[HN Gopher] Crypto-Anarchism
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Crypto-Anarchism
Author : mgh2
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-02-27 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| nyolfen wrote:
| encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital
| pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets,
| black markets, collapse of governments.
| dmos62 wrote:
| On a related note, it's amazing to me that Bitcoin's Satoshi is
| still an anonymous figure. Many initial Bitcoin contributors are
| closely aligned with Crypto-Anarchism and some think that Satoshi
| is one of them. Either way, I think not diving into the spotlight
| says something good about a person.
| dogman144 wrote:
| I think odds are strong Finney was a big possibility in the SN
| guessing game.
|
| A single entity or group of entities keeping the faith this
| long and not busting open the SN wallet w/ all those btc's is
| an insane commitment to values. I'm not sure someone could
| really pull that off. And, short of something like a multisig
| key for that wallet was held between a few core folks, of which
| Finney held a key (DNS root servers works like this at ICANN I
| believe), I'm not sure a group of people could hold strong for
| this long, given the price rises.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| I don't think you could do multi-sig transactions on Bitcoin
| until 2011:
|
| https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0011
| dogman144 wrote:
| Ahh good point.
| [deleted]
| croissants wrote:
| > I'm not sure a group of people could hold strong for this
| long, given the price rises.
|
| Isn't it possible that whatever person or group of people
| comprise Satoshi just decided to throw away the key, making
| willpower irrelevant?
| sneak wrote:
| I would imagine the US intel agencies and probably those of
| other countries have figured out the person or people behind
| it; either via passive monitoring or targeted attacks against
| systems they were known to have used, such as GMX email.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Why would they be interested?
| sneak wrote:
| Large amounts of censorship-resistant payment ability can
| be used to challenge sovereign prerogatives (aka "national
| security") up to an including financing a war.
|
| Knowing who or where someone is sitting with 40 billion
| dollars in cash that can be teleported instantly and
| irreversibly to anyone, anywhere on the planet is something
| that I would be surprised if they were _not_ interested in.
| Every other system of moving large amounts of money long
| distances is under some form of sovereign control, either
| via bank /wire regulation, or customs searches in the case
| of physical gold or currency.
|
| My first talk on Bitcoin and digital currencies in 2011 was
| titled "Financing The Revolution"[1] for precisely this
| reason. Cryptocurrencies, due to their censorship
| resistance and inherently transnational nature, ultimately
| pose a threat to sovereign nations if they remain open
| access and fungible.
|
| The CIA asked one of the bitcoin core developers to come to
| Langley and present to them on the matter in 2011. It's
| been on their radar for a while.
|
| [1]: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/camp/2011/Fahrplan/even
| ts/459... https://vimeo.com/27653912
| dmos62 wrote:
| I definitely agree that institutions have an interest in
| surveilling or tampering with the network. It's just that
| the backstory of its invention isn't something I see as
| being practical information.
|
| I'm inclined to nitpick your argument about
| cryptocurrencies being a threat to sovereign nations.
| Isn't everything that isn't censorable and is resilient
| to attack a threat to everything else? Your argument
| could be used to advocate authoritarianism.
| sneak wrote:
| > _It 's just that the backstory of its invention isn't
| something I see as being practical information._
|
| It wouldn't be, except that circumstantial evidence
| suggests that the creator(s) of bitcoin were involved in
| early mining and possibly (perhaps even likely) have
| access to approximately $40B USD worth of the currency,
| having the mining rewards from some ~22,000 early blocks
| at 50 bitcoin each.
|
| There's also other circumstantial evidence that suggests
| that the keys may be lost, the person/people who have/had
| the keys may be dead, that the person/people who mined
| those blocks would likely never spend them, et c. But the
| risk is there, and it's nonzero. Getting more information
| on the matter, and perhaps an identity, from the
| published information available (satoshin@gmx.com) is a
| straightforward and low-cost task for nation-states.
|
| _Almost_ all of the other people who have anywhere near
| that much bitcoin had to give their name and address and
| bank account to someone, somewhere, or they were one of
| the few dozen of us computer nerds who were mining way
| back then, and likely not terrorists /violent
| revolutionaries.
| baq wrote:
| Why wouldn't they? Creating a multi-billion dollar global
| commodity out of thin air is quite a feat. I would want to
| know what the authors of Bitcoin are up to after they moved
| on.
