#something that exists to enable equal access to information should not then be commandeered to muddle/reduce its effectiveness

[jamestaylorswift]

I know this is small but if the lwymmd subtitles only being available in japanese is an easter egg that’s. don’t do that. people need those

[captivatesearchmarketing]

Dog Park Trends on the Rise

Dogs parks are by a long shot one of the main highlights on the list of things to get of city and local area parks. Canine parks can be magnificent augmentations to a local area, regardless of whether as a consideration to a current local area park or as an independent, canine explicit park. Individuals who are considering building a canine park ought to know that there are numerous traps to be experienced en route. Albeit significant and fundamental parts, constructing a canine park isn't just about the strategy or the design outlines. It isn't just about that ideal package of land you need to utilize, the kind of fencing you will introduce or the extraordinary sign you need to put at the passageway. Before you do anything, find out about your market, learn canines and the individuals who own them.

To have a protected park, you should have rules and ensure they are clung to - you should have a regulated park. While numerous who use canine parks might be capable canine proprietors who acknowledge they actually have a long way to go about canines, many individuals are first time canine proprietors who think they know it all. Canines must be keen on being social in any case for them to have a positive involvement with a canine park. Envision blending all canines into an off-rope climate? You actually never understand what will occur, so it's basic to have oversight. There are a few models of canine parks. City canine parks are normally free and open to the public all day, every day. Albeit most have posted guidelines, there is nobody to ensure individuals maintain those standards. These parks are where most issues are experienced. Part based stops generally charge an expense and require individuals and their canines to be enrolled. Many charge based parks expect canines to finish a demeanor assessment before they are admitted to the recreation center, and individuals are approached to go to a direction meeting. It's anything but a smart thought to combine little and huge canines in an off-rope climate. Many canine parks have both a little canine territory and a huge canine region.

As indicated by a new report from the Humane Society, in any event one canine can be found in roughly 39% of American family units. Subsequently, America's biggest urban areas have seen a practically identical 34% increment in the quantity of canine parks inside the most recent 10 years. With canine parks on the ascent, park and entertainment divisions currently have an assortment of gear, pet waste arrangements and different items readily available.

The Basics:

Despite the fact that not generally conceivable, effective canine parks are frequently dispatched in spaces that are not as of now being utilized. To decide the correct area, search for territories that:

As of now see high canine use

Are outside the boundaries of primary parks

Won't influence untamed life or water quality

Are equally appropriated all through the city

Are near stopping

Are away from existing jungle gyms, local locations and hefty traffic

Are dry and flooded

Are at any rate 5,000 square feet

*It can likewise be useful to put your canine park along a path framework to give canine proprietors more noteworthy chance to walk their four-legged buddies.

While grass is presently the most widely recognized surfacing choice for bigger canine parks, bark chips (play on words planned), sand, rock, stone or engineered turf can likewise be utilized. Financial plan, atmosphere, park size, use and the encompassing park conveniences ought to be viewed as while figuring out what surfacing ought to be utilized. Parting a canine park fifty-fifty, rotating which side is open, can help save the surfacing of bigger canine parks while allowing a more modest canine to stop go to soil might be a superior choice.

Fencing First:

Contingent upon the canine variety socioeconomics and the requirements of the pet proprietors in your general vicinity, fencing is normally lovely norm in more modest off-chain regions while bigger ones are regularly left without a fence. To make a smoother canine park activity, park and amusement divisions are turning into somewhat more vital in their fence arrangement while numerous parks are just utilizing an ordinary arrangement. This arrangement incorporates two arrangements of doors at the section regions to permit pet proprietors to close the external entryway and release their canine prior to opening the internal door and heading into the primary zone. Others, be that as it may, utilize a different section and leave region. On the off chance that your potential canine park region contains a lake or other water highlight, it is a smart thought to put an extra fence around the waterway to keep canines from washing up.

Park Features:

The present canine parks range from fundamental bundles of land to expound pet jungle gyms with lakes, splash highlights, deftness gear and other park conveniences. The rudiments are currently turning out to be standard particularly with regards to remaining cool and invigorated. Despite the fact that somewhat less significant in more moderate atmospheres, regardless of whether it's a shade design or trees, giving shade from the warmth is particularly significant for the two pets and their proprietors. Going from a basic pet drinking fountain to a more intricate splashing fire hydrant, water is an invite convenience for all canines. Since canines regularly use anything upstanding as a stamping post, drinking fountain arrangement is significant. It very well might be to everybody's greatest advantage to put the water highlights in regions where proprietors actually have command over their pets by means of a chain.

