Oleg Andreev
Month
По-русски: http://bitnovosti.com/2014/01/02/cryptoanarchy-and-anonymity/
Crypto-anarchy is not some crazy utopian ideology, but a very viable thing that unfolds in front of our eyes this very moment. The Internet and Bitcoin will soon allow people solve social problems in a novel way: instead of ancient formula “the strongest wins and beats the shit out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.
But first, lets start with some history.
Cypherpunk movement started as a mailing list in 1992. In 1993 Eric Hughes publishes a “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” [1]. In 1994 Timothy C. May publishes “Cypherpunks FAQ” [2].
Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ:
2.3. “What’s the ‘Big Picture’?”
Strong crypto is here. It is widely available. It implies many changes in the way the world works. Private channels between parties who have never met and who never will meet are possible. Totally anonymous, unsinkable, untraceable communications and exchanges are possible.
Transactions can only be voluntary, since the parties are untraceable and unknown and can withdraw at any time. This has profound implications for the conventional approach of using the threat of force, directed against parties by governments or by others. In particular, threats of force will fail.
What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “crypto anarchy.” (Voluntary communications only, with no third parties butting in.)
In 1994 Nick Szabo coins the term “smart contract” [3] and describes all use case categories that are talking about today: from digital cash to synthetic financial assets and smart property.
In 1998 Wei Dai & Nick Szabo came up with the ideas for “b-money” [4] and “bit gold” [5] during their conversation on the libtech-l mailing list. Wei Dai captured the essence of the movement in an immortal quote:
I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. 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.
In 1999 Nick Szabo coins term “intrapolynomial cryptography” [6] for the entirety of proof-of-work algorithms and describes what we call now a “private blockchain”, a chain of property ownership enforced by a consensus of “property club” members [7]. The latter article is especially valuable today as it explicitly states that the job of voting in the consensus mechanism is used only for secure execution of the agreed-upon rules and database replication, but not for changing the rules themselves.
In 2004 Hal Finney implements a RPOW server [8] (“Reusable proof of work”) inspired by the bit gold proposal. The RPOW scheme uses a secure processing module that simultaneously acts as a mint and as a custodian for the ledger of proof-of-work tokens.
In late 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto publishes an overview of Bitcoin [9] and on January 3rd, 2009 releases the code and begins the blockchain.
Bitcoin is the exact implementation of the system envisioned by Tim C. May, Wei Dai and Nick Szabo. The only requirement is for transacting parties to remain anonymous. If there’s no trace to physical persons, there is no place for the violent intervention and thus the contracts can only be enforced according to the voluntarily agreed-upon rules between the parties. Bitcoin allows encoding these rules right in the transactions so they are automatically enforced by the whole network.
In practice, we cannot imagine living in full anonymity. Human beings live in a physical world and enjoy a lot of physical things. Anonymity is not something you can easily manage like a single encryption key. It must be maintained via careful dissemination of one’s actions among actions of others. And since the network activity is easily recordable, one mistake is enough to reveal oneself. In other words, the cost of anonymity is rather high compared to the benefits. Does this mean crypto-anarchy is an utopia?
I would argue, it’s far from it. Cypherpunks being rigorous scientists made a much stronger assumption than needed in practice. For transacting parties it is enough to have costs of cheating (e.g. resorting to violent coercion) meaningfully higher than the cost of following the contract (that is, keeping the promise). If that condition holds for the majority of interactions in society, there will be a great incentive for people to protect themselves against remaining rare cases of cheating thus keeping the system sustainable. Anonymity is simply one of the ways to raise the cost of the attack.
Bitcoin raises the cost of many kinds of attacks, going far beyond protecting against central banks meddling with money supply.
First, all sorts of computational services will flourish. Machines never need to disclose their physical locations and can freely automate both payment verification and payments themselves. Denial-of-service and spam can be largely eliminated by simply requiring a smallish payment for every request.
Second, personal services can be protected by peer-to-peer insurance deposits [8] that literally raises the cost of cheating by making both parties agree to a greater sacrifice (“bilateral insurance deposit”).
In a similar manner, crowdfunding can be fully insured by allowing raised funds to be reverted if the majority of shareholders decides to do so.
