Are crypto technologies the ultimate way out of authoritarianism?
For my latest podcast, I read some early cypherpunk texts, including Wei Dai’s “B-Money” where he describes how crypto-anarchy created out of alternative forms of money that will be untraceable and unregulatable.
I personally find this idea very exciting – not to mention impressively prescient, given that it was written in 1998 – in that a mode of community cooperation that exits the government system seems like the only way to rid ourselves of the current levels of authoritarianism experienced globally.
I also see this as the true power and implication of crypto technologies – not a get rich scheme, but rather a true anarchic exit of existing power structures.
Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.
Until now it’s not clear, even theoretically, how such a community could operate. A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way to enforce contracts. Traditionally these services have been provided by the government or government sponsored institutions and only to legal entities. In this article I describe a protocol by which these services can be provided to and by untraceable entities. (W. Dai – B-Money)
Link to Wei Dai’s paper – http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt
Link to my podcast:
Apple – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pdamx-31-2-the-cypherpunks-live-on/id1691736489?i=1000673369430
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