In spite of the fact that the gear out in the open spaces ought not be of an expert evaluation, later canine stops likewise highlight play conveniences, for example, deftness hardware. This adds some additional fun and offers individuals the chance to accomplish more than essentially sit on a recreation center seat. While choosing your deftness hardware:

Search for gear covered by an exhaustive guarantee

Pick different pieces that will challenge and oblige canines of changing sizes and capacity levels

Utilize rust/decay confirmation materials

Select hardware with slip-safe surfaces

Maintain a strategic distance from gear that is multiple feet high to forestall canine and kid wounds

Here are a couple of interesting points that may assist you with picking the correct spot for your future park:

Size It Up: The size of your park may rely entirely upon the accessibility of land. It is suggested in any event 1 section of land however they can be as large as your local area can oversee and keep up. On the off chance that space isn't an issue, consider a region enormous enough that it's conceivable to turn high traffic territories yearly or even occasionally.

Pack It In: Consider how your local area will utilize the recreation center. Recall that individuals need to appreciate the recreation center as well! It's imperative to get ready for seating and shade so everybody stays agreeable when they visit your park. Try not to stop there! Would you like to incorporate space for readiness gear, a sand box, lake or wellspring, climbing divider, strolling trails or something else you can think about that your local area and its canines could adore? A local gathering can help figure out what's possible and liked by the future park supporters.

Water, Water Everywhere: Consider a water hotspot for people and canines just as a canine washing station. On particularly sloppy days, having the option to wash your canine off to shield vehicles from getting the full canine park experience can make a more pleasant day for everybody.

Plan For Clean Up: To help keep your canine park lovely and as perfect as could reasonably be expected, place squander stations and refuse containers a fair distance separated (roughly 4 for each section of land contingent upon the design). Guarantee the recreation center is effectively open for arranging groups so it's easy to keep your park rich and slick.

Show Your Spirit: Remember that planning your canine park stretches out to the soul of the recreation center. One key approach to do this is to made way for mindful pet-possession and conduct in the canine park by creating and posting park rules. Some example rules may include:

Canines should be appropriately immunized and it is suggested that they be fixed or fixed.

Pups under 4 months old enough and female canines in warmth are disallowed.

Try not to bring canine food into the canine park.

Proprietors should tidy up after their canines.

Canines with a known history of forceful conduct are restricted.

Canines should wear a restraint with recognizable proof consistently.

Canines should be restricted when entering and leaving the recreation center.

Leaving canines unattended is denied.

Kids younger than 16 should be administered by a parent or watchman.

Limit of 3 canines for every individual, per visit.

Watch for canines on the opposite side of the passage entryway when entering or leaving to forestall get away.

Regardless of whether your canine park is an essential plot of soil or totally pressed with very good quality conveniences, it ought to be a spot that your local area pet proprietors appreciate. The information and items now accessible enable park and amusement offices to make a canine park that accommodates their particular area, needs and financial plan.

[freespeechfandom-blog]

Cassie, marks and marriage

Since the topic came up, I might as well write a separate post about all the long mark stuff that wouldn’t fit very well into a series of reblogs. Tl;dr version: C didn’t mind the marks, M didn’t intend to mark her, the marks had positive effects for C, and both of them use the marks in ambiguous ways to cherry-pick which interpretations they are going with, and even so vamp marriage probably wouldn’t be about lovey-dovey matrimony anyway. Longer version below, still, see highlights for a condensed summary.

- Let’s start with the way the marks were made. M, spasming on a bed in geis-induced desire, bit C. C didn’t expect it, but also didn’t fight it, and when she did protest, he stopped. Fast forward, she is now marked, something that is immediately visible to all vamps (will come back to this), who just go with it as they only care about ‘outcome, not intent.’ She doesn’t fuss about the marks too much ever again, though she acknowledges that she wasn’t asked, and isn’t too keen on belonging to anybody (will come back to this).

- Let’s look at the consent of the various parties. Since both were under the effects of the geis at the time, none of them were legally compos mentis - so M didn’t consciously plan it. He does later say he didn’t realize C was really there - and even if we believe that he lied, and that he perhaps coouuld have been lucid enough to plan the marks deliberately as a manipulation (unlikely), if nothing else, the fact that having further entanglements with Cassie reduces the chances of just being able to ask her to save Elena without complications should prove that he didn’t want to mark her any more than he wanted the geis to be changed into a love/desire spell. Moving on to C’s consent, she wasn’t aware beforehand, but she accepted it afterwards explicity. She’s asked if she wishes she had not been marked, and she doesn’t go ‘hell yeah, cause the marks annoy me’; she is also asked if she wishes to break up, and to all of that she says she doesn’t mind, and wants to have a closer relationship instead, and asks for dates. 

