Monero in the Cypherpunk and Libertarian Tradition
2026-06-07 , Hall 1 / Sala 1

This talk makes the case that Monero represents a working piece of counter-economic infrastructure in the sense proposed by Samuel Edward Konkin III.
The presentation situates Monero within the broader intellectual lineage running from Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism and Konkin's agorism through the cypherpunk movement of the early 1990s. It draws on Hayek's theory of concurrent currencies and denationalisation of money to show that Monero's privacy-by-default architecture is not merely a technical preference but a direct answer to a theoretical problem posed decades earlier. Where Rothbard, Hayek, and Friedman formulate normative postulates, Monero replaces the norm with an algorithm and law with cryptography.

Mirosław Karczmarczyk is an independent researcher at the intersection of monetary theory, political philosophy, and cryptocurrency. His interests focus on the ideological and structural connections between the cypherpunk movement, libertarian and anarchist traditions, and privacy-preserving technologies. He is presenting related work at the Austrian Economics Meeting Europe conference, May 2025.
Based in Kraków, Poland