Crypto Wars - Intro
For over 30 years, an invisible war has raged in the digital shadows. A war against privacy, anonymity, and self-sovereigntyâa silent but relentless campaign to establish a global surveillance regime and extend control over the most intimate recesses of our minds and souls.
This war didnât start today.
It began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government sought to cripple encryption technology before it could empower the masses. They tried to kill PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in its infancy, and mandated the Clipper Chip, a backdoor implant that would have allowed the government to spy on every phone call in America.
Back then, encryption wasnât seen as a tool for digital freedomâit was treated and regulated as a weapon of war. It was really serious business. For years they fought to suppress it, restricting exports, lobbying against secure communication, and classifying cryptographic tools as munitions.
The Clipper Chip act was repelled, thanks to a bunch of cypherpunks. This was known as the first âCrypto Warâ. After this victory, by the 2010s, the tide had turned. Encryption was becoming mainstream, and mass surveillanceâthe ultimate goalâwas at risk.
Then came 2013. Edward Snowden tore the mask off the system, revealing how intelligence agencies, Big Tech, and Western governments were spying on millions of innocent people worldwideâAmericans and foreigners alike.
Encryption threatened to disrupt this machinery of total control, and so a new strategy was needed: if encryption couldnât be banned outright, it could perhaps be corrupted, weakened, and controlled.
The Obama administration led a crusade to block the adoption of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps, such as those on Facebook platforms.
Having failed to curb its spread, Western countries and intelligence forces today are seeking other ways to access citizens' communications and data, such as by forcing companies to create backdoors â hidden access points that would render encryption useless â in their software.
Now, the battlefield has expanded. Enter the Crypto Wars, Phase Two.
If encryption gave people privacy in communication, cryptocurrencies give them privacy in finance.
Together, they form the foundation of digital sovereigntyâthe ability to freely communicate and act beyond the grasp of banks, governments, and surveillance capitalists. And that, of course, could not be tolerated.
Between 2022 and 2024, governments tightened their grip, cracking down on privacy coins like Monero, arresting developers of open-source financial privacy tools like Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet, and forcing entire projects to shut down.
Wasabi Wallet, Phoenix Wallet, and others collapsed under legal pressure. Even Telegramâs founder, Pavel Durov, found himself in the crosshairs, arrested in France in August 2024 under vague charges related to financial privacy.
What we are witnessing is a coordinated attack: they are targeting the few people capable of building the tools of financial and digital autonomy. They want to make an example of them, to scare the masses into compliance, obedience, and dependence on fully traceable financial systems.
But make no mistakeâthis is not just about money.
This war is about self-determination, about the liberation of individuals from the financial, bureaucratic, and technological cages that have been tightening for decades. They are about whether we own ourselvesâor whether we become permanent digital serfs under a system that tracks, controls, and engineers our every move.
And yet, there is still time to act. We need to awake our spirit, abandoning useless tribalism, and helping people understand what is truly at stake.
This is the last stand. Resist.
CRYPTO WARS - CHRONOLOGY (1989 - 2024)
1989 - The FATF (Financial Action Task Force) is established and more than 100 countries adhere. The FATF is a supranational organisation that promotes recommendations on the basis on which all countries should meet the shared objective of tackling money laundering and terrorist financing.
1991 - The US Senate includes in an omnibus decree (Bill 266) the obligation to insert backdoors in cryptographic algorithms to allow access to data by authorities.
1991 - Zimmerman develops and releases PGP, a protocol for encrypting data and communications, free and public. He called it "guerrilla freeware".
1992 - Eric Hughes publishes the Cypherpunk Manifesto: "privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system [...] Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography."
1993 - Zimmerman is investigated for unauthorized export of ammunition without a license. During these years, cryptographic algorithms were equated with weapons of war, and their dissemination was strictly controlled. Zimmerman managed to defend himself ingeniously: he published the source code of PGP in paper format, within a book. In the United States, unauthorized export of weapons (including encryption software) was prohibited, but certainly not books. The courts ruled that the source code of PGP was not a weapon of war, but a simple expression of the author's thought, therefore protected by the First Amendment.