- Picking up on the marks having alternative potential meanings: belonging can mean as a possession, or belonging together. Same for the bite: on vampires, they signify a marriage of equals who belong together; on humans, they show that a favored magical servant belongs to a vamp family (because mages can’t be added to a vamp family the normal way). So C doesn’t want to be owned by anybody, but she’s cool with belonging together with M, which she wanted to do for years as a crush, in TtD even though she knew they won’t work out, subconsciously in CbS so that the geis responds to her wish to be with M (Pritkin’s assessment not mine btw), and when she reaffirms her post-marks dating wishes in CtD. (((It’s also interesting to note here that all intimacies that M and C are involved in were desired by Cassie, not by Mircea - she had the hots for him first for years while he obv wasn’t interested in a teenager, she wanted to ‘ride him’ while he previously didn’t look at her that way, her Pythian powers controlled the geis to morph into a love/lust loop based on her own emotions, and it’s she who wants to get to know him better and she wants to date. So the Missie relationship wasn’t forced on C, but rather something that predominantly she wanted that was accomodated by coincidences and M just went with it - not saying it was a hardship for him by any means, he seemed to be into her too, just highlighting that neither the geis nor the bite was an ensnarement plan of his making.)))

- So which interpretations is true then? Is C an equal in marriage, or is she a servant with a loyalty badge? Naturally, the vamps are going with the servant interpretation, because a twenty-something slip of a girl is not considered marriage material for an illustrious centuries-old Senator - but she sounds useful, so good job, they’re cool with it. Although ever since the demigoddess-reveal and the Pythia-duels, Cleo is increasingly suspicious that C might be a dedicated ally to M, not just a manipulated mortal, which is ringing her poor paranoid danger-bells. And another thing to note is that the vamps already accepted C as a potential equal - when she was named second, M’s vamps deferred to her, Cleo treated her as an equal, and she gave commands to Jules and Co. on the basis of hey, I’m your master’s second, which all support that the definition of vampire marriage can be applied to a Pythia in a vague enough way to accommodate her in a potential equal function, so it’s not automatically a servant badge. The rest of the magical society either don’t really know about it, or like Jonas interpret it as an unfair favor the Pythia would have towards the vampires, to which C argues that she’s loyal to her vampire family the same way other Pythias are loyal to their families.

- More so than what it means to the magical society however, it’s important to see what it means to them. C makes the valid point that M wants it both ways - a ‘personal’ relationship and a separate ‘professional’ one, which is clearly not working. However, Cassie does the same too, reinterpreting the ‘marriage’ whenever it suits her as well. She tells Mircea that he should tell her things, because they are ‘married’, so she invokes the bond when she’s trying to get access or information, or when she’s trying to boss vampires around. But when it comes to sharing info of her own, or falling in love with her bodyguard or hooking up with him, she conveniently forgets about being ‘married’. So both C and M are trying to juggle this ambiguous term to their own benefit by cherry-picking situations in which it would be beneficial to use the ‘marriage card’ to their advantage and ignore it when inconvenient.

- And as for that, I’ve tried to recall instances in which the marriage card is raised, but there isn’t many of them, especially lately; and from those earlier ones, pretty much all of it was beneficial to Cassie. When EtN-C shifts to TtD-M, it saves her life and provides a reasonable explanation why M would accept her as real. Then in the past, M presumes the mark shows that they are intimate in the future, which C agrees wasn’t against her will, so it gives past-M an excuse to get it on with Cassie, which enables the whole geis-discussion to surface. Then, in CtD, C bosses vampires around and doesn’t get thrown out of restricted med access only due to the marks, and later also has Nicu and the other older vamps treat her more attentively and seriously than they would a random yapping mortal. I genuinely don’t remember any situation in which the marriage is held against her, as in ‘as my wife, you have to make an army’ or ‘as the master’s wife, you need to stay inside when you can’t shift’ as most conflicts reference actual objections and arguments, and the marks aren’t used as an excuse to hinder, command or limit Cassie. Heck, they don’t even prevent her from dating Jonas’ selection of suitors, lol. However, as always, and as I mentioned elsewhere, do please quote the scenes at me if I glance over something of that sort.

