Cyberpunk vs. Cypherpunk: BTC's Enlightenment for the Age of AI Agents

Over the weekend, BTC took another stroll around the 60k mark, fluctuating up and down, rising and falling. The Coinbase premium index has been negative for 40 consecutive days, and Jeremy Grantham once again came out to declare that BTC is heading for extinction.

This time, instead of discussing the market, I’d like to talk about some technological philosophy—the rarely discussed aspects beneath the surface glitz of the market, concerning the fate, history, and future of humanity in the era of a technological explosion.

I. A Vision of High-Tech, Low-Life Future

Not long ago, Decrypt published an article about Cyberpunk, titled "The Future Cyberpunk Imagined Is Here: How Much Did It Get Right?" The article interviewed R.U.Sirius, co-founder of Mondo 2000, and Shira Chess, a professor at the University of Georgia, reviewing the cultural symbol spanning forty years from William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Cyberpunk 2077.

The future depicted by Cyberpunk seems highly sci-fi at first glance, but upon deeper reflection, it sends a chill down your spine: brain-computer interfaces, slums under neon lights, black-market doctors performing limb modifications, and multinational corporations bigger than governments. Technology is extremely advanced, but freedom is extremely scarce. The poor survive unemployed in the gaps of high-tech, while corporations control everything from the top floors of skyscrapers. Wealth and poverty have never been so polarized, and classes have never been so isolated. All of humanity is divided into two types: those who control high-tech, and those who have been replaced by it. Bruce Sterling gave it a precise label—"High Tech, Low Life."

Reading this future thirty years ago felt cool. Now, standing at the door of the AGI (artificial general intelligence) singularity, reading it again can't help but make one’s heart tighten.

Shira Chess made a penetrating point in the article. She said that the most accurate prophecy of Cyberpunk was never mechanical limbs and reflective sunglasses, but rather that "corporations have ultimately completely occupied the digital space." Users think they’re surfing the internet, but in reality, they’re operating within a few closed platforms. Data belongs to the platform, social connections belong to the platform, and identity also belongs to the platform. You are merely allowed to use them.

R.U.Sirius recalled that in the early 1990s, they thought personal computers and the internet would take power away from big corporations and put it in everyone’s hands. The exact opposite happened: those tech companies became the most powerful institutions in the world. In 2015, Facebook forced his handle R.U.Sirius to be changed back to his real name, Ken Goffman, under its real-name policy. Facebook didn’t even need to ask for his consent.

The era of the grassroots internet has ended. An internet once proud of anonymity, freedom, and DIY has become a digital shopping mall controlled by a few companies.

II. Cypherpunk Points to Another Path

However, not everyone accepted this prediction about the ultimate fate of humanity and technology.

Just as Cyberpunk was becoming a cultural symbol for the masses, another small group was quietly doing something completely different. They called themselves Cypherpunk. The name differs by only one letter, but the direction differs by tens of thousands of miles.

Cyberpunk presents a dark future. Cypherpunk attempts to use tools to avoid that future.

In "A History of Bitcoin," dedicated an entire chapter (Chapter 2) to recounting the mysterious past of the Cypherpunks.

In 1993, Eric Hughes, one of the founders of the Cypherpunk mailing list, published the well-known "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto." It is very short, but every word is like a scalpel, accurately dissecting the authoritarian internet future that was descending. He said that in the internet age, privacy would become a necessity. If people lose privacy, they will eventually lose freedom. Privacy is not a secret but a power—"the ability to selectively reveal oneself to the world." And cryptography is the key technology to ensure that everyone enjoys this power and gains freedom.

I have read this manifesto countless times. Essentially, it is a manifesto about individual sovereignty. Cryptography gives individuals an ability: to protect their communications, assets, and identity without needing permission from any authority. Power is not granted by big companies or platforms but is guaranteed by protocols, by cryptography, by mathematics.

