Gate 2025 Year-End Community Gala #2026 Bitcoin Market Outlook **From the Cyberpunk Dream to the Current Dilemma: The Rift Between the Ideals of Freedom and Reality**

When it comes to the origins of cryptocurrency, many people only know Bitcoin, but few understand the group of discontented idealists behind it—the cypherpunks. They have been pondering a question since the early 1990s: how to truly achieve freedom in the digital world?

**Part One: The Cypherpunk Belief**

This group holds an ironclad creed:

Privacy is not about concealment, but the cornerstone of an open society. Without privacy, freedom of speech and thought are empty words.

Rather than trusting the promises of institutions, they trust mathematics more. Systems built with cryptography are more reliable than any organizational rules—because mathematics does not lie.

They dream of establishing a transaction system that requires no third parties, thus escaping censorship and achieving true economic freedom. This idea later directly incubated digital currencies like Bitcoin.

**Part Two: From Theory to Practice**

Cypherpunks are not just talk. They collaborate through encrypted mailing lists, turning ideas into reality one by one:

In the 1990s, DigiCash attempted to create electronic cash; Hashcash aimed to solve spam issues; B-money explored the possibilities of digital currency... These were not ideas hatched by a single person but the collective wisdom of the community.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper on this mailing list—he did not create out of thin air but stood on the shoulders of these pioneers, integrating years of technical accumulation into a complete blockchain solution. The emergence of Bitcoin marked the first time the ideals of cypherpunks were truly realized through code.

**Part Three: The Dilemma of Idealists**

But now, the problem is that the original dreams of cypherpunks face awkward realities:

**Moral Dilemmas**: Providing encryption tools protects freedom, but the same tools can also be used for malicious purposes. When to use them and when not to, technical developers find themselves in a dilemma.

**The Irony of Centralization**: What was once meant to be decentralized is now increasingly controlled by large tech companies and financial institutions—these new centers of power. Isn’t that a bit ironic?

**The Fall of Privacy**: Even more painfully, most people now willingly sacrifice their privacy for convenience. Alipay, social media, various apps... People exchange data for services. The "surveillance society" that cypherpunks warned about has now become a reality.

This is the paradox of the contemporary crypto world: technology itself is neutral, but the people who use it are not. The beliefs of cypherpunks still persist, and Bitcoin is still running, but in this highly centralized internet era, how much freedom and autonomy remain? This is a question every practitioner needs to seriously consider.