Ian Grigg writes at http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000381.html:
: FC exile finds home as Caribbean Brit : : Vince Cate (writes Ray Hirschfeld) created a stir a number of years ago : by relocating to the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla, purchasing a : Mozambique passport-of-convenience, and renouncing his US citizenship : in the name of cryptographic and tax freedom. : : Last Thursday I attended a ceremony (the first of its kind in Anguilla) : at which he received his certificate of British citizenship. : : But Vince's solemn affirmation of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, her : heirs and successors was done for practical rather than ideological : reasons. Since giving up his citizenship, the US has refused to grant : him a visa to visit his family there, or even to accompany his wife to : St. Thomas for her recent kidney surgery. Now as a British citizen he : expects to qualify for the US visa waiver program. : : Is this the end of an era, a defining cypherpunk moment? "Cypherpunk" responds in the comments: > I never saw this kind of thing as being central to the cypherpunk > concept. In fact, to me it seems like the wrong direction to go. The > point of being a cypherpunk is to live in cypherspace, the mythical land > where online interactions dominate and we can use information theory and > mathematics to protect ourselves. Of course, cypherspace is inevitably > grounded in the physical world, so we have to use anonymous remailers > and proxies to achieve our goals. > > But escaping overseas is granting too much to the primacy of the > physical. It would be better for Vince Cate and other expats to help > create anonymizing technology and other infrastructure to allow people > to work and play freely in the online world. > > And tying it back to this blog, the gold at the end of the cipherpunk > rainbow is a payment system which can be deployed and exploited > anonymously. That's hard, for many reasons, not least because most people > are happy and eager to share information goods for free. Modern-day > online communism (creative commons, open source, etc) actually undercuts > cypherpunk goals by reducing the need and motivation for anonymous > payment systems. How can you buy and sell information goods online, > when everyone gives everything away freely?