Bitcoin: It’s the platform, not the currency, stupid!
The specter of cryptoanarchy
“A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” This is the beginning of the “Crypto Anarchistic Manifesto” by Tim May.
This first sentence in the manifesto is a nod to the 1848 “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Just like the communist manifesto, the crypto anarchic manifesto is about dispensing with government interference. In this case, the advances in information technology will stamp out government regulation.
According to May, computer technology was about to reach the point where it is possible for individuals and groups to communicate and perform transactions in a completely anonymous manner. Two entities can exchange messages, transact business and enter into contracts, without ever knowing the name or legal identity of the other party.
Thanks to cryptography, interactions are untraceable and tamper-proof. The result could be that governments might lose complete control of the economic marketplace.
May’s prophecy was already known in limited circles in 1988. However, the document wasn’t actually published online until 1992. In the meantime, it has taken on a cult status among techno-anarchists.
The arrival of Bitcoin has led some financial experts to now take the manifesto very seriously. Some of them refer to several Dark Web initiatives, like the online black marketplace Silk Road or Assassination Market, a kickstarter for assassins, to explain how bitcoin is changing our world into a true dystopia.
However, most experts believe the Bitcoin protocol will cause a revolution equal to the Internet itself. After all, who would have thought that email would end up making the paper letter, fax, and postcard obsolete back in 1997?
Just as Google, Napster, Youtube, Facebook etc. have transformed the way we interact with content, the Bitcoin platform will revolutionize the world of finance. Contrary to the early days of the internet, when only a few people had a computer, nowadays everybody has a supercomputer in its pocket. The Bitcoin protocol is a “Big Bang Disruption” that will kickstart an age of accelerated innovation.
“Thanks to near-perfect market information […] the bell curve, once useful as a model of product adoption, has lost its value as a planning tool,” say Larry Downes and Paul Nunes. “This kind of disruption has its own unique life cycle, and with it its own best practices for marketing and sales, product enhancement, and eventual product replacement. Markets take off suddenly, or they don’t take off at all. Since adoption is increasingly all-at-once or never, saturation is reached much sooner in the life of a successful new product.”
Bitcoin truly turns the world around.
Next: A network where trust is not needed