What about crypto anarchy

[Waffles]

With the relative success of crypto anarchist technology, such as bitcoin and the Tor nettwork, the individual now has power that the state can do nothing about. That's the point, the government literally can't stop this, even if they made up their mind to, which poses some interesting questions. When they lose their fundamental power to regulate the economy, because regulation of trade and minting have been taken away from them, what can they do then?

 

On a second note, these technologies are beginning to leave their prototype stage, so shouldn't we be able to see the stress they put on the government soon?

[rosencrantz]

That's the point, the government literally can't stop this, even if they made up their mind to, which poses some interesting questions. When they lose their fundamental power to regulate the economy, because regulation of trade and minting have been taken away from them, what can they do then?

 

Nothing. Once anonymous transactions become available for everybody, the state dies away. For more read Snowcrash, where the president of the United States lives in a trailerpark in Alaska

[Koroviev]

With the relative success of crypto anarchist technology, such as bitcoin and the Tor nettwork, the individual now has power that the state can do nothing about. That's the point, the government literally can't stop this, even if they made up their mind to, which poses some interesting questions. When they lose their fundamental power to regulate the economy, because regulation of trade and minting have been taken away from them, what can they do then?

 

On a second note, these technologies are beginning to leave their prototype stage, so shouldn't we be able to see the stress they put on the government soon?

 

There are a couple of "ifs" that are always in the back of my mind when talking about cryptography.

1. most cryptography is government funded or government chosen. Even the Tor network, although it started in the private sector, is funded primarily by the US Gov (this made for a really fun Defcon talk a few years ago when Tor was being released ). AES the current most common best practice for encryption came from a NIST competition.

2. encryption is not perfect. even if you have an algorithm that is functionally un-breakable even by the most powerful machines you are still dependent on the end user to properly implement it. Just to give you an idea, part of my job is cracking passwords, and with what I would call a mid range PC I crack on average about 50% of user's passwords, these are users who are preached security every single day.

 

so yeah IF there is generally accepted and usable cryptography we can know is not compromised (yes government funded does not automatically mean compromised, but.....) and IF it is properly implemented and IF technology has not caught up to the point where it takes less than centuries to do a simple brute force on it then yes we are set. If not, well, I don't like to think about that much.  

[Laforge]

Most optimistic scenario:

Nothing. Once anonymous transactions become available for everybody, the state dies away. For more read Snowcrash, where the president of the United States lives in a trailerpark in Alaska

 

Less optimistic:

Govt will be incentivized to excessively regulate the internet. We may get a repeat of 'regulatory capture' so that Google/MS eventually "becomes" govt, same happened in history with the free market (rail roads, airports, housing, telecom,..).

It's possible govt will also start a war to facilitate these kinds of "sacrifices" from people and business.

 

Whether this is technically possible is an interesting question, surely TOR vs China censorship is hopeful. But i'm afraid it's only a matter of "whitelisting" the internet. A "state of emergency" (cyber terror false flag?) will be required to shove this down the population's throat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitelist

 

[Waffles]

Thanks for some points I didn't realize before.

[Koroviev]

Whether this is technically possible is an interesting question, surely TOR vs China censorship is hopeful. But i'm afraid it's only a matter of "whitelisting" the internet. A "state of emergency" (cyber terror false flag?) will be required to shove this down the population's throat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitelist

 

I hope you're right but every day it seems like this would take less and less. Just look at Net Neutrality, or how they just went and put CISA into the Omnibus.

 

The scary thing is that a lot of, if not most, people see the internet as Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix not the horizon of freedom and opportunity that it really is. So if the government can make something sound like it's threatening their Netflix binge watching (Net Neutrality), or that people are being mean to each other (check out Twitter's new ban on hate-speech), or that the internet is dangerous and companies need to "share" all of their data (see CISA) the idea that something like white-listing or China's firewall require a state of emergency seem less and less likely.

 

To give you an idea of how little people understand computers and the internet watch the news when they report on something like when the air traffic control system went down a couple months ago and count the number of times they use the word glitch, then ask yourself what do they mean by glitch. is it a bug in the code? software update gone awry? did someone trip over a power cord? did they DoS themselves or did someone else do it? maybe it was a power outage. Nope all we get is "glitch," and that is apparently enough.

[Koroviev]

This guy from Iran who was a big name in blogging before he went to prison for 6 years wrote an article reflecting on the changes he's missed in the internet in that time and touches on potentially what that could mean. It's a little long but very very relevant and helps to explain what I've been trying to say.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web 

[Anthony1617]

Nothing. Once anonymous transactions become available for everybody, the state dies away. For more read Snowcrash, where the president of the United States lives in a trailerpark in Alaska

Why would it die away when it can still tax? Just because people would be using a currency without or with limited inflation won't stop the other ways government is funded. It's a huge step forward, and does place a limit on government, but certainly won't be the end of it.