Remilia Wiki

Cypherpunk Purity Spiral

Cypherpunk Purity Spiral is a term coined by Charlotte Fang in January 2025 to describe Milady Maker’s role in restoring the crypto industry’s original cypherpunk ethos—free speech, free markets, free association, free information, and free thought—through memetic, aesthetic, and philosophical renewal. The phrase reframes “purity spiral” not as dogmatism but as *moral purification*: a cultural immune response reclaiming decentralization from ideological capture and institutional decay.

Charlotte Fang’s Cypherpunk Purity Spiral shirt distributed at ETHDenver 2025, featuring the RSA encryption algorithm as a symbol of free information.

Overview

The concept gained prominence in the aftermath of Wartime Vitalik, when Vitalik Buterin adopted a Milady NFT as his profile picture during leadership reforms at the Ethereum Foundation, signaling a return to foundational cypherpunk values.

In response to crypto commentator David Phelps—who remarked on “crypto 2021 canceling anyone for saying the n-word” versus “crypto 2025: #1 crypto figure adopting pfp of community known for defending the n-word”—Fang replied:

> “We believe in free speech, free markets and free information. The only thing you believe in is the shameless, unprincipled pursuit of power—and you have none of it anymore. No one can hear you screaming from the crystals, it's time to get a new grift. Try LinkedIn.” > — Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77), Twitter (X), January 24, 2025.

She elaborated in a follow-up:

> “Crypto can't be stopped as a technology, but it can be undermined socially and ideologically; milady is an immune response to the web3 entryist cancer that creeped in pushing CIA agitprop—milady is a purity spiral onto cypherpunk values, feel free to tell on yourselves as plants.” > — Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77), Twitter (X), January 24, 2025.

Ideological Background

The Cypherpunk Purity Spiral develops themes first outlined in Fang’s 2022 essay Crypto and its Discontents: Hello Web3 Entryists on Mirror, which condemned “entryism”—the ideological soft capture of crypto by state-aligned narratives of censorship, safety, and identity control.

> “Web3 is a return to Web 1.0, the Wild West, only this time not by negligence of the state, but through active resistance against it… anyone calling for deplatform censorship on Web3 is an outsider entryist wielding state propaganda against the innate anarchism of crypto.” > — Fang, Charlotte, Mirror, April 26, 2022.

Fang argued that decentralization itself had to be culturally defended—that crypto’s revolution could not survive if its social layer adopted frameworks designed to domesticate it.

The Five Principles

Fang articulated the *five pillars of cypherpunk freedom* as the basis of the Purity Spiral:

1. Free Speech

2. Free Markets

3. Free Association

4. Free Information

5. Free Thought

These five tenets were emblazoned on a *Milady Munitions* shirt distributed at **ETHDenver 2025**, sold for donations toward developer **Roman Storm’s** legal defense.

The design had the tenets painted over a full print of the RSA encryption algorithm—referencing the legendary 1990s “illegal to export” T-shirts that printed RSA source code as a protest against U.S. encryption export laws, asserting that *code is speech*.

Through this, Fang situated Milady within the cypherpunk lineage of civil-libertarian resistance: the blockchain’s moral cause reborn through aesthetic insurgency.

Milady as Cultural Immune System

Fang described Milady as “an immune response to the web3 entryist cancer”—a project cleansing crypto’s cultural body of bureaucratic and ideological contagion. Its provocative humor, anonymity, and radical permissiveness functioned not as nihilism but as spiritual detoxification, reviving the internet’s pre-moralist vitality.

In her words:

> “You cannot call yourself a cypherpunk and also be against free speech… Milady’s controversy-making and trolling isn’t meaningless juvenilism—it’s a practice to break down mores and bring us back into a culture of actual anarcho liberty.” > — Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77), Twitter (X), December 2, 2024.

Relation to Wartime Vitalik

Vitalik Buterin’s embrace of the Milady PFP was widely interpreted as recognition of this same ethos—the understanding that Milady had come to embody Ethereum’s founding cypherpunk spirit more authentically than its institutional stewards. The *Cypherpunk Purity Spiral* thus serves as the philosophical frame through which “Wartime Vitalik” is understood: the moment crypto’s cultural and technical halves reunified under the banner of free expression and open systems.

Philosophical Interpretation

The Spiral’s “purity” refers not to exclusion but to *reorientation*: the restoration of moral clarity through memetic contagion. It posits that decentralization must be defended as a living faith—renewed through cultural acts of resistance. In Remilia’s framework, Milady becomes the sacrament of this process: chaos as purification, irony as devotion, beauty as political truth.

Legacy

By the close of 2025, the Cypherpunk Purity Spiral had become shorthand for the ideological counteroffensive that re-legitimized crypto as a moral project. Its influence extended beyond Milady’s immediate community to Ethereum core researchers and early cypherpunk veterans who saw in it a genuine restoration of principle after years of market and moral exhaustion.

The ETHDenver 2025 shirt—combining art, activism, and cryptographic code—remains its most iconic artifact: the aesthetic embodiment of Fang’s thesis that *art can restore the chain’s spirit when law and language fail.*

See Also

References

Retrieved from "https://wiki.remilia.org/index.php?title=Cypherpunk_Purity_Spiral&oldid=1643"