Finally, systemic predation by the state becomes economically impossible. Most modern states fund themselves by debasing money supply (also known as “bond issuance”, “budget deficit”, “inflation”, “quantitative easing”, “stimulus package”). Bitcoin-based economy simply does not allow this as it is very cheap to store bitcoins and verify transactions yourself and completely avoid all kinds of fraud associated with modern banking. As central banking disappears from the state’s arsenal, federal government activities including wars become unfunded and quickly come to an end.
Local governments may continue their operations funded by local taxes, but that would become increasingly voluntary. Extracting bitcoins costs much more than protecting them. There is no highly centralized and monitored banking network, so it’s much harder to track taxable transactions. Every additional tax evader defunds the local police department and makes it safer for the next person to underreport earnings if he wishes to do so. Considering that the law enforcement is paid only a small portion of the total budget to be extracted (50% goes to bureaucrats and the rest to other public services), consistently extracting bits of information from millions of individuals is unsustainable in the long run. If anyone is good at stealing bitcoins, they are much better off doing it alone and taking all profits for themselves.
Governments, of course, can also tax in kind (like your underreported Ferrari or a house), but this would be even costlier than seizing any kind of money and those costs must be paid by the state in bitcoins that it does not have to start with.
If this speculation does not sound to you like a complete lunacy yet, here is the fun part. Most governments are completely broke already and can only pay with the IOUs they print. When people start a massive run for bitcoins to protect their wealth, everyone will be able to earn bitcoins for their work, except those who work for the government. Policemen, public school teachers and alike will be the first ones to notice prices rising faster than their salaries. They will be the first ones to switch jobs or become largely corrupt on all levels, like it was in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats will smell the approaching panic and, instead of trying to retain control over the employees, will privatize as much public goods as possible. Again, exactly like during the fall of the Soviet Union. People will see how all promised public services are either abandoned or stolen, and this time everyone will have a method to protect their own property and do business voluntarily and in an even safer and cheaper way than before. Crypto-anarchy will quickly become a boring reality without the need for anyone to remain fully anonymous.
[1] http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
[2] http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt
[3] http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Economics/SmartContracts.html
[4] http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt
[5] http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20011217091748/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20020202165211/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html
[8] http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm
[9] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
UPDATE on March 22, 2016: correct attribution and timeline for Nick Szabo’s proposals.
More people are willing to “invest in Bitcoin”. Before doing that they need to understand what it is and what it isn’t. Someone asked me if it’s okay to “invest in BTC for a year at current prices”. This way to put it is to admit that you do not understand the value of Bitcoin. You will buy at $1000 and sell all at $800 during a sharp reaction to some piece of bad news. Don’t do that.
Bitcoin is a great bet. If most people own a little bit of Bitcoin, we will wake up tomorrow in a new world. If they don’t and everyone goes home, your investment is fundamentally worthless. Bitcoin is as pure as money can ever get: it’s either a global standard, or it’s purely an object of art valued by few. You do not invest in Bitcoin, you switch into it.
If Bitcoin becomes the world money, people will massively sell off their currencies, gold, silver and some low-risk investments (like bonds or extra real estate). Rough calculations give us a figure higher than $10M of today’s dollars per bitcoin.
But what fascinates me personally about Bitcoin is not a nice monetary reward, but a transformation in our society that comes as a side effect. Even if me and you put no money in Bitcoin today, our lives will be so much better if Bitcoin wins.
Real Bitcoin value proposition is in removal of large-scale destruction and giving an unseen before amount of economic freedom.
As an example, the total debt of the U.S. government is $17 trillion and growing [1]. This debt is owned by the banks that create dollars in exchange for that debt. Government simply promises to pay off this debt with the same money (plus interest) that it is supposed to extract from the taxpayers later. It’s not only impossible economically, but it’s logically invalid. To return more debt-based currency, they’d need to issue even more debt.
You may think these numbers do not affect you personally, but consider what this money is being spent on. Total cost of the war in Iraq since 2003 is an astonishing $6 trillion [2]. Almost one third of today’s total debt. During this war more than 1 million people were killed [3]. In other words, folks working in military earned $6 million per one person murdered.
