Cryptocurrency: BTC Mag on CryptoAnarchy

[grarpamp]

Today's crypto crowd much too wussified and bleating
for regulation to mention cryptoanarchy proper...


Bitcoin 'Barbed-Wire' & The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-and-the-crypto-anarchist-manifesto
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-crypto-manifesto.html
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-and-the-sovereign-individual-thesis
https://www.chaum.com/publications/Security_Wthout_Identification.html
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/homestead-act#:~:text=The%20Homestead%20Act%2C%20enacted%20during,plot%20by%20cultivating%20the%20land.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FARMERS_barbed_wire_1874_advertising.jpg
https://ideas.ted.com/why-barbed-wire-yes-barbed-wire-was-as-transformative-as-the-telephone/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048l0s1
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40448594
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fence_Cutting_Wars
https://ideas.ted.com/why-barbed-wire-yes-barbed-wire-was-as-transformative-as-the-telephone/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoins-blockchain-is-the-timechain
https://www.citadel21.com/bitcoin-as-real-estate




Comparing Bitcoin to barbed wire from Timothy May’s “Crypto Anarchist
Manifesto” can give insight into the gravity of this seemingly
abstract invention...

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.

A single and, at first glance, tiny invention changed everything from
the nature of agricultural use to the treatment of public lands and
even the concept of ownership: the invention of barbed wire. The new
type of fence was advertised in 1875 as the "Greatest Discovery of the
Age." Patented by Joseph Glidden of Illinois, it was "lighter than
air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust." And indeed, it brought
about a transformation of the American West. The double, twisted wire
with spikes was used everywhere: by railroad companies demarcating
their lines, by ranchers demarcating fields or raising cattle and by
anyone else who used it to mark and protect what was "theirs."

Barbed wire was a double-edged sword. Settlers loved it because it
made property a fact. Cowboys, who used the free land extensively,
hated the dangerous wire that led to injury and infection. Native
Americans were driven farther and farther off their land because their
concept of property was not to draw firm boundaries. No wonder they
quickly referred to barbed wire as "the devil's rope." Old-time
cowboys also lived by the principle that the great prairie was common
property and cattle could run free under the law of "open range."

Barbed wire was a disruptive invention and a fight quickly broke out
over it. In the "fence-cutting years," masked gangs like the Javelinas
or Blue Devils cut fences and threatened settlers who put them up
until lawmakers stepped in. The barbed wire was to remain.

It is interesting that cypherpunk Timothy C. May uses the analogy of
barbed wire to counter-image the invention of cryptography. It was an
equally underestimated and seemingly small invention, but one that
successfully played "wire-cutter." The ideal of the free "open range"
was restored and unlike the gangs that ended up being taken down,
mathematics was simply unstoppable.

(Source) Barbed wire versus the open range – a settler fencing off his plot.

The mental image is great because it turns the logic on its head.
Barbed wire drew boundaries in freedom. But a tiny pair of wire
cutters can undo them. And, as if with a battle cry, the “Crypto
Anarchist Manifesto” ends, "Arise, you have nothing to lose but your
barbed wire fences!"

Today, with Bitcoin, one of the cypherpunks' visions has arrived in
reality. In fact, we are exactly on the path that the “Crypto
Anarchist Manifesto” had prophesied, in both cryptographic and
economic terms. The text said that cryptographic methods would,
"fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government
interference in economic transactions." We are well on our way to that
reality, thanks to Bitcoin.

But despite how unappealing the image of the barbed wire that divided
a vacant land into plots may seem to us, Satoshi Nakamoto's
mathematical-economic invention has a few similarities to the
disruptive invention of barbed wire in the 19th century. At first
glance, Bitcoin is also a small mathematical discovery that comes
across as unassuming, but Bitcoin fundamentally changes a few things.

The ambivalence is that, on the one hand, it is indeed the vision of
an "open range" that cuts through resistance, borders and (government)
surveillance like wire cutters. On the other hand however, Bitcoin
allows precisely the effortless demarcation of ownership. Bitcoin is a
bit like "barbed wire" for property rights in the digital world. This
is because it is the ingenuity of this invention, cryptographic
encryption in conjunction with the timechain, that turns what was
initially only a theoretical right to property into a reality.

This is because Bitcoin transactions, although pseudonymous, show many
formal aspects of property rights as we know them from real estate.
For example, ownership is publicly registered and shown without gaps
across the interconnected blocks. This ownership is publicly
accessible and verifiable for each individual. And it is ensured that
no duplicate claims exist. The timechain becomes a kind of public land
registry. Transferring these features and processes to a pseudonymous
system is indeed unique — barbed wire and wire cutter at the same
time.

While critics of the technology bother with superficial analogies like
the tulip mania, Bitcoiners know that fundamental philosophical
debates underlie all the issues at stake in Bitcoin. Philosophers like
John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau would write entire books about the
fundamental questions of this digital commodity, if they were still
alive.

After all, what do we actually own besides our bodies? That which we
cultivate with our work? That which we transform? Or simply that which
we can demarcate?