CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
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 |  Subject: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: Could Bitcoin Fund a Separatist Economy?  Wed Sep 25, 2013 10:54 pm | |
| Cody Wilson is a twenty-five-year-old former law student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the inventor of the Liberator, a gun made almost entirely from plastic pieces created with a 3-D printer; he uploaded to the Internet a blueprint that anyone could use to print such a gun.
Wilson, who espouses libertarian views, created the blueprint to make a point: information should be free. Not everyone agreed with him. In May, after Wilson successfully fired the gun at a range near Austin and posted the design online, the State Department requested that those files be removed from the Web site of his nonprofit, Defense Distributed.
Wilson complied—but not before the files had been downloaded two hundred thousand times, igniting a debate about whether there should be limits to the free flow of information over the Internet, and over the role of the government in enforcing those restrictions.
Wilson lives in “a utopian world in which contraband will be only a notional concept, because enforcement will require policing ideas and blueprints, not simply goods,” Jacob Silverman wrote in a piece about Wilson and the Liberator in May.
A native of Cabot, Arkansas—a small suburb of Little Rock—Wilson said that the State Department’s action persuaded him to drop out of law school and pursue revolutionary activities full-time. In fact, he had been planning his next endeavor for a while. When Indiegogo, a crowdfunding site, booted Defense Distributed’s campaign in August, 2012, for violating its terms of service—Indiegogo said the project related to the sale of firearms; Wilson said it was for the creation of information—Wilson began to raise money by asking people to support him using a currency called Bitcoin: encrypted, difficult-to-trace bits of code that function like cash and can be exchanged over the Internet without a bank or a PayPal account.
Wilson said that he eventually raised two hundred bitcoins for the Liberator—the equivalent of twenty-seven thousand dollars, according to the current exchange rate. His efforts attracted the attention of a twenty-five-year-old Brit named Amir Taaki, who e-mailed him with an invitation to speak at the Bitcoin 2012 Conference, in London. He accepted.
Wilson and Taaki met in person for the first time in January of 2013, when Taaki took Wilson to visit a workspace for hackers in Bratislava, Slovakia, and to anarchist squats in London. They reconnected in Berlin that July and began hashing out a plan to use the as of yet unregulated, untaxed, nearly untraceable currency in a way that would, like the Liberator, undermine the ability of governments to regulate the activities of their citizens.
In the Bitcoin world, where banks no longer serve as intermediaries between people and their money, bank accounts have been replaced by online “wallets” that people can use to virtually store and send bitcoins.
Wilson and Taaki’s project, tentatively known as Dark Wallet, is a simple wallet designed to be easier to use for people who aren’t tech-savvy; they hope that in turn accelerates the currency’s rate of adoption around the world. The wallet will be open-source and free to use. Eventually, Wilson and Taaki hope to create a vast stable of Bitcoin-related tools.
The goal, for Wilson, is similar to what he tried to do with the Liberator: use technology to remove government intervention from his life, and from the lives of like-minded people.
Unlike many current Bitcoin wallets, which can be difficult to download and cumbersome to use, Wilson and Taaki are designing Dark Wallet, they told me, as an easy-to-install plug-in that sits discreetly on users’ Chrome or Firefox browsers. Made for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, Dark Wallet would move most of the energy-sucking process of insuring there’s only one of each bitcoin in circulation, and that they aren’t spent in two places at the same time, to separate servers.
Wilson still lives in Austin, working remotely on Dark Wallet with Taaki, who lives in an anarchist compound called Calafou, outside of Barcelona, and writes most of the code behind the wallet. Taaki and Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, a periodical covering the currency, are part of a Calafou-based organization called unSystem, which came up with the idea for the wallet; they’re working with a team of developers from around the world. Wilson, who will manage the development team behind Dark Wallet, making sure they meet their targets on time, is also producing a video and other material for a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the project.
Dark Wallet should be ready sometime in January or February of 2014, Taaki said, though he’s not committing to anything. “It’ll launch when it’s ready,” he said. And the details of an upcoming crowdfunding campaign have still yet to be solidified, though Taaki and Wilson expect it to launch sometime in October.
