On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 11:41:52PM -0500, grarpamp wrote:

some sort of official cypherpunks predictions for 2018 thread.

IMHO this thread is rather early. Two predictions, estimated damage at least $0.42 trillion. 1. Major malware(s) spreading via Intel ME and the like. Significantly worse than wannacry. Possibly hard to clean, requiring reprogramming chip on external device. 2. Major Android malware(s). Could be off by an year or few.

Two more: 3. m$ windows will suck so much, computer illiterate people will be ready to pay for just literally "uninstalling windows" 4. bitcoin will at least temporary lose the first place on https://coinmarketcap.com (this is not rigorous metric)

A prediction of sorts... Late 2017 was the year "Bitcoin", more properly "cryptocurrency" definitively hit the front page of every global newspaper and TV show. Everyone who is anyone in the internet / financial / investor / banking / govenmental / elite / even the working man's world knows of it. This cryptocurrency cat is now fully and completely out of the bag... yet what it means is not yet properly understood, relayed, nor acted upon. 2018 will begin the first year of the Great Cryptocurrency War. Governments / Banks will now begin making their move in force against you. Do NOT fail to heed this warning! You have but moments to act. You lost your first chance to kill them, with "Bitcoin", precisely "BTC". You spent too much time fucking around in tech infighting, years of "blocksize" bullshit, and in profits, and not enough in actively overtly fighting the real overarching fight. Meanwhile, tiny little regulators, and gratuitous corporate ass kissers, in far off corners, got the best of you, categorizing and framing your own shit, your own narrative, reporting on you, lawyer due diligencing you, being subpoenaed to your taxers, and policying against you. They won. That was chump change. Now you're in the Big Leagues of Round Two. Now your next, only, and last chance is in "cryptocurrency" combined, more precisely your nonstop dedicated action in support of it, to blow the government / banking fuckers permanently out of the water. To win this war you must... - Integrate into your daily lives at least once a week to personally open educational cryptocurrency conversations with newbies / groups, get and then personally fund wallets of any particular ticker, trivial or not, on their phones / computers. Beyond just indoctrinating Satoshi, this funding gives stake and share of mind power to the cause. - Get cryptocurrencies adopted at all levels and at all costs. a) Through supporting multi cryptocurrency payment APIs / processors. b) Personally lobbying, nonstop, local and big corporate retailers to accept those pay processors / direct acceptance. Integrate their supply chains. Float wikis and databases full of current verified acceptors. Get your friends in side businesses hooked up. - Get opensource uncensorable anonymous distributed exchanges in production now. - Quit the stupid coin rivalries, the ICO's, the angel invested centralists among them immediately. NONE of you will succeed, you'll be overruled by State and competition, only the free and opensource tech will succeed over time, upon the willing backs of opensource contributors globally, as with "BSD/Linux". Fork and fork again. It must be about the shared devotion to divining the resultant successful tech and applications, not to which sole dev entity and government addled investor house it comes from. - FORGET about investment profit returns. This *IS NOT* the true goal. Those are the natural BYPRODUCT of successful adoption. No adoption, or get shutdown by the powers, then no lasting profit shall come to you. Bulletproof adoption is the sole endgame condition. Otherwise all you have worked for is yet another State Fiat, a sellout, sheepishly subservient, not maximally profitable up against total forex, stores, markets and derivatives, at its core. - Form and constantly fund and wield lobbying groups to propel cryptocurrency and shutdown the central statist plan. This is rightly anathema to non statists, but MUST be done as a weakening ploy. Show how they can use it too for their own schemes, corrupt as they might be. You *will not* likely win, not in a meaningful to you or your family's lifetime term, by sitting on your ass ignoring and trying to game around complying with the current state. You must take it head on, both changing it and *brain* first. Show and prove out the alternative and new models the world has not seen before and desperately needs. Overall, it is *YOU* that must get the message contained within Satoshi's Genesis Block out to and firmly adopted among the masses, the mid level businesses, and the elite. If you do not do this, RIGHT FUCKING NOW, IMMEDIATELY, IN 2018, the prediction is that World's Governments and Bankers will move faster than you and crush the promise of cryptocurrency forever. Thereby taking down not only cryptocurrency, but the underlying privacy networks, anonymity, neutrality, free speech, even strong cryptography with it. All with the stroke of a pen. NEVER underestimate the dire FUD factor of that among both yourselves and the sheeple. Fight it now and win. Ignore it and lose. Launch and WIN the political war NOW, on your terms, with abject excessive decisive clarity, before they do. Or die. btc:191pXUq5kn4n2T5sszzeUJDNxqqWUJivft