I've played around with this thought myself.

And I can reveal that in Starknet, it also crossed our minds—"Why should we go to market makers? Why should we approach exchanges? There will be trading demand for this token—let them list us, they will have a gap in their offering if they don't, Bitcoin didn't need a team to approach any CEX or market maker!" (I serve on the board of the Foundation, it is not my token, I don't own any of its supply).

It is a perfect level of arrogance that anyone proud of their project should have. If you're not this arrogant about the quality of your project, you are you even working on it?

So you're not the first nor the last to think this way. In Starknet's case, it came down to community expectations. Starkware which started the whole thing is an $8bn company, which raised over a hundred milion dollars, and people have come to expect certain things with high-profile token launches. One such expectations is market makers, and the reason for that is that you want to reduce volatility that is caused by a lack of liquidity in the order books.

Why? Because, you don't want a person to buy the STRK token at $8 only to find out moments later that it's trading for $1.

For Bitcoin, this was okay. Bitcoin existed for a few years before market places even existed. The type of places where you'd buy bitcoin were refurbished Magic The Gathering trading card trading websites. The whole industry was extremely immature. You had no reason to expect order depth, CEX support, market markers, etc. for bitcoin. Who would you be expecting it from? Satoshi had already left before a serious infrastructure for trading bitcoin had emerged. So you had no company backing it and no associated expectations, and no competitors to compare it to.

You ask what a cypherpunk token launch looks like in 2024. Many devout bitcoin believers believe that one of the unique things about bitcoin is that its launch was immaculate and irreproducible. You cannot create the same circumstances for it, because the world which bitcoin launched into does not exist anymore. The main problem being here that people today find ways to snipe the supply:

1. If Bitcoin was launched today and it was an exciting project with trailblazing technology, specialized actors would find ways to mine all of the supply and regular consumers could never have participated with their laptops while an immature market for mining it emerged.
2. If Bitcoin was launched today and it was not an exciting project, it is unlikely that it would become very successful.

The best example of this is the launch of Grin (MimbleWimble). In many ways, whoever invented it did everything they could to reproduce the Bitcoin launch. Whitepaper dropped anonymously into an IRC channel. All the attention to it was grassroots. They launched using Proof-of-Work only and devised a particular hashing algorithm that was designed to be resistant to specialized ASIC-chips, to level the playing field.

But the day that Grin launched, there was already an industry of GPU-miners standing ready to mine it, which they did, meaning that the average Joe with his graphic card hard very little chance to capture any of the supply.

You can read some of my previous writings on fair launches in my first Orb reply.

The most cypherpunk launches today, in my opinion, are projects that profile themselves as memecoins in which the founders don't premine the supply, but even that is not sufficient. For example, you can launch a Solana memecoin, throw the whole supply into a liquidity pool and step away, but it may be too cheap for a single person who is not a founder to come in and buy a vast amount of the supply from the liquidity pool in a nascent stage of the memecoin gaining recognizeability.

More creativity is needed. Right now, there are 3 projects which come to mind that explore the design space in an interesting way here: XEN, Ordinals (BRC20) and Runes. Each of these type of tokens make it so that the way to get an allocation in the initial supply, you have to "burn" the blockspace of another blockchain, and this process takes place over many blocks/weeks/months/years.

None of these projects are perfect though.

XEN has a bunch of staking/ponzi mechanics built into it. BRC20-tokens leave undesireable traces on the Bitcoin blockchain which could make it difficult as a starting point for a new cryptocurrency.

I think if I was doing this today, I would explore doing part of the launch as an open Runes mint, which burns Bitcoin blockspace but doesn't leave the same amount of undesireable traces on the blockchain (called UTXO-bloat), but I'd also airdrop part of the supply to communities I favor (in the Ordinal/Ethereum/Solana NFT communities). Miladies for example?

In any way, I think the closest way for something to emerge organically in a way that resembles Bitcoin, for regulatory reasons and other reasons, it would likely have to start out as a meme, growing in appreciation over the years organically, exploring open mint dynamics if you want to avoid airdrops altogether.