Crypto is for Activists: Why We Need More Cypherpunks, Not Cypherposers

Bitcoin is activism, not a get rich quick scheme or a startup platform.

The point of bitcoin is to regulate bad laws and to democratize bad policies by way of circumventing harmful enforcement.

For the International Students for Liberty Conference in early 2013, we decided to do something a bit wilder, we wanted to show these youngsters how bitcoin works.

We built a little orange box that accepted cash notes and sent out bitcoin transactions.

We founded Lamassu and started manufacturing bitcoin ATMs, a machine we like to now call "Cryptomats."

Fast forward almost six years and we're still going strong, still advocating bitcoin and there's a booming industry making machines that help people buy and sell bitcoin.

End-users who use the machines never have their coins stored for them by operators, but are required to actually use bitcoin to get it.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people around the world are using cryptomats every month to get small amounts of bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies directly to their wallets.

We have to think about what happens when a growing population of the world starts owning bitcoin.

The whole point of bitcoin is for people to help themselves, but it's our jobs as proponents to make that easy.