
Crypto-anarchy does not require anonymity - oleganza
http://blog.oleganza.com/post/71410377996/crypto-anarchy-does-not-require-anonymity
======
vbuterin
Cryptoanarchy is a means of organizing society under conditions of a very high
defense/offense asymmetry (ie. if it costs Y resources to cause X harm to
someone, the ratio Y/X is high). The greater that this asymmetry is, the more
useful cryptoanarchy becomes. Cryptoanarchy is already becoming increasingly
successful with reputation systems and private arbitration, and the reason is
that we are increasingly living in a world where that is the case, since with
the internet it's difficult to find people, action happens across multiple
jurisdictions, and greater economic decentralization in some respects makes
regulation more difficult. In fact, what is particularly interesting is that
Y/X is not just high, it's sublinear - if I'm three times as powerful, it is
much less than three times as hard to hurt me. Arguably, in the face of
governmental attackers, Y is sometimes _not even an increasing function of X_
- since one's main defenses against an entity that is nearly all-powerful in
the sphere of violent force are speed and privacy, and one's speed and privacy
both reduce with size, it's easier for the government to nab a single $100
million foe than it is to nab a single $10000 foe. You can see this clearly
with the DPR seizure. The more extreme that this condition becomes, the
stronger an influence crypto-anarchic law protocols will have on society.
That's the general principle; anonymity is only one aspect of it.

~~~
yetanotherphd
That is a very nice summary of the ideas, much clearer than the article
itself.

I think that the problem with your claims about the defense/offense asymmetry
is that it is based on abstractions that only exist because of the government.
All of the reputation/private arbitration systems that exist online still
exist in the context of nations with laws that prevent, for example, someone
killing you because you posted a bad review of them. Or simply stealing your
goods in person ("X robbed me in the street and stole my clothes. I would not
do business with him again").

Once you have established an upper limit on the kind of offensive actions that
can be taken, it is easy to bootstrap reputation systems. But I don't consider
this as evidence that there is a high defense/offense asymmetry at a
_fundamental_ level.

~~~
vbuterin
There are several cryptoanarchist responses to that:

1\. Some government-like mechanisms should definitely exist on the level of
the physical world (this could be anywhere from Rothbardian private law to a
concept of private cities to a more moderate vision of a Georgist government
that taxes exclusively resources and perhaps even pays out a basic income).
What matters is that these governmental mechanisms should/will stay out of
trying to restrict human interaction.

2\. We are already moving into a less materialistic society, and the trend
will continue in the future. For myself personally, all of my physical
possessions combined have a resale value under $1k and a replacement cost
under $2k. If you mug me, you will get a moderately good cell phone, some cash
in my wallet and maybe an old laptop, but not anything nearly worth the tiny
risk that I or a bystander will be able to overpower you. When all wealth is
stored in data or the mind, locked behind passphrases and encryption, physical
crime simply becomes not all that interesting.

3\. Contrary to Oleg's post, people's online identities should be cleanly
separated from their physical identities, and it should be cryptographically
difficult to make the mapping from the guy who wrote a bad review of you to
the physical person living in a certain city.

You can feel free to choose which of these you find more and less convincing;
I have my own opinions on the issue and certainly do not represent "the
movement" as a whole to any significant extent. But you are correct that the
high offense/defense asymmetry characterized by the (cryptoanarchists' vision
of the) internet does heavily rely on existing infrastructure; if this were
not true, then we would have been living in a society organized largely along
cryptoanarchist lines for the past ten thousand years.

------
makomk
Depends on your definition of "anarchy" I guess. If your system is non-
anonymous, you _will_ get power structures arising amongst the participants
that, in practice, will allow the more powerful participants to safely cheat
the less powerful ones.

In fact this is already happening to a certain extent. Remember pirateat40's
Ponzi scheme? Part of the reason it was so successful was because he got on
board influential, trustworthy members of the Bitcoin community and they
created an atmosphere where anyone who called out the scam was seen as a
scammer themselves. Many of them got away scot-free.

Edit: also, it doesn't matter what kinds of peer-to-peer insurance or escrow
schemes you come up with, sufficiently powerful participants can and will get
people to carry out transactions outside of those safeguards. We've seen this
on Silk Road already, where the big sellers managed to create a culture where
handing the money over early and bypassing escrow was necessary for almost
everyone.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Most anarchists are fully aware that power structures are inevitable. Defining
anarchy as their absence is a little silly.

I like thinking of the goal of anarchism as "smaller power structures that you
can more easily swap out."

