About

Cypherpunk Times is an independent multi-chain publication launched in May 2022 as Decred Magazine, to cover all things Decred. Then rebranded in July 2023 to encompass projects that embrace the cypherpunk principles.

Cypherpunktimes.com is a hub for participating crypto content and multimedia creators. The platform uses open sourced technology and the content delivered will be distributed under the Creative Commons licence Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

There are some obvious challenges with moving to a multi-chain publication. To avoid contention at a later date, I propose these initial publication rules:

Publishing rules

To be included in the “Cypherpunk Times” publication, a project should have at least 2-years of continued development. The project must be open source and producing permissionless tech.

To reduce the publication becoming heavily one-sided, I propose a maximum cap of five articles a week per project, with a possible reduction to three / four once more communities become active.

Publication aims are based on several principles. Content that reaches outside these fundamentals should include appropriate advice or warnings. Principles include:

• Open source
• Non-custodial
• Permissionless
• No KYC policies or restrictive licensing
• Peer to peer
• Encryption and privacy
• Decentralised

Acceptable content:

• Project achievements, milestones, technical achievements and news updates
• Innovation and emerging technologies
• News related articles
• Educational tutorials and product onboarding

Unacceptable content:

• No fluff pieces that make exaggerated claims or hyped expectations
• No shameless promotion, advertising, or linking to non-relevant sources

Decred

Decred is a new type of organisation (Layer 1 - DAO), that is founded on the principles of sound money.

• 21 Million Max Cap
• Permission-less
• Peer to peer
• Secure
• Private
• with a transparent coin supply

Decred started life as peer to peer cash with a built in governance system to help it evolve. Through this evolution it has seen the need to extend on the original peer to peer premise to include peer to peer exchange. Decred is building the first crypto exchange that will be truly Decentralised, Open sources, fee-less, with an interoperability level that can see all project listed without the need for a middle men (including Decred).

Firo

Firo is a privacy-preserving blockchain that seeks to protect users’ financial privacy. Its core team is behind the protocol design and implementation of the Lelantus and Lelantus Spark privacy protocols. Formerly known as Zcoin, it has also implemented various privacy-preserving protocols over its existence, leveraging discrete-log based zero-knowledge primitives. Further, they provided the anonymous voting infrastructure for the Thai Democrat Party elections in 2018.

Beyond privacy protocol development, Firo is also expanding its use case to become privacy infrastructure by enabling Spats (Spark Assets) which allow user created assets that share the anonymity set with Firo and all other assets on the platform.

Digibyte

DigiByte is a decentralized global network. It’s an open source initiative, Proof of Work blockchain, which utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO)  model of accounting.

DigiByte focuses on cybersecurity, digital assets, payments and secure communications technologies.

We believe in immutability, self sovereignty, inclusivity and that DigiByte is a public utility for all. Come build with us.

Editor Window

The editor window is fairly self-explanatory. Add a featured image, add a post title, and write your post.

It’s best to write your post in a text editor first, that has spelling and grammar checking, this will reduce issues later. Two editors I like to use include “Grammarly” and “Ulysses”, both have great advanced features for spelling and grammar.

Using the + button on the left gives use access to a whole host of features including importing images, videos, toggles, callouts etc… Images can also be drag and dropped onto the page.

To make sure your post loads quickly, it’s best to keep the size of images to a minimum. Most image compressors or exporters can produce great quality large images that are less than 1 MB, the optimal size for a web image is about 0.3 MB.

Editor Sidebar

On the top right of the editor screen, there’s a sidebar to help with additional information and SEO.

• The Post URL gets generated automatically, but you can also edit here
• Publish date
• Tags – This is how the platform forms collections. Content should include at least one tag. For example, the project tag, the product tag or other relevant tags.
• Post access = Public
• Excerpt – This is the post description, promotional text and the SEO description for the post.
• Author
• Template – This is the featured image style, of which there are two “Default” and “Full Featured Image”

Featured images

There are two kinds of featured images in our publication, “Default” and “Full Featured Image”. These can both be selected from the editor window sidebar, top right of the screen.

Full Featured Image Template:
When no text is included in the featured image, use the “Full Featured Image” template. This template combines the title text with the image and adds some nice fade and scroll effects, as seen here – https://www.cypherpunktimes.com/decred-art-be-water/

Default Image Tamplate:
The “default” template is best to use when your image has text.  On the home and tag pages, these images crop from the centre to facilitate different screen sizes. For this reason, it’s best to have a safety area for text on the left and right of the image. Here are the setting I use for my featured images that include text:

• Image width = 2560px
• Image Height = 1440px
• Text safety area left and right = 250px

In the default template, it’s also possible to have a different featured image from the first post image. This helps with various scenarios, including when you’ve got a featured image that has the same design as a video. In this case, you’ll only see the video and the featured image is excluded. As seen here - https://www.cypherpunktimes.com/bison-relay-lightning-network-management-how-to-rebalance-your-channels/