| sneak wrote:
| I think this might be a "great man"-style fallacy. It's
| not so much that _that /those specific person/people_ are
| important, but that anyone who potentially controls that
| much transnational cash is immediately a person of
| interest to those that are concerned with the Master List
| Of All Humans Who Can Potentially Hire An Army And/Or Buy
| Thousands Of Jets/Tanks Immediately.
|
| (People with $40B USD in a bank account aren't usually in
| that list.)
|
| If you're in that exclusive club, it pays to know an
| exhaustive list of everyone else who is in that club.
| dmos62 wrote:
| But how would you make the pitch? Q: How does your
| research project proposal relate to national security? A:
| Bitcoin is a feat and I'm really interested in who
| started it.
| nostromo wrote:
| > I think not diving into the spotlight says something good
| about a person.
|
| It seems likely (or at least plausible) that Satoshi is a
| bitcoin billionaire.
|
| Imagine having a thumb drive or computer in your possession
| with more value than all of the gold at Fort Knox.
|
| I'd want to be anonymous too.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Speculation is that they've passed away, and that satoshi's
| coins will forever remain unmoved. If you were anonymous in
| their position, could you resist the urge yo move some of
| those coins?
|
| If those assumptions break, BTC might become even more
| interesting (read: chaotic) than it already is. Imagine
| injecting 1M coins into the market.
|
| But, with institutional players getting into BTC now, I guess
| such concerns no longer make sense.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Satoshi could have lost the wallet.
| babyshake wrote:
| Satoshi seems to be the main reason that Bitcoin is Bitcoin.
| There's an almost religious type of "immaculate conception"
| quality to it.
| dogman144 wrote:
| "The Dark Net" by Jamie Bartlett was a book with a perhaps overly
| dramatic and actually a bit misleading title/graphics, that
| nonetheless does a very, very good job of explaining the so-what
| of crypto-anarchism. Also, as it was published in 2014, so it was
| a bit prophetic.
|
| To crib a Goodreads review of it, it's actually about:
|
| > Bartlett spends the bulk of the book analyzing the impact and
| development of the internet on human life:
|
| To get to the point, what is really interesting about the crypto-
| anarchist movement is a concept Bartlett does a good job
| explaining. The cipherpunks, for all their libertarian
| wackadoodle beliefs, believed that if you could enable 3 pillars
| of internet use, the impact of how the internet could be used
| would be radically improved. Or like, those 3 pillars would
| enable something really "meaningful" about internet use..
|
| Those three pillars are natively digital... 1) private browsing
| 2) private communications 3) private spending
|
| If you look at how the past 20-30 years turned out, 1 and 2 came
| into existence and proved to have immensely impact: Tor and PGP.
| Tor perhaps didn't shake things too much although has its niche,
| but consumer-accessible encryption today plays fundamental roles
| in internet infra basic functionality the same way that web
| servers and DNS does.
|
| So, the cipherpunks sort of called it accurately on 1 and 2.
| Along comes 3 in Oct 21, '08 with bitcoin's white paper. At a
| minimum, that means btc merits attention in my mind, as it comes
| out of a community that has some other very prescient commentary
| on how the internet could, should, and would eventually work.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _Each node can only decrypt its own part of the message, and only
| obtain the information intended for itself. That is, from which
| node it got the message, and to which node it should deliver the
| message. With only access to this information, it is thought to
| be very difficult for nodes in the network to know what
| information they are carrying or who is communicating with whom._
|
| Caveat: this won't work against global passive adversaries (those
| who can see a significant portion of traffic going in and out),
| nor against governments willing to intercept and implant the
| hardware with backdoors.
|
| I find it interesting that in the early days of crypto, people
| were hopeful that such fates might be avoided. But here we are,
| mostly subservient to a few large corporations --- and also to
| each other, since we carefully watch what we say.
|
| In other words, the goal is to widely broadcast as many thoughts
| as possible, for most people. That seems to be in direct
| opposition with what the early creators of crypto imagined would
| happen, which is a neat outcome (for better or worse).
| motohagiography wrote:
| It's funny to look back on the cypherpunks list as kind of a fun
| cyber punk LARP and then a mere quarter century later, we really
| are living in a world where people live double lives as fugitives
| from privacy invading corporations, mass intelligence apparatus
| surveillance, political gangs infiltrating institutions, and
| navigate a domestic civil information war abetted by shadowy
| international forces, where even the tools we use to maintain
| some semblance of a private autonomy are suspected traps and
| honeypots, and there is an arms race on to defend civilization
| against drones and robots.
|
| It's like we won't believe we live at the edge of a dystopia it
| until there are flying cars.