The person or group that, in 2008, created Bitcoin—that is, released the protocol that defined what Bitcoin would be—called itself Satoshi Nakamoto. The online comments that Satoshi Nakamoto made before disappearing completely, in 2012, indicate that the creator of Bitcoin, like Wilson, was deeply mistrustful of economic institutions and designed the currency to be intentionally subversive.
Bitcoin is created, or “mined,” as it’s called, by powerful computers that race to solve complex math problems and are rewarded for their work with the encrypted code that is a bitcoin. Today there are 11.7 million of the coins in existence, worth an estimated $1.6 billion, though their value fluctuates dramatically. Nakamoto set the number of coins entering circulation to halve every four years until 2140, when they will plateau at twenty-one million coins and never be produced again.
Because no one can arbitrarily decide to print more bitcoins, and because no banks intermediate the storage and spending of the currency, the value of a bitcoin is determined by market demand. Wilson finds this very attractive.
But where a currency exists, capitalism will inevitably find it. In recent months, Bitcoin has caught the attention of entrepreneurs, many funded by venture-capital firms, who have begun building Bitcoin-related start-ups. The companies include exchanges where people can trade bitcoins, along with services that let people store and spend the currency in places ranging from Amazon-style online markets to brick-and-mortar bars and restaurants.
The mainstream entrepreneurs who are interested in Bitcoin have found a haven in a nonprofit called the Bitcoin Foundation. Writing about Bitcoin in April, Maria Bustillos described its executives as a “rational and sober group of adult administrators” who stand in contrast with the image of Bitcoin users as “wild-eyed kids camping out in half-deserted lofts.” Members of the foundation met in August with several federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve, the F.B.I., and the Secret Service. On the surface, the meeting was an educational exercise, meant to explain how Bitcoin works, but many observers assume it was a step toward regulating the currency.
The foundation, which celebrates its first anniversary this month, calls itself an advocacy group “dedicated to serving the business, technology, government relations, and public affairs needs of the Bitcoin community.” One goal, according to Jon Matonis, the executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, is to educate both public and private interests—including the government—about how the currency operates. (“The Foundation is not pro-regulation as some have claimed, but it is pro-education,” Matonis has written, adding that he supports “bitcoin education for legislative and regulatory entities” and that “lobbying on behalf of Bitcoin is not necessarily anti-market.”)
Wilson, not surprisingly, sees working with the government as a betrayal of Bitcoin’s fundamental purpose. “The public faces of Bitcoin are acting as counter-revolutionaries,” he told me. “They’re actively working to try to diffuse it, and to pollute it.” He was referring, he said, not only to the Bitcoin Foundation but to venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in New York and Silicon Valley who increasingly embrace the currency as a way to profit, but don’t share his revolutionary aims. (Matonis said he is aware of Wilson’s concerns. “I don’t see my role as advancing crony capitalism,” he said.)
Wilson believes Bitcoin should remain the backbone of a separate economy that undermines the government’s ability to collect taxes and to control the value of currency—not be subsumed into the mainstream economy.
“The state is basically allowed because we have all chosen to use these certain institutions to channel our activity and commerce,” he told me. “But when we are enabled, through alternative means and technologies, to channel our commerce as we will, channel our production as we will, the state simply disappears.”
Not everyone agrees, of course, that society would benefit from the disappearance of governments. Wilson used the Liberator to make the point that the government shouldn’t regulate the flow of information; he wants to use Bitcoin to help build an economy outside of the government’s reach.
But his ideology, taken to its logical conclusion, would also leave services like roads, libraries, fire fighting, and policing in the hands of the private sector—whose interests may not be aligned, Wilson’s critics argue, with those of the public at large.
Wilson knows that he could see blowback for his stance against the foundation: as a self-described “crypto-anarchist,” perhaps he shouldn’t be so concerned with who is or isn’t determining the currency’s future. And if the U.S. government attempts to regulate the currency, which seems likely, Wilson will also find himself once again in direct opposition to the government.
Wilson and the suit-and-tie-wearing people at the Bitcoin Foundation share a common interest in bringing Bitcoin to as many people as possible. The foundation seems willing to play nicely with the establishment, and has been open to hearing about the interests of old-school players like venture capitalists and government regulators. Wilson, however, who was only recently firing an illicit gun into the desert, isn’t looking only for a new currency but for another way to liberate himself—and others—from government oversight.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/09/dark-wallet-bitcoin.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true |
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