block
by James Wolstencroft
Money that needs no one’s permission. That was the dream, and it was older than the technology: Chaum’s blind signatures in the 1980s, Back’s Hashcash, Dai’s b money, Szabo’s bit gold, each a stone laid towards a bridge nobody had finished. Then, in October 2008, a 9 page whitepaper arrived signed by a name nobody has ever put a face to.
The genesis block is the image this whole series stands on. Stamped into the first link is that morning’s Times headline, the Chancellor on the brink of a second bailout. Before the chain carried a single coin it carried a proof: a fragment of the public record, fixed in place forever. It was born a tekmerium. The world just had not noticed yet.
The paper closes where the dream stopped being hypothetical: the WikiLeaks banking blockade of 2010, when the payment networks closed their doors and censorship resistant money found its first honest use.
Hands forward to Following the Money: what happened when the wrong people believed the dream.
In preparation, unpublished at the time of writing. This page holds the shape of the argument while the paper is written.