Bitcoin And The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

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Some of Bitcoin’s properties sound abstract. Properties like digital ownership, censorship resistance, decentralization and more. But the deeper you dig into the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the more you realize that Satoshi Nakamoto even implemented some mutually exclusive properties simultaneously: freedom of privacy and property rights. In fact, Bitcoin reconciles an uncensorable pseudonymous system and an extreme form of property rights. I would like to show why this combination was actually almost impossible by using an analogy based on the example of barbed wire in Timothy C. May’s “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

We first find the “barbed wire” analogy in one of the shortest but most exciting texts of the cypherpunk movement, the aforementioned “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” While the common man had never heard of the internet at the time, the minds of the cypherpunks, who were only forming in the early 1990s, had already painted a clear picture of the information age and its promises and dangers. Those who find the thesis in “The Sovereign Individual” to be prophetic should definitely keep in mind what the cryptography anarchists were already discussing a decade earlier.

With works like “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems To Make Big Brother Obsolete” by David Chaum in 1985, this once-nascent movement set a counterpoint to the tendencies of technology moving toward centralization and control, even if this actual danger was still a long way off. May was a libertarian-minded former Intel employee who had retired from the company at 35. He became a cofounder of the cypherpunks email list and wrote influential texts. Among them was the “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” which he distributed at a hacker conference in 1988.

In it, May points to the great future of cryptography, which would eventually realize the grand vision of anonymity and privacy in cyberspace. In what is an almost frighteningly visionary essay from today’s perspective, May shows what possibilities encrypted communication between people could offer. He not only compared encrypted communication to the invention of the printing press, but chose an analogy that had it all: the invention of barbed wire.

May wrote, “Just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.”

Interestingly, it is clear from the comparison that the imminent (state) surveillance and restriction of the individual goes hand in hand with the invention of barbed wire. It is cryptography, however, that cuts the barbed wire around intellectual property. From today’s perspective, the mental image May chose to paint can hardly be surpassed in terms of genius and ambivalence. After all, thanks to Bitcoin, the image even works in two directions.

Barbed wire is an often underestimated invention, and few people knew what implications it would hold. In the U.S., the so-called “frontier,” or the borderland between the settled or “civilized” and the undeveloped areas, had moved farther and farther west. It was seen as a divine mandate, a “Manifest Destiny,” to settle the whole country. To this end, President Abraham Lincoln had launched the Homestead Act in 1962. It stated that any “honest citizen” could take up land free of charge. All one had to do to claim his property was to make it his own through agricultural use.

(Source) An advertisement for Glidden’s barbed wire. The farmer had registered his patent in 1873.

But tilling the fields in the vast prairie was difficult, for the land was practically a single open space. It was inhospitable, overgrown with wild grasses, sometimes difficult to access and used by cowboys, ranchers or Native Americans, sometimes almost nomadically. Fencing off land was either expensive or ineffective because neither wooden fences nor planted hedges could keep out unwelcome visitors.

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