- It’s perhaps also interesting to investigate what vampire marriage really means, because it’s clearly not what it means to modern readers, or what it generally represents in romance novels (and this isn’t one anyway). As we see a certain Lucilla being married to Senator Marcellus in Masks, vamp marriage goes back to at least Roman times and thus predates concepts of romanticism, so it can’t be about love and emotional support - it’s far more likely a more traditional marriage of common interests, shared resources and alliances, which would be in line with the pragmatism and collectivism of vampire society that practically requires its members to work on improving their and their family’s position.

So long story short, Cassie may not have been asked about the marks, nor consented to being bitten at the time; but she doesn’t protest or reject them later, and instead opts for an even closer relationship. This is also in line with the other trend in the books, in which intimacy happens due to accidents and circumstances, but generally in accordance with Cassie’s wishes. The marks were also not a malicious manipulative plan by Mircea, because he would not have chosen them consciously as they only complicate things. Furthermore however, they are never even really utilized in a negative way for Cassie, and we see more scenes in which she directly benefits from them being there, enabling her to do things she would not have done otherwise. Ultimately, Mircea doesn’t act like a husband should, and Cassie doesn’t act like a wife should, and I suggest that vamp marriage wouldn’t even be about that due to their mindset and the age of the traditional institution of marriage. So, was the point of the marks just a convenient plot device? So far, pretty much, though KC always insists that she writes everything ‘for the plot’ including the triangle, which so far had no reason to exist either. So perhaps the marks will also play a role in the future...? 

[cryptoquicknews-blog]

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/65lHi1

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

This post was originally published here

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ���A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared in the world, as far as anyone is aware, with the publication of the Bitcoin white paper. There is no trace of the name before that date, and after a few months of interacting with other developers on the project, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared just as abruptly from public view at the end of 2010.

With the exception of a couple of private emails (indicating that the developer had ‘moved onto other things’), and a forum post disavowing an attempt to ‘out’ the developer in 2014, Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since. Perhaps instead, more accurately, we might say that the entity referring to itself as Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since 2010.

For less interesting than the ‘real’ identity of Satoshi is the way in which that identity operates in the world – in a way that perfectly accords with Cypherpunk and blockchain doctrine.

Eating the dog food

In Section 10 of the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi outlines the privacy model of the system. In the traditional banking model, the flow of money through an exchange is anonymized by the third party administering the transactions; they hide what they know from everyone else. However, on the blockchain, where all transactions are public, the anonymity happens between the identity and the transaction; everyone can see the money moving, but nobody knows whose money it is.

The common idea of cryptocurrencies is that they set assets free, but a cryptocurrency is a monetary unit like in any other currency system – one that, because of the blockchain, is closely monitored and controlled. What’s really liberated is identity. It is liberated from responsibility for the transaction and liberated from the ‘real’ person or persons performing it. Identity, in fact, becomes an asset itself. This is also what marks out the idea of the blockchain from earlier cryptosystems like PGP; it’s not the messages that are being hidden, but the actors behind them.

A necessary part of software development is the use of the technology in real-life situations for the purposes of testing.

This is often done by the developers themselves in a process known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ While the developers of bitcoin could test mining and transacting coins between them, the real ‘product’ of bitcoin – a decentralized, deniable identity – could only be tested by someone (or a group) willing to build and sustain such an identity asset over a long period of time – and who better to perform that test than the creator of bitcoin themselves?

Satoshi Nakomoto is an exercise in dogfooding – and proof of its efficacy.

Newsweek Magazine, 2014

When Satoshi disappeared into the ether, they left on the blockchain, unspent, the piles of bitcoins they’d personally mined in the early days of the project – over a million of them. These bitcoins are still there, and only someone who holds Satoshi’s private keys can access them. Today, Satoshi ‘exists’ only to the extent someone can prove to be that individual – the only proof of which is possession of those private keys. There is no ‘real’ Satoshi.

There is only a set of assets and a key. ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is creator, product and proof of bitcoin, all wrapped up in one.

Once again, the creation of money is the creation of a myth. In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber proposes that the connection between finance and sacrifice runs deep in Western culture: ‘Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the ‘redeemer’? The primary meaning of ‘redemption’ is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying of a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.’

Satoshi’s sacrifice is something different, but in the anarchic frame from which the individual emerged, not dissimilar. In order to secure the future of bitcoin, Satoshi gave up all personal gains from its invention: some 980,000 bitcoins, valued at $4 billion in late 2018. This is a gesture that will continue to inspire many in the bitcoin community, even if few of them understand or even consider its true meaning.

