Way back in the day when the majority of people concerned with privacy were conspiracy theorists, criminals and pedophiles, I was a confused anarcho-communist.
I had given up christianity a couple of years before and had recently turned to the atheistic side of agnosticism. I was reading alot of crimethinc, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Kropotkin etc. I had some pretty bad social anxiety and had been on chatrooms of various kinds since my dad got a computer when I was 13.
I don't remember how I found freenet and the iip community but I loved it, a bunch of paranoid weirdos like myself talking about privacy and debating philosophy and politics.
Besides the protection from the government and anyone else trying to see what I was doing, the thing I liked most about freenet was that i didn't need to run a server to have a site on freenet. No one did. An entire freenet site is distributed to nodes throughout the network. Files could be uploaded for free. The only downside to all this freedom was how slow it was.
I haven't tried to use freenet in a few years, after i2p started and iip stopped i switched over for a bit and slowly dropped out of anonymous internet, the deep dark web, but i remember some other things I saw starting up while I was there. Some things that eventually got insanely popular and profitable and hyped up.
I remember when the slashdot bitcoin article came out. I thought, " oh, I've heard of crypto currency before." Some one on i2p in I don't know what year was talking on i2p irc about crypto tokens, tokens that had a cryptographic hash to prove that a transaction had taken place, it didn't move too far along as I knew. I've tried to go through the logs to find it but i couldn't. Maybe they went on to work on it further, I don't know.
There had been an anonymous bank called yodel bank that pooled egold to make as anonymous transactions as possible. It was all run through irc scripts I believe.
I remember talking to someone who had created an encrypted file system that had another encrypted partition inside it. Years later I read that Julian Assange was on the team that made it. Maybe i talked to him before he was famous.
I don't want to talk about the what ifs, what if i had stayed in the general community? What if i would have bought 100$ of bitcoins when the slashdot article was released? I'm where I'm at now and I learned some expensive lessons.
I'm ready to get back into it! And i think steem power is going to help me, the internet, and the world.
Anyone here remember Egold HYIPs (High Yield Investment Programs)? And the Egoldforums which basicallly became the BTC Talk forums? Just a bunch of people looking for ANY sprt opf global online money system they could use to move money around the world anonymously and fast!
Egold could have gone in and stopped those theives because it was centralized so im glad they got shut down, fuckin pieces of shit, allowing tons of people to get their egold scammed, and refusing to go into their own centralized system to reverse fraudulent payments!
Anyway Bitcoin came out and all those HYIP scam people found an amazing new tool which they could use to scam people!
and now that crypto currency prices are rising so fast and people are legitimately making money very quickly, many many thieves and scammers create websites offering daily rewards, I see tons of people advertising these scams all over the place especially in local telegram chats
Aywway yeah Egold man! High yield Investment programs
Also SIned the haker Dennis Moran was into bitcoin, i would talk to him over iRC we had a chatroom Lyceaum.org irc #love and it had molokobot and all these cool people an sinned or coolio or denis moran was a "computer criiminal" who hacked the entire internetshutting own many majo websites in the year 2001 and it was crazy he went to jail and they made hm work on the jail computers and i remmber he sent me a bitcoin when they were less tan a dollar and he was so excited about bitcointelling me to mine it and how it was going to change eveyrthing and he died of an overdose in 2014 i believ because he had so much drugs from his bitcoins, and back thenit was easy to just buya bunch of drugs thanit could be to convrt it to cash, and it was insane when he was first talking about bitcoin yeah this whole world is insane...back then we were trading drugs online, he would always be all about sening drugs on the internet for money, using paypal and shit! lol IRC chats man TOR changed everything but theres always been secretive chatrooms and secret web communities hat have always use encryptionetc
Me too. I considered buying Bitcoin when they were going for $0.005 per coin. Yes, I am kicking myself. I was pretty broke at the time and it came down to buying some of this bitcoin that the government might shut down, or buying a meal for my family. You know what they say about hindsight.
Yeah, just have to keep an eye out and an open mind for next time. Could be now. I already wish I would have bought $STEEM july 3... or yesterday.
Ah, the old times! We really need Duke Morbid here. :-)