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Bitcoin
● is awesome, duh, But let's dig deeper. Why is bitcoin so great exactly?
● The ideas that went into Bitcoin could be used to make all sorts of other cool things.
● Libertarians need to be there to be the first adopters!
● Libertarians need that vision of the free internet.
Cryptography has some interesting properties to a libertarian
● You can't hold a gun to an equation.● One computer can defeat all the other
computers. – Not true of guns.
● Cryptoanarchy is so individualistic that it might actually work.
Who is Whitfield Diffie?
Cryptography = “secret writing”
● This word is wrong. ● Confidentiality is just one service that
cryptography provides.
The Study ofthe Security of Protocols
for the Provision of a Service● You should think of cryptography as free market
law + computers.● That is not an analogy, that is actually what it is.
The Method of Cryptography
● Define a service. (Confidentiality, Deniability, Nonrepudiation, Anonymity, Adjudication)
● Design a protocol to provide it. ● Try to think of all possible ways to cheat and
give academic accolades prizes to the best cheater.
● We don't actually have a proper word for this, so let's come up with one, seriously.
This is not to say there aren't evil cryptographers!
● The government owns lots of cryptographers whose job it is to break your security.
● But just imagine how much better things would be if all law was based on contracts and there was no concept of legislation.
● There would still be evil lawyers, but they would have to try to trick people into signing slave contracts or something instead of interpreting a constitution.
Trusted Third Party (= vulnerability)
● Cryptographers don't like 'em. ● Hobbe's argument amounts to the assertion
that a universal trusted third party is the only viable one for certain services.
● However, there is a proof in cryptography that says any third party can be emulated by a distributed protocol.
● Yes, mathematics shows we don't need the state!
● (Haha!)
Tradition● Cryptologers like to use old ideas that have not
been proven to be broken. ● Cryptologers define the nature service to be
provided. If you don't define the service, you don't know who's cheated!
● In politics, nobody knows what the service is because everybody has a different idea about justice and they're all lying anyway.
● Cryptologers can take tradition seriously without being anti-intellectual. Cryptologers have a much better attitude with tradition.
The Founding Fathers
● They gave it a good try, but they were amateur cryptologers and came up with a broken protocol.
● The constitution is broken, so scrap it and come up with something else!
“If you think cryptography is the answer to your problem, then you don't know what your problem is” – Peter G. Neumann, quoted in the New York Times
Summary● Computer-mediated protocols are empowering
to the individual. ● Huge opportunities to make the world a freer
place.● Cryptography should be seen as a branch of
free-market legal theory. ● Cryptography has a much better tradition than
the libertarian legal tradition and libertarian legal theorists could learn a lot from it.
● Plenty of great libertarians made their contribution in the field of cryptography and we should know enough to honor them.
Recommended Books● Mine when it comes out. (Published by liberty.me)
– Cryptoanarchy: Freedom in the Computer Age● Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice, Wenbo
Mao● Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier● Foundations of Cryptography, Oded Goldreich● Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,
Satoshi Nakamoto● Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond● Richard Stallman
– Essays– The Right to Read
The Individuality of the Cryptographic Tradition
● Cooperation without trust is the assumption. ● Typical threat models in cryptography involve a
set of independently operating computers without prior relations established between them.
● In other words, cryptologers use a model of autonomous actors in the state of nature.
Conclusion
● If you're smart enough to read Human Action you're smart enough to read a cryptography book.
● Invent a protocol so useful that even the government will have to use it some day.
● Satoshi, if you're watching... thanks!!