| willeh wrote:
| Growing up as the typical nerd, I used to think that trust was
| something that needed to be eliminated, that other people weren't
| worthy of trust and that we all ought to be using TOR, bitcoin,
| I2P. All our chats be over XMPP with OTR messaging. But growing
| up, and getting beyond the world of early adulthood I've come to
| realise that most people can be trusted most of the time. Who
| doesn't instinctively look away when someone is typing in a
| password, most bosses aren't trying to scam you out of your pay
| check. In fact most people instinctively help others - even
| giving them a little push along.
|
| As amazing, magical and occasionally necessary things like TOR,
| bitcoin and I2P are what truly is wonderful is that basic trust,
| that small but significant [?], much more than clever algorithms
| and data structures is what makes our lives work.
| fsflover wrote:
| This is completely missing the point of why one should be
| anonymous and use I2P etc. Surveillance harms journalism and
| activism, making the government too powerful and not
| accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have
| the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone
| should have privacy to protect them. It's sort of like freedom
| of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for
| everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
| aloisdg wrote:
| > In fact most people instinctively help others - even giving
| them a little push along.
|
| You may like the book Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I agree with your observation, most people are nice.
|
| What I realised growing up is that every day someone is forced
| to give a percentage or their profits or face jail time,
| someone gets killed because we socialise the cost of war,
| people get spied on by state actors and surveillance systems.
|
| All of this despite most people being nice.
|
| The centralisation of power is a weakness and it's being
| exploited by those who are not nice.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| I would say in our capitalistic system you should have an
| inherent _distrust_ of your communications channels. Google is
| reading your Gmail, Facebook is tracking the amount of time you
| spend looking at any image on its services, many third parties
| are trying to reverse your identity as you browse. All to sell
| or otherwise monetize your data.
|
| There are many bad actors out there government and commercial.
| alentist wrote:
| That is hardly unique to a "capitalistic system", as history
| has repeatedly shown.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| We live in a capitalistic system today, these are some of
| its properties. I said nothing about trust in other
| systems.
| alentist wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > I used to think that trust was something that needed to be
| eliminated ... I've come to realise that most people can be
| trusted most of the time
|
| You are confusing the NEED to trust with the ABILITY to trust -
| and the are almost opposite things in some regards.
|
| You need to trust car drivers to stop at a traffic light not to
| run over you. This is disempowering: your life is in their
| hands. If we can remove the need to trust drivers (e.g. with
| automatic braking) it's good.
|
| If you CAN trust your neighbor to water your plants when you
| are away this is empowering. You can freely choose what to do.
|
| As a side note, traditional anarchists are all about mutual aid
| and solidarity, while "anarcho-capitalists" support selfishness
| (links below)
|
| (By the way, it's written Tor, not TOR)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_(organization_theor...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfishness
| dogman144 wrote:
| What you're missing is that software enables entities you
| shouldn't trust to work at scale in a way that does make it an
| issue.
|
| Staying very high level, we're primed to think of privacy in
| human-defined terms in a way. Your mom snooping over your
| shoulder on what you're typing/viewing at age 12 on your first
| PC is the cause.
|
| As a result, with tech privacy, we do a notional looking up and
| looking around, like you are, to evaluate it... ok, I know 20
| people have my finsta, I only give out my number to like less
| than 2 people a year, I don't have a google account so no need
| to clear my cookies or use a VPN, and so on...
|
| What you're not accounting for that:
|
| - the very small amount of stuff you do let leak out because
| "most people can be trusted most of the time" gets ingested by
| that "most" delta. There is one or few very untrustworthy
| entities, you're right, but they still touch your online
| presence. This is the difference maker because of the scale
| these entities can work at (BlueKai is an example).
|
| - Shadow contacts, and so on, are a thing. You get sucked in
| either way by other's bad behavior
| croissants wrote:
| A few years ago I read a book called _Maximum City_. The premise
| is "let's look at the lives of several people [including a
| powerful police officer, a dancer, low-level criminals, high-
| level criminals, very poor people just getting by and,
| remarkably, a young Hrithik Roshan] in circa-2000 Mumbai". I also
| happened at the same time to be within hearing distance of a few
| discussions that touched on crypto-anarchism.
|
| The thought I remember having is that crypto-anarchism seemed to
| require being embedded in a well-functioning state, but that this
| assumption was kind of just waved away. I had this thought
| because so many of the people in _Maximum City_ are just at the
| mercy of the slightly more powerful people around them -- paying
| protection money, not getting paid for work, paying bribes -- and
| there 's not a well-functioning government that can help them. It
| seemed like said people would love a lot _less_ anonymity ( "hey!
