# Inevitability of cypherpunk for a proper civilization Assume an universe inhabited by intelligent agents able to potentially live forever (i.e. do not having a fixed life expectancy). Such agents will continiously develop and rise to more and more power, eliminating each and every possibility for emergence and growth of new/"younger" agents. Eventually, the set of agents will become fixed, they will get centralized, put into hierarchy - and the whole universe will come to a global steady state of "monotheism": a single power that rules all. This power will not evolve - and will inhibit the development of the rest of the universe under its control. Thus, we have a trilemma: either * agents must have a fixed life expectancy (this how biology works and that's why evolution "invented" death) * agents must not be able to come to the totality of their power no matter how far they evolve * universe will degrade and instead of technological singularity it will come to a single degenerate state (similar to "heat death", "Big Chill" - or "paradise") The only option which is acceptable for me personally – and which unlocks future technological singularity in form of multi-agent system with evolving individualities is the second one. The only way to technologically enable the second option is to put a foundational laws into the universe design which enables "hiding" of less powerful agents from more powerful - i.e. privacy. It seems that the Universe we live in enables that – at least existence of such mathematical constructs as hash functions and discrete logarithm problem for elliptic curves suggests such an option. Thus, any civilization striving for a long-term survival needs to develop privacy technologies and (as a consequence) censorship-resistance at the scale of inter-agent communications. The above also gives a perfect explanation to the Fermi paradox: the evolved civilizations must hide behind cryptographic systems which makes them for the external observer to be indistinguishable from the rest of cosmic background. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://dr.orlovsky.ch/blog/inevitability-of-cypherpunk-for-a-proper-civilization.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.