What does cryptoanarchy mean
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What does cryptoanarchy mean
By Oleg Andreev
Posted January 29, 2017
The word โanarchyโ simply means rejection of a notion that any human being (or group thereof) can be a kind and wise despot to rule all other human beings. However, many people think โanarchyโ means absense of order, lack of ethics and complete apocalypse.
โCryptoanarchyโ means a practical path to protecting human beings against wanna be despots (that is, protecting humans against each other).
Why is it โcryptoโ? Lets be more specific about what we want to achieve:
- Organizations that do what you like should be protected against censorship and shutdown. If you and others want to participate in them, you should have cheap and safe means to do so in a hostile environment.
- Organizations that do what you donโt like should not be able to extract support from you. They should rely on voluntary support from their participants and waste as many resources as possible to gain involuntary support.
In other words, we need asymmetric security for society: cooperation should be cheap, intervention should be expensive.
โCryptoโ comes in play because most cryptographic primitives and protocols are built around the idea of asymmetric security: cheap to use, expensive to break.
Turns out, personal communications, money and financial markets are all digital and can be secured via cryptography. Identities can be obfuscated to protect against physical attacks. Money can be decentralized and therefore censorship-resistant, and also cheap to secure. Entire financial markets can be distributed and adaptive to support complex economical relationships even when some parts of the economy are under political pressure.
Implementing these two points does not automatically guarantee happiness to everyone. But it certainly improves individual liberty and gives room for many people to figure out how they want to live without being locked into a vision of a narrow group of psychopaths.