| look! this guy is threatening to beat me up if I don't pay him
| every month! that's illegal!"), and would be well-served by tech
| infrastructure that makes them _more_ visible.
| acobster wrote:
| More visible to whom? To the well-functioning state? I don't
| follow. The whole premise of anarchism is that a truly free
| society is one _without_ a state. The presumed benefit of the
| kind of visibility you 're talking about also rests on the
| assumption that the state is aligned with the interests of the
| wider population, whereas anarchism proposes that the state is
| fundamentally misaligned with collective and personal freedom.
|
| Maybe your point is that _because_ crypto-anarchism appears to
| rest on this state-friendly assumption, it isn 't "real"
| anarchism. I don't know too much about crypto-anarchism and
| haven't formed an opinion either way, but if it's as cozy with
| anarcho-capitalism as the quotes at the end make it out to be,
| I'd probably agree with you.
|
| (edited for formatting)
| dmos62 wrote:
| Detour: This thread has a lot of downvoted comments, but not
| a lot of replies. Further, a lot of the downvoted comments,
| like the above, are well argued. I, for one, would love to
| see more involved engagement.
|
| Anyway. Anarchism is actually a broader concept than
| believing that state is fundamentally misaligned with the
| collective. That's a branch of anarchism if anything. A
| better definition of anarchism is the belief that every
| institution or authority has to be able to justify its
| presence and should be dismantled if it can't (quoting Noam
| Chomsky). Following that defintion, I'd say that crypto-
| anarchism is anarachism where redistribution of power is done
| via technological means, with an emphasis on technological
| solutions to privacy and trust.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| You make a critical point, actually in light of the OP
| topic. The building of crypto-anarchist tools might lead to
| the insight that certain forms of state have little
| coercive power (because the tools restrict or redirect the
| actions the state can take), and so anarchists are okay
| with the state.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > The thought I remember having is that crypto-anarchism seemed
| to require being embedded in a well-functioning state, but that
| this assumption was kind of just waved away.
|
| Not sure about anyone else, but speaking from my own
| philosophising, you're subtly wrong/missing the point: it
| requires _not_ having any of your critical physical substrate
| /infrastructure embedded in _poorly_ -functioning state. The
| distinction is that, in a lot of (over-)simplified models,
| there _is_ no physical substrate, so what kind of state it 's
| embedded in is a vacuous question. Compare, eg, any
| (over-)simplified model of computation that doesn't consider
| physical problems like cosmic ray bitflips or hard drives dying
| in fires/wearing out (ie, most of them).
| f430 wrote:
| Without punishment and regulatory framework, all forms of
| anarchism whether its confined to human morals and beyond, are
| doomed for failure.
|
| Without rules, without a centralized arbitrator of consequences
| for breaking rules including the arbitrator, the bad part of
| human nature will prevail and destroy stability in the long run.
|
| ex) Communism, anarcho-cults, narco-anarchy
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You can privatise protection and arbitration, removing a
| central arbitrator
|
| Eg. http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
| f430 wrote:
| More fantasies from a throwaway account. Someone is going to
| suggest blockchains in this thread. I guarantee it.
| lxdesk wrote:
| Speculation is enabling to non-coercive frameworks. If I say a
| token has a use value that I will use to supply goods and
| services, you may want to acquire that token. If I can also
| control issuance and supply of that token, then, short of
| direct threats of violence or enslavement, you must negotiate
| with me or with a marketplace.
|
| Most of the ill in the world has something to do with
| gatekeeping replacing speculative activity.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I've always found the name "crypto-anarchism" a bit unfortunate,
| given that it has a remarkably close structure to the "crypto-
| fascism" word, which is more than 60 years older, but with a
| totally different use of the prefix "crypto".
|
| "crypto-fascism" uses the greek prefix, also used in the word
| "cryptography", while "crypto-anarchism" just use "crypto" as a
| shorthand for "cryptography" (and unsurprisingly, this use has
| also been adopted by "crypto-currencies", which themseves
| originat in the crypto-anarchist movement).
| ergwwrt wrote:
| Crypto-Buildism.
| nostromo wrote:
| Mine the cryptocurrency of your mind via meditation.
|
| Discover insight tokens and trade them for inner peace.
| the_only_law wrote:
| So what color should we make the Picardia?
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(page generated 2021-02-27 23:02 UTC)