1994 - The Clinton administration proposes a new anti-cryptography strategy: to require manufacturing companies to install a chip in every phone (Clipper Chip) that would allow access to the communications of all Americans. The plan failed also thanks to a strong social campaign by those individuals, like Zimmerman, who were defined as "cypherpunk".
1995 - During this period, FATF (Financial Action Task Force) releases recommendations to limit the use of cash and instead promote traceable payments, such as checks, payment cards, and direct deposit of salaries. It marked the beginning of a long and enduring offensive against cash and the anonymity it provided.
2004 - Hal Finney publishes his idea of "reusable proof of work", a way to use cryptographic proof of work (hashcash) and create "POW tokens".
2008 - Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the Bitcoin whitepaper.
2013 - Edward Snowden publishes tens of thousands of classified documents showing how the NSA and British intelligence were engaged in mass surveillance activities of hundreds of millions of people, both in the US and abroad.
2013 - Founder of Silkroad, one of the first âdark marketsâ, Ross Ulbricht, arrested and then convicted for life with the accusation of facilitating money laundering, drug trafficking and more.
2014 - Monero was launched.
2015 - The Obama administration explores technical ways to overcome the obstacles of encryption along with the big tech sector. At least 4 solutions were found, but then never publicly pushed due to fear of reactions.
2019 - The US Department of Justice sends a letter to Mark Zuckerberg kindly demanding not to implement, as planned, end-to-end encryption systems in Facebook chat systems.
2019 - FATF releases recommendations for the cryptocurrency sector: "Guidance for a risk-based approach to virtual assets and VASPs." The guidelines clearly state that the goal is to combat any form of anonymity and counter the use of "mixers, tumblers, privacy wallets, and other technologies capable of obscuring people's identities".
2020 - The Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, NZ, CAN) sign an international agreement to combat online child pornography.
2020 - The European Commission announces a new strategy against online child pornography.
2020 - The Council of the European Union publishes a document describing the problems of encryption. At the same time, research is commissioned to find ways to overcome the obstacles of end-to-end encryption and access data.
2021 - In the EU, the first 'chatcontrol' regulation comes into force to legalize voluntary scanning of chats by communication service providers to identify and report potentially child pornographic content. Since 2016, Facebook had been doing this, but the chatcontrol regulation became necessary due to another European regulatory update that would have made this activity illegal.
2021 - The director of EUROPOL states in an interview that the single most problematic barrier to fighting crime is encryption.
2021 - The European Union announces a new AML (anti-money laundering) package in adherence to recent FATF recommendations in the crypto sector. The package limits cash transactions to a maximum of 10k and also prohibits anonymous bank deposit boxes.
2022 - In the United States, the developer of Tornado Cash is arrested on charges of facilitating money laundering through the development of open-source code.
2022 - USA, UK, and EU begin to enact laws against online child pornography, which will require communication service providers to adopt technologies capable of scanning chat contents (text, audio, video). The three laws are practically copy-paste of the principles contained in the international agreement signed in 2020 among the Five Eyes.
2022 - One of the developers of Tornado Cash, Alexey Pertsev, is arrested in Amsterdam for money laundering (eth).
2023 - The Online Safety Bill comes into force in the UK, the law against child pornography and other illegal online content. Signal threatens to exit the UK market due to impositions against encryption of communications. Concurrently, another law allows law enforcement to seize any element related to cryptocurrencies (even a piece of paper with 12 words written on it) in case of suspected crime.
2023 - In the EU, the AML package presented in 2021 is approved, which also includes the obligation of "travel rule" for the crypto sector: namely, total surveillance of transactions and obligation for exchanges to consider the risk of receiving transactions from unidentified "unhosted wallets" (and possibly block them).
2023 - The founders of Tornado Cash, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, are arrested in the USA for money laundering (eth).
2024 - The founders of Samourai Wallet are arrested, with the same accusation as the developers of Tornado Cash: facilitating money laundering by writing open-source software for privacy.
2024 - Alexey Alexey Pertsev is found guilty and convicted for aiding money laundering activities by developing the Tornado Cash tool.
2024 - Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, arrested by french authorities. Same accusations as the founders of Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet.
2025 - Newly elected President Trump liberates Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road, after being imprisoned for 11 years.