Satoshi Nakamoto must have been one of the most faithful readers of this manifesto. When the Bitcoin whitepaper was released in 2008, many saw it as digital gold. In my view, looking deeper, it is more of an engineering realization of Cypherpunk ideals: without banks, without governments, without any intermediaries, two people can exchange value on a peer-to-peer network. Mathematics ensures security. Protocols ensure trust. Individuals ensure sovereignty.

Cyberpunk depicts the horror of being controlled by machines. Cypherpunk offers a plan to reclaim freedom through technology. Bitcoin is the most successful answer to this plan so far.

III. AI Agents Arrive, the Story Continues

Fast forward to 2026.

AI Agent is becoming a high-frequency term. The Decrypt article specifically mentioned a special Agent that became popular early this year—the AI assistant OpenClaw, affectionately called "lobster" by the Chinese community. It’s not a general-purpose tool for writing emails or booking flights; it’s an AI assistant with persistent memory and the ability to "self-evolve." That is, it doesn’t just execute commands; it continuously grows through interaction with you. Its memory is continuous, its cognition accumulates gradually, and it understands you better and better.

This sounds cool. But after experiencing it, my mind immediately focused on a key issue—not what it can do, but where it should be installed and deployed.

An AI Agent that holds all your memories and behavioral preferences, if running in the cloud, means your memories enter some company’s database. Your conversation history, your thinking habits, your preferences, all the private things you’ve told it—are all on servers controlled by others.

Isn’t this just Shira Chess’s "corporations occupy digital space" in the AI era?

Satoshi Nakamoto, as a member of the Cypherpunk movement, used cryptography to solve the custody problem of money—with Bitcoin’s private keys in your own hands, assets truly belong to you. For AI Agents, the memory custody problem is similar: the Agent’s memory on a device you control means the Agent truly belongs to you (note: large models require high computing power and will likely still be cloud services, but they are stateless, memoryless, and non-locking).

Therefore, I have always believed that if AI Agents become the new entry point to the internet, that entry point should be on the client side, not in the cloud. Every person with an Agent should deploy it themselves, just as every person with Bitcoin should hold their own private keys. Not because cloud providers are untrustworthy, but because trust should not be a default assumption.

This aligns exactly with the core philosophy of Cypherpunk: protocols guarantee ownership, not a company’s credit.

In my view, from Cyberpunk to Cypherpunk, from Bitcoin to AI Agents, the thread of individual sovereignty—from asset ownership to information ownership—is becoming increasingly clear. With every technological advance, humanity faces the same choice: centralize power in the hands of a few institutions, or disperse it to every individual through protocols.

IV. History Illuminates Reality

Eric Hughes declared in the manifesto:

"We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of benevolence… If we truly want privacy, we must fight for it! We must unite to create systems that support anonymous transactions… We must use cryptography, anonymous remailers, digital signatures, and electronic money to protect our privacy… Even laws against cryptography can only reach the borders of a nation and the extent of its violence. But cryptography will inevitably spread globally, and with it will come anonymous transaction systems…"

It has been 33 years since these words were written. It wasn’t until 2008–2009 that Bitcoin was born. The rise of ChatGPT is only in recent years. I believe that in the next decade, AI Agents may become as common as smartphones. And that choice about where power belongs is already upon us.

Choosing a client-side AI Agent installed on your own computer vs. choosing a cloud-based AI Agent provided by a big tech company—the difference is as vast as choosing to hold your own Bitcoin private keys vs. depositing your coins in a centralized exchange.

Choosing the cloud or the client side is not just a technical architecture issue. It’s about whether you believe in individual sovereignty.

Those who choose self-custody of private keys may be mocked in the market, but through multiple bull and bear cycles, they have a higher chance of surviving exchange closures, exit scams, hacks, and bankruptcies. Those who choose to deploy AI Agents on their own devices today will likely go through a similar process.

There is a kind of freedom called "the freedom not to." Not to be monitored, not to be collected, not to be distilled and manipulated by algorithms.

Cypherpunks have used several generations, using code and protocols to guard the torch of freedom. Now it’s the turn of the AI Agent generation.

Life is precious, and love is dearer. But for the sake of freedom, both can be cast aside.