What if Jim Bell (actually it was really Tim May's idea) was right? Sure, assassination markets don't exist right now, even if they could exist now, in theory, with anonymizing networks and digital cash. But imagine for a moment that the cypherpunk vision of the future, in which we "transcend" the constraints (barbed wire fences) of the physical world, and manage to arrange commerce beyond the control of governments, using the aforementioned tools, is actually not realistic.

Imagine that instead, people decide to "flip the script" like this: to enforce political will in the physical world by using these same tools. Obviously "assassination markets" described a crude version of that. But imagine a scenario that's more subtle: the government wants to enforce behaviour A in public, and treats !A as a very serious crime. Then imagine person X walks into the street and does !A, but instead of getting arrested by the police around him, everyone instead deliberately turns away. This person X seems to have power that is outside the government somehow .. how?

Imagine that there are cameras all around the street he is on, but not only government surveillance cameras, also drones and perhaps throwaway invisible devices that are recording. Imagine networks of extremely violent vigilantes (but not government! separate ones) that monitor these feeds. Imagine that they dox and investigate people doing things they don't like, and then murder them or their loved ones, or who knows what horrors.

This is all very fanciful in a dark way, but my point is that the view "cypherpunk means we can avoid state power and not challenge it" may miss a ton of subtlety. Notice that in my fanciful description, it's pretty criticial that these "vigilantes" can act somehow anonymously, and that would be the hard part.