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Three years into the lunarpunk odyssey

Memecoin craze

The Dark Vegas saga began in 2023 amids a solarpunk memecoin bubble, fueled by shills on centralized slave tech platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.

It's worth noting a few things here. Firstly, memecoins represent the purest, most honest form of money with market prices dictated solely by social consent. Secondly, the largest cap memecoin is Bitcoin (BTC), the Magic Internet Money, since it's not a governance token like UNI or an utility token like ETH, because you can technically pay for a block space (tx fees) on the Bitcoin blockchain with any asset, including fiat. Finally, BTC is not backed by any real-world asset or nation-state army, nor does "proof-of-burnt electricity" makes it backed by energy since you can't recover that energy back from the coins.

Lunarpunk anti-memecoin

In other words, memecoins are fine as long as people understand their speculative nature and are willing to gamble. However, every single memecoin project relied solely on slave tech and tried to get listed on centralized custodial exchanges with mandated KYC to boost trading volume. We hated that compliant solarpunk attitude, but also wanted to use the hype to push people toward privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant freedom tech like Session, SimpleX, Spasm, IPFS, and Nostr.

So we started designing a lunarpunk anti-memecoin called BLOOD which was paired against popular memecoins with anti-CEX protections and complicated drainage mechanisms, essentially making paired memecoins "bleed" liquidity when arbitrage bots rebalance pools. The proof-of-concept experiments were successful and we even airdropped free money to a few forum users, but the project didn't get enough steam because there was no presence on the slave tech platforms, so we moved to other initiatives.

Federated forum

The same year, we launched a Spasm-powered forum focused on privacy, freedom tech, and ancap. Spasm represents the most advanced generation of social media with a fully agnostic architecture, but in 2023, the integration with the Nostr network was clunky and there was no web admin panel and no GUI moderation tools, so deleting messages required a direct interaction with the database.

Anyway, we federated the forum with other freedom-conscious early adopters like RebelNet (run by SimplifiedPrivacy), engaging in conversations with influential voices from the libertarian camp, trying to raise awareness of the freedom tech.

Dark Vegas Tales

Then in 2025, we decided to launch Dark Vegas Tales due to lack of proper privacy and freedom-focused podcasts. Although, SimplifiedPrivacy had an interesting pod, but it was very short-lived. IntelTechniques by Michael Bazzell (ITMB) was also fine, but it was mostly focused on compliant techniques and the host didn't have enough expertise in freedom tech, Monero, zk, DeFi, and crypto in general. Anyway, ITMB shut down and all other major cypherpunk podcasts were very soft to put it mildly.

The first episode of Dark Vegas Tales called "Ethereum runs on slave tech" exploded in the Ethereum community, exposing the grim reality of the ecosystem dominated by compliant companies and VCs trying to lock users into monetizable permissioned walled gardens while throwing around buzzwords like "decentralization" and "censorship-resistance".

While the Ethereum ecosystem continued marching into permissioned compliance, the podcast introduced new concepts like "slave tech" into public debate and spawned memes like "pussy pools", essentially labeling compliant privacy pools as "Tornado Cash for pussies". Additionally, a few projects like Uniswap responded to criticism by quickly fixing some issues the podcast exposed.

Cypherpunk directory

By 2026, a cypherpunk directory was launched with a focus on reviewed freedom tech with deep technical insights. While a few useful directories exist, most are boring copycats. They either rely on vulnerable, easily gamed crowd-sourcing reviews, or worse, sell you slave tech like Proton and Signal, and promote outdated tech like Matrix and Mastodon.