Monero Circular Economy: From Cypherpunk Hundreds to Sovereign Millions
XmrBazaar's User Growth Chart: Freedom's Exponential Awakening Curve
“One person after another, each in his own way, senses that time is running out on a dying way of life.”
“First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics.”
— The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
I sometimes open a random paper book to a random page for a spark of inspiration, or just to break the trance of staring at my screens (mostly hoping problems solve themselves). This morning, I opened The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg and read:
"First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics. As they do, they will transform the character of governments, shrinking the realm of compulsion and widening the scope of private control over resources."
It struck a deep chord inside me. Here we are in November 2025, and we’re just in the “hundreds” phase. XmrBazaar has ~5.7K real users: people actually opting out, building a Monero Circular Economy, not just trading funny imaginary virtual tokens between themselves. This is the cybereconomy the authors predicted back in 1997, over a decade before Bitcoin’s white paper:
" …much of the world’s commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds. When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings."
Do you see what I see? Being among these first hundreds of cypherpunk pioneers (future millions strong!) filled me with a grateful happy smile this morning. Yet this joy is shadowed by a profound and terrifying sorrow: there will be martyrs — victims of a desperate state apparatus — among us, like the Samourai devs, facing max sentences from the US government, or Roger Ver, held for ransom. We’re living out that dire warning from 1997:
"Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectable, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax–de facto or even overt hostage-taking will be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion.
Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption.
Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. For the same reasons that the late, departed Soviet Union tried in vain to suppress access to personal computers and Xerox machines, western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means."
Yet, here’s the good news for all of us, backed by math, human brain studies, and another spot-on prediction from James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg:
"…we all stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nationstate, creating new forms of social organization in the process. This will be far from an easy transformation. The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past."
Exactly: it IS speeding up. Check this chart of XmrBazaar’s real users (counted only after PGP key setup, since bots can’t PGP... yet). Doesn’t it look like a perfect exponential curve?
You can continue reading here if you want :)
“One person after another, each in his own way, senses that time is running out on a dying way of life.”
“First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics.”
— The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
I sometimes open a random paper book to a random page for a spark of inspiration, or just to break the trance of staring at my screens (mostly hoping problems solve themselves). This morning, I opened The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg and read:
"First in scores, then in hundreds, and ultimately in the millions, individuals will escape the shackles of politics. As they do, they will transform the character of governments, shrinking the realm of compulsion and widening the scope of private control over resources."
It struck a deep chord inside me. Here we are in November 2025, and we’re just in the “hundreds” phase. XmrBazaar has ~5.7K real users: people actually opting out, building a Monero Circular Economy, not just trading funny imaginary virtual tokens between themselves. This is the cybereconomy the authors predicted back in 1997, over a decade before Bitcoin’s white paper:
" …much of the world’s commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds. When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings."
Do you see what I see? Being among these first hundreds of cypherpunk pioneers (future millions strong!) filled me with a grateful happy smile this morning. Yet this joy is shadowed by a profound and terrifying sorrow: there will be martyrs — victims of a desperate state apparatus — among us, like the Samourai devs, facing max sentences from the US government, or Roger Ver, held for ransom. We’re living out that dire warning from 1997:
"Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectable, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax–de facto or even overt hostage-taking will be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion.
Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption.
Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. For the same reasons that the late, departed Soviet Union tried in vain to suppress access to personal computers and Xerox machines, western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means."
Yet, here’s the good news for all of us, backed by math, human brain studies, and another spot-on prediction from James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg:
"…we all stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nationstate, creating new forms of social organization in the process. This will be far from an easy transformation. The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past."
Exactly: it IS speeding up. Check this chart of XmrBazaar’s real users (counted only after PGP key setup, since bots can’t PGP... yet). Doesn’t it look like a perfect exponential curve?
You can continue reading here if you want :)
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