Ask yourself, who gave these trillions for the war? What investors thought it might be a good idea to invade Iraq, lose a bunch of money and have people hate you? The answer is that there are no investors. All this money is being made up by the central bank in exchange for more government debt. And due to tons of laws, regulations and taxation people have to accept this funny money for their work.
Bitcoin does not allow this. It’s a single, absolutely transparent ledger where anyone can see how money is being created. There’s a fixed supply which cannot be increased overnight by a single man. If people adopt Bitcoin as their standard money, governments would have to pay for their wars from taxes. And people will feel how their taxes actually work. Not even mentioning that taxes will be much harder to extract if peaceful citizens decide to oppose their government. By simply being a world money, Bitcoin will prevent massive murder and destruction. This alone is worth making a bet on, in my opinion.
After removing disastrous wars, people will find themselves not only in a safer world, but also with even more opportunities. Anyone can trade with anyone else on the entire planet, absolutely safely, anonymously or publicly. Every teenager can join the global market whenever he wants. Every person can save money for a rainy day without Paul Krugman telling him why it’s good that his savings lose in value. Every business is more protected against racket by having secure cash as an ultimate insurance against temporary losses. Programmable contracts [4] allow incredible new business models that are otherwise impossible, lowering the cost of lawyers and auditors. The entire internet will shift from advertisement to more directly funded services as micropayments become viable.
If you understand all of this, you should desire these changes and participate in them. If you don’t agree with me, you should not invest in Bitcoin at all. You can’t have just a cute payment protocol without all global consequences that necessarily follow. Bitcoin is a single package: either it completely fails, or it turns all people into wealthy peaceful anarchists.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Nick Szabo:
“Often the protocol designer can’t figure out how to fix a vulnerability. If the attack one needs a trusted third party to protect against is not a serious real-world threat in the context of the application the designer is trying to secure, it is better to simply leave the small hole unplugged than to assign the task to a trusted third party. In the case of public key cryptography, for example, protocol designers haven’t figured out how to prevent a "man-in-the-middle” (MITM) attack during the initial key exchange. SSL tried to prevent this by requiring CAs as trusted third parties, as described above, and this solution cost the web community billions of dollars in certificate fees and lost opportunities to secure communications. SSH, on the other hand, decided to simply leave this small hole unplugged. The MITM hole has, to the best of my knowledge, never even once been exploited to compromise the privacy of an SSH user, yet SSH is far more widely used to protect privacy than SSL, at a tiny fraction of the cost. This economical approach to security has been looked at at greater length by Ian Grigg.“
Some people say that volatility of Bitcoin prices makes it poor “store of value”. You never know how much exactly do you have today: $10500, $9600 or $11201. When you pay for something you may pay 5% more than what it was just a minute ago. Or, if you are a merchant, you may receive 5% less than what you expected. That could be a problem.
We asked experts and got some evidence that it is not quite correct. Bitcoin has been a great store of value over the past 4 years. Almost everyone who invested in Bitcoin and kept it for more than a year enjoyed gains from 200% to 4000%. This means that 10% daily volatility is no longer a problem. When you pay with Bitcoin you enjoy more than 90% discount. Who cares if it’s one day 91% instead of 93%?
Similarly, merchants who consistently accept bitcoins and keep most of them around are compensated for small losses on volatility with big gains on their savings. For the past two months I was paying for bagels nearby with bitcoins and half of the time the price was going slightly down one hour after the payment. However, in overall, the guy accepting them finally made more than three times what he would receive in euros. Of course, last two months were better than in average, but over a one-two year period everyone was better off no matter when they invested.
Those merchants who do not want to invest in Bitcoin, but wish to enjoy zero-fee transactions without fraud, can use BitPay or Coinbase.
Bitcoin is both volatile and is a great store of value so far.
PS. This is not an endorsement to buy Bitcoin. You should not do that based only on the price history. If it was a Ponzi scheme or a huge bubble, the price would look the same. You should only invest if you study what Bitcoin is and how important it may (or may not) become in the future. Otherwise, do not put more than a dollar in it.