“Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.” – George Orwell, 1984
Orwell wrote in his novel Animal Farm: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced without any formal ban.” This became thoughtcrimes in his novel 1984, a story of how independent thinking becomes illegal.
Arweave is the cypherpunk chain built for thoughtcrimes.
Cypherpunks’ influence on crypto
The cypherpunks were a loose, global collective of programmers, cryptographers, and activists in the 1990s who believed privacy is a human right, and that cryptography is the best way to defend it.
Bitcoin was one of the first utilities to emerge from this movement. Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, was guided by cypherpunk ideals. He built a peer-to-peer financial network that removed centralized control at a time when trust in institutions was collapsing.
Bitcoin’s release in 2009, during the peak of the global financial crisis, wasn’t a coincidence. The genesis block even included a headline from The Times:
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
Bitcoin was more than a novel technical innovation. It was a political act, a rejection of a system that bailed out bankers, printed endless money, and left regular people to deal with the fallout.
Bitcoin’s first real utility? Buying goods online (mostly illegal). Silk Road, darkweb markets, money laundering. It’s a permissionless network, so of course bad actors showed up. But today, Bitcoin sits among the top 10 global assets, just below silver. Countries are creating Bitcoin reserves. Some even use it as legal currency.
Despite what the media says about the crypto industry, it’s not just about crime. But it also lost its cypherpunk roots. Somewhere along the way, the movement lost the plot:
Thoughtcrimes on Arweave, that’s a different story.
What are thoughtcrimes?
In Orwell’s 1984, thoughtcrime was the act of thinking anything outside the Party’s approved narrative. The moment you question, the moment you doubt, you’re guilty. Even if you stay silent, eventually they find you.
That is not far off from how censorship works today. It is not just platform bans. It is algorithmic throttling, shadowbans, vague “misinformation” labels, and platforms quietly rewriting their policies on the fly.
We saw this during COVID and times of political unrest. Platforms and governments can subtly shift the boundaries of discourse without anyone noticing.
Arweave is the thoughtcrime chain
If Bitcoin created a permissionless network for money, Arweave created one for data.
It’s a permanent, decentralized archive. Anyone can upload. No one can delete. Data is stored for at least 200 years thanks to its endowment-based storage model.
Data storage isn’t flashy. Most people enter crypto through memecoins and NFTs. But Arweave stayed true to the mission in full cypherpunk fashion. You won’t hear about it unless you go deep. But when the world needs a place to store valuable information, the kind that governments and platforms want to erase, it ends up on Arweave.
Look at the Hong Kong protests, the war in Ukraine, and in Gaza. Primary sources, videos, journalism censored or erased elsewhere are being permanently stored on Arweave.
If your government doesn’t like you speaking out about war, human rights abuses or political corruption, where do you turn? If governments can’t shut you down directly, they can quietly pressure tech companies to remove information. Because you, the user, don’t actually own any of that data.
So instead, you turn to Arweave. A network with no geographic or political borders. It exists as a protocol that does not rely on public trust. It was designed with the belief that unpopular, uncomfortable, and inconvenient information must have a place to live, even if no one likes it.
Instead of the motto “don’t be evil,” Arweave can’t be evil. That guarantee is built into the protocol. And now, more protocols are being built on top of Arweave, pushing the protocol-over-platform narrative forward.
The permaweb is the cypherpunk stack
Cypherpunks don’t just want data stored forever. They want permissionless web access without surveillance. Arweave is one part of a larger permaweb cypherpunk stack:
- No more cloud storage: Permanent, censorship-resistant data on Arweave.
- No more AWS: AO - the decentralized supercomputer
- No more DNS takedowns: AR.IO for permissionless domains and web hosting
- No more honeypot VPNs: Anyone Network, a private relay network with no single point of failure
- No more platform censorship: Odysee, a video publishing platform backed by Arweave
Final thoughts
We don’t get to decide what future generations will find valuable. We can’t predict what today’s truths will become tomorrow’s misinformation and vice versa. But we can preserve the raw record beyond the reach of governments and corporations.
Arweave is the cypherpunk chain, built for thoughtcrimes.