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simbolit
_Policemen, public school teachers and alike will be the first ones to notice
prices rising faster than their salaries. They will the first to change 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,_

I may be reading this wrong, but it seems the author sees the scenario above
as preferential to the current system. I am no libertarian, but how can 90s
Russia be a good example for a society? Do people saying something like that
sometimes leave their abstractions and ask people who were on the ground back
then? average life expectancy fell more than 5 years between 1989 and 1994.

~~~
VMG
> I may be reading this wrong, but it seems the author sees the scenario above
> as preferential to the current system.

I think you are reading this wrong. The author describes a likely outcome
under the assumption that some modern societies share characteristics with the
former soviet republic.

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DennisP
Governments will probably always be able to tax land ownership, given that the
register of deeds defines it. Enforcement is easy: if the tax doesn't show up,
change an entry in the register and auction off the land. Georgists and
geolibertarians claim it would be beneficial to tax only land, maybe someday
we'll see if they're right.

For the time being, a carbon tax would be another option. Charge by the ton at
the major sources (eg. coal mines) and it'll be fairly easy to administer. Of
course that'll have the side benefit of hastening the demise of fossil fuels,
removing that source of revenue, but it could ease the transition at least.

~~~
3pt14159
This is the future, a combination of land and resource taxes (including
negative resource taxes like carbon taxes) that fund a post-scarcity Basic
Income.

------
rainsford
The ability to seize money doesn't seem necessary for taxation to work. For
example, the government could simply throw you in jail or seize your physical
assets if you fail to pay taxes.

~~~
klez
The point is that seizing physical assets and keeping you in prison costs a
lot more than collecting money.

~~~
pessimizer
All you have to do is set an example, though. Most people who don't want to
pay taxes pay their taxes every year without ever having to be jailed.

~~~
oleganza
Because government can cheaply seize their assets from their bank accounts
without much hassle. When 90% of wealth is owned outside of the banks, you'd
need to go door to door without clear idea how much you can possibly extract.
After every successful seizure people only get smarter and protect their
wealth even tougher.

~~~
pessimizer
You don't have to extract a dime. Shoot people who fail to pay whatever you
estimate they should, even if they would have had to borrow or steal in order
to make the payment - inability to pay would be no excuse. Make sure the
payment is a reasonable, manageable amount if someone, for example, consents
to being monitored, or opens their books to whatever extent the "attacker"
would like. If they don't consent, greatly overestimate their income, maybe
even as a statutory default assumption of income.

You wouldn't have to shoot very many people at all to maintain whatever amount
of control you wanted over other people's lives.

------
pessimizer
I don't understand how the title relates to the content. Some handwaving about
the cost of "cheating" (or vs. the cost of something else that I'm going to
assume is "not cheating") wrapped in a bit of libertarian science fiction?

If I can figure out who someone is who is spending cryptocurrency in a way I
don't like, can't I just pay someone to make them transfer their bitcoins to
me, or just kill them? If I have 1000x more bitcoins than they do to pay
assassins and bodyguards, how could they resist me?

Can someone who is more in tune with this sort of theory explain it to me? Am
I understanding anything here?

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AnonyOdinn
Hello,

I dislike 'boxes,' but if I had to characterize myself I would suggest that I
could be described as cryptoanarchist and voluntaryist in terms of my thought
processes and philosophies which I appreciate helping to put into practice.

On the subject of "crypto-anarchy does not require anonymity," I would
certainly state that it does not, but systems which emanate from a crypto-
anarchistic perspective should preserve the choice or ability for people to
make decisions about anonymity and identity generally, regardless of how you
personally perceive of or define identity.

This is part of what is discussed in the ABIS protocol.

You can read the whole proposal here:

[http://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS](http://github.com/ABISprotocol/ABIS)

Cheers

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gweinberg
The type and amount of taxes which states will be able to collect may change,
but the whole apparatus isn't going away any time soon. Taxes on real property
and excise taxes on physical goods would still be pretty easy to collect even
if something like bitcoin were used for nearly all commercial transactions.

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kungfooguru
Wow, this may take the cake for most hilariously absurd bitcoin article.

~~~
oleganza
Let's see who laughs in 5 years. Do you have an economical counter argument?

~~~
maxerickson
I'm pretty sure you will reject "Bitcoin is just a fad" out of hand.

Before you throw too many numbers back at me, realize that billions of dollars
were spent on Beanie Babies, even back before the last decade of US fiat
erosion.

~~~
VMG
I keep hearing about these beanie babies as a comparison - is there a
whitepaper describing how that revolutionary payment system worked?

Otherwise it would be _really_ stupid to use it as comparison to Bitcoin.

~~~
anoncowherd
It seems he just wanted to draw a parallel between two "manias". I have no
idea what will happen to Bitcoin, but it sure does look like a mania. I do see
the benefits too, of course.

Most Bitcoins are purchased as a speculation, expecting their value to go way
up. It's possible that the gold rush is already over, but it's also possible
it's only beginning.

------
jellicle
In this thread: some fantastically deluded individuals.

