Way back in the day when the majority of people concerned with privacy were conspiracy theorists, criminals and pedophiles, I was a confused anarcho-communist.
I had given up christianity a couple of years before and had recently turned to the atheistic side of agnosticism. I was reading alot of crimethinc, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Kropotkin etc. I had some pretty bad social anxiety and had been on chatrooms of various kinds since my dad got a computer when I was 13.
I don't remember how I found freenet and the iip community but I loved it, a bunch of paranoid weirdos like myself talking about privacy and debating philosophy and politics.
Besides the protection from the government and anyone else trying to see what I was doing, the thing I liked most about freenet was that i didn't need to run a server to have a site on freenet. No one did. An entire freenet site is distributed to nodes throughout the network. Files could be uploaded for free. The only downside to all this freedom was how slow it was.
I haven't tried to use freenet in a few years, after i2p started and iip stopped i switched over for a bit and slowly dropped out of anonymous internet, the deep dark web, but i remember some other things I saw starting up while I was there. Some things that eventually got insanely popular and profitable and hyped up.
I remember when the slashdot bitcoin article came out. I thought, " oh, I've heard of crypto currency before." Some one on i2p in I don't know what year was talking on i2p irc about crypto tokens, tokens that had a cryptographic hash to prove that a transaction had taken place, it didn't move too far along as I knew. I've tried to go through the logs to find it but i couldn't. Maybe they went on to work on it further, I don't know.
There had been an anonymous bank called yodel bank that pooled egold to make as anonymous transactions as possible. It was all run through irc scripts I believe.
I remember talking to someone who had created an encrypted file system that had another encrypted partition inside it. Years later I read that Julian Assange was on the team that made it. Maybe i talked to him before he was famous.
I don't want to talk about the what ifs, what if i had stayed in the general community? What if i would have bought 100$ of bitcoins when the slashdot article was released? I'm where I'm at now and I learned some expensive lessons.
I'm ready to get back into it! And i think steem power is going to help me, the internet, and the world.