Story of a cypherpunk in plain clothes - Part one

Growing up in the countryside with a second-hand tower

Gabriele Vernetti grew up in a small village in the province of Cuneo, surrounded by fields. His first encounter with the digital world came around the age of nine or ten, when his father brought home an old decommissioned office computer. From that moment, his curiosity for technology never stopped. The internet connection, the first modem with its distinctive sounds, downloads that took hours and often broke off halfway through: these are the memories Vernetti carries with him as the foundations of a passion that would take him far.

The cracked-software dealer of the science secondary school

At the liceo scientifico in Cuneo, applied sciences track, Vernetti quickly found a like-minded group of friends. Sharing music files, films and video games via USB drives soon became something more structured. When a classmate showed him how to obtain any software for free, the shift was immediate.

When I discovered there was a way to essentially get any software you could want for free, we started telling every kid at school: come to us, we’ll install it for you.

Vernetti and his friend went so far as to print a flyer listing the services they offered – Office suite, AutoCAD, Photoshop, antivirus – and distribute it at other schools in Cuneo. The attempt to expand the model beyond their own school ran into a fundamental obstacle: trust. Without knowing people in person, nobody trusted them enough to install third-party software on their own computer.

Sport and the protective character of the changing room

Alongside his passion for technology, Vernetti also developed as a footballer in the youth sector of his local club, playing as a centre-back from the start. Years in the changing room shaped his character, developing what he himself describes as a natural protective instinct toward teammates in difficulty. An ankle injury – diagnosed as avascular necrosis of the talus – forced him to stop and then undergo surgery, ending his competitive career. After recovery, he joined an amateur team in the village, eventually becoming its organisational coordinator: registrations, CSI league enrolment, line-ups and weekly logistics.

The thread connecting cypherpunk culture and file sharing

One of the most interesting moments in the interview is the connection Vernetti draws between file-sharing culture and the ideological roots of Bitcoin. This is not a superficial analogy but a precise historical continuity.

Bram Cohen, who invented BitTorrent, is one of the most significant practical figures of the cypherpunk movement. The idea of creating free software, usable by anyone, so that information can flow freely across the globe via the internet: that is something Bitcoin shares at its roots.

Bitcoin, according to Vernetti, is a product of the same cultural movement that generated the peer-to-peer protocols of the past twenty-five years. The difference is that instead of bits encoded as films or songs, the information payload becomes an economic transaction. This awareness did not arrive immediately upon discovering Bitcoin, but consolidated over time.

The Politecnico, startups and the encounter with Bitcoin

Vernetti arrived at the Politecnico di Torino to study computer engineering and from his first year met Giorgio and Salvatore, two figures who would become central to his path. The university environment, with its business incubator and frequent startup-focused events, immediately stimulated the urge to build something. The idea the group began working on concerned transparency in the agri-food supply chain: creating a technological tool capable of reducing the trust required toward intermediaries between producer and end consumer.

It was during one of these events at the Politecnico, around 2018, that the group came across an existing startup using blockchain to trace food as it moved along the distribution chain. The reaction was immediate: they had to understand what blockchain was. That research led directly to Bitcoin, recognised as the first blockchain. From that point, study focused on the original protocol, with an increasingly deep understanding that would lead Vernetti, over time, to become one of the maintainers of Stratum V2, the protocol at the centre of one of the most significant contests over the decentralisation of Bitcoin mining.