A Political History of DAOs

In 2008, a group of developers released a whitepaper on the Cryptographers Mailing List.

Engineer Paul Baran made a number of breakthroughs that are relevant to the public, decentralized technologies to this day, including “message blocks” (a component in blockchain technology) and advocacy for private digital networks via cryptography.

In 2009, Cypherpunk Hal Finney became the first person to transact Bitcoin as well as the first maintainer of the Bitcoin software code base.

FROM CYPHERPUNKS TO WEB3:

The Cypherpunks were united by a belief that people should be able to live free from state interference in private matters, and a conviction that this freedom could be achieved through the use of digital encryption technology that allowed people to communicate without being surveilled.

Digital encryption is a fundamentally political security technology, and a site of struggle for privacy, freedom, and democracy that scholar Linda Monsees has termed “Crypto Politics.”

They hoped these technologies would make it possible for people to inhabit “temporary autonomous zones” — the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces in the physical world or cyberspace that elude formal systems of control.

A PRE-HISTORY OF THE CYPHERPUNKS:

So, pursued the development of decentralized, cryptographically secure digital infrastructure.