HUNDRED YEAR CRYPTO ANARCHY

This is Tim May. The team recently gave a lecture entitled "Thirty Years of Crypto Anarchy."

I like the title so I tear it up, but we will add 70 years because this lecture is also aspirational.



Crypto Anarchy has got a bad rap. Something about the whole idea of ​​anarchy. We are not trying to overthrow the establishment and bring down the nation-state here. You can if you want, but please do it on your own time.

The government actually has a pretty important job. It creates and enforces rules that enable civilization. Without rules, we will become a group of small tribes fighting each other, and life will be brutal and brief.

In the absence of a central authority, we can use technology to enforce regulations. That's all crypto anarchy is: Create self-enforcing rules without involving government. They should thank us for easing their workload.



Proprietary rights, for example.

Back in the wild days in the wild west, there is no good way to control land rights. Cattle ranchers can not keep their cattle from getting lost, farmers can not plant crops without being trampled by cows.

Barbed wire is a big problem because it lets settlers take over their land and fix it.



Barbed wire is not the perfect solution. For example, this does not match a set of wire cutters. In physical conflict, it is cheaper to attack than to survive.



This is Ft. Knox. There's something like $ 200B worth of gold stored here. A game theorist might think that it is economically rational to spend up to $ 199B to get into the vault and steal gold.

Except that we have a $ 600 billion defense budget. In the physical world, anyone with the greatest weapon can make rules.



This does not apply to the digital world. Encryption is cheap to survive and expensive to attack. To force a 128-bit RSA key would take a million billion years with a supercomputer.

The threat of violence is useless.



Without a coercive threat, we can interact and transact as we choose.



This is Attorney General Jeff Sessions. She sucks. I do not know if he will be the Attorney General any longer. He led a campaign to record the largest black market.

Jeff Sessions likes to point out that people have OD'ed and died of drugs they bought on the black market, but look - people will not stop doing drugs. Narcotics is one of Mexico's biggest exports.

Street drugs involve a lot of violence and blackmail because they have no central authority to keep them organized. Darknet market gives way for opponents to compete without killing each other.

Technology does not change what people want in the world, just eliminate the use of violence to get there.



Every time a market closes, three new ones appear in place. Over the last few years, the biggest hidden market is AlphaBay. The day after Alphabay disappeared, vendors posted a signed message at Reddit to prove they were still available, and to announce that they had moved to the next market.

Public key cryptography is not just for encrypting private messages. It also gives evidence that the sender is the person they say. When buyers and sellers make transactions, they sign messages with their private key. Signatures become digital identifiers.

So this is the problem with the darknet market. Platform is not important. Users expect the site to eventually disappear, because there is no market admin that survives 3 years without exit scam or raid. What matters is the user.

Even if a site goes down, reputation and relationships remain.



For most of existence, identity is local. People can selectively disclose information depending on where they are.

Now that we have all these big data companies, there's a stupid idea that people have only one identity that follows them everywhere.

This is a visa application to enter the US. It asks for every email address you use for the last five years, and lists all your social media accounts. Cripes.



True Names is a sci-fi novel from the 80s, in which online hackers are trying hard to keep their legal identity a secret. If the government finds their true identity, maybe they kill them.

This is where we are headed. Not part of the killing, but a section on separate digital and legal identities.

Keypairs is not a social security number. We can have more than one digital identity.

Before we find a company, the business owner is personally liable for any loss incurred in the business. This means that if your company sells bum products, you can be sued and enslaved by creditors.

In the 1800s, we created the idea of ​​a limited liability company that was legally independent of their founders. By separating the company from its owner, the entrepreneur may take a new business venture, or some business, without the responsibility of one company affecting another company.



Many people who do ICO and lawyers ask about whether tokens are securities. Who cares. Do not do ICO with your real name, duh.

ICO has raised more than $ 1.3 billion this year. How many investors know who the founders are? This is one of the anonymous ICOs for decentralized name servers and token exchange. The founder trades nothing more than the Github and Reddit karmic repositories.

Reputation is a guarantee. No one knows who the black market admin is, but they are believed to be escrow. If the amount of money in custody exceeds the operator's estimated future earnings, they will be out of fraud. Evolution is the market with the highest value until it comes out with escay $ 12 million. Do not trust people with more money than their reputation.

The real name is a barbaric relic. The most valuable blockchain to date has been created under a pseudonym.



When Tim May wrote The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, it was not a call for action or a kind of push. It's just an observation. We now have the technology to create and implement our own rules, and this knowledge can not be stopped. We can rail against the inevitable, or use this tool to build the world we want.

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