In 1993, before most people had ever touched the web, a mathematician named Eric Hughes wrote a line that predicted your whole future: "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age." He wasn't talking about hiding. He was talking about choice. The right to reveal yourself to the world on your own terms, and to reveal nothing when you choose nothing. His answer wasn't a law or a protest. It was code. Hughes and a small group of cryptographers understood you couldn't ask governments or corporations for privacy, because they profit from taking it. You had to build it yourself, in math, and give it away. "Cypherpunks write code," he wrote. Someone had to write the software that defends privacy, so they were going to write it. Fifteen years later, one of those someones published a whitepaper for peer-to-peer electronic cash. Money you can hold and move without asking, without announcing, without a permission slip from anyone. Hughes saw the shape of it in 1993. Most of the world is only catching up now. The tools of your freedom were never going to be handed to you. Someone had to write the code. Someone did.