The power of brands

Back in 1995, another regular Cypherpunk contributor, Nick Szabo, proposed a term for the kind of sacrificial identity deployed so successfully by Satoshi: a ‘nym’. A nym was defined as ‘an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community’. Thus the nym is opposed to a true name, which links together all kinds of information about the holder, making them vulnerable to someone who can obtain information that is, in the context of the transaction, irrelevant.

Or as Szabo put it: ‘As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one’s enemies.’

Szabo used as examples of nyms the nicknames people used on electronic bulletin boards and the brand names deployed by corporations. The purpose of the nym, in Szabo’s reading, is to aggregate and hold reputation in particular contexts: in online discussions on particular topics, or in a marketplace of niche products. But online handles and brand names are not the same things, and their elision is an early echo of the reductionism which the ideology forming around the blockchain would attempt to perform on everything it touched.

Brand names are a particular kind of untrue name, one associated not merely with reputation but also with financial value. If the brand attracts the wrong kind of attention, its reputation goes down, and so does its value – at least in theory. But because of their value (financial, not reputational), brands also bestow power on the corporations that own them – that know their real name – while often hiding behind them. Brands can sue. They can bribe. They can have activists harassed and killed. Because of their value, brands become things worth maintaining and worth defending. Their goal becomes one of survival, and they warp the world around them to that end.

Online handles are a different kind of untrue name. Their value lies precisely in the fact that they are not tied to assets, not associated with convertible value. They exist only as reputation, which has its own power, but a very different kind. They can be picked up and put down at any time without cost. The key attribute of online handles is not that they render one free through rendering one anonymous, but that they render one free through the possibility of change.

It is precisely this distinction, between financial freedoms and individual autonomy, that underlies many of the debates that have emerged around bitcoin in recent years, as it struggles to articulate a political vision that is not immured in a technological one. While bitcoin has proved to be a powerful application for the idea of the blockchain, it has also distorted in the minds of both its practitioners and many observers what the blockchain might actually be capable of.

In many of its practical applications, bitcoin has so far failed to deliver on its emancipatory promises. For example, one strand of bitcoin thinking is premised on its accessibility: the widely touted aim of ‘banking the unbanked’ claims that the technology will give access to financial services to the full half of the world who are currently excluded from real market participation. And yet the reality of bitcoin’s implementation, both technological and socio-political, makes this claim hard to justify.

To use the currency effectively still requires a level of technological proficiency and autonomy, specifically network access and expensive hardware, which put up as many barriers to access as the traditional banking system. Regulatory institutions in the form of existing financial institutions, national governments and transnational laws regarding money-laundering and taxation form another barrier to adoption, meaning that to use bitcoin is either to step far outside the law, into the wild west of narcotics, credit card fraud and the oft-fabled assassination markets, or to participate legally, handing over one’s actual ID to brokers and thus linking oneself to transactions in a way that undermines the entire point of an anonymous, cryptographically secure system.

What is blockchain for?

Even if Bitcoin can’t emancipate everyone, it might at least do less harm than current systems. Yet in the last couple of years, bitcoin has made as many headlines for its environmental impact as for its political power.

The value of bitcoin supposedly comes from the computational work required to mine it, but it might more accurately be said that it derives from a more traditional type of mining: the vast consumption and combustion of cheap Chinese coal.

It’s become terrifyingly clear that the ‘mining’ of bitcoin is an inescapably wasteful process. Vast amounts of computational energy, consuming vast quantities of electricity, and outgassing vast quantities of heat and carbon dioxide, are devoted to solving complex equations in return for money. The total power consumption of the network exceeds that of a small country – 42TWh in 2016, equivalent to a million transatlantic flights – and continues to grow.

Bitcoin mining facility, from CoinDesk archives

As the value of bitcoin rises, mining becomes more and more profitable, and the incentive to consume ever more energy increases. This, too, is surely in opposition to any claim to belong to the future, even if one is to take into account the utter devastation imposed upon the earth by our current systems of government and finance.

These complaints, which are both uncomfortably true in the present and addressable in time by adjustments to the underlying system, mask the larger unsolved problem posed by the blockchain: what is it really for? Somewhere between the establishment of the Cypherpunk mailing list and the unveiling of the first bitcoin exchange, a strange shift, even a forgetting, occurred in the development of the technology.

What had started out as a wild experiment in autonomous self-government became an exercise in wealth creation for a small coterie of tech-savvy enthusiasts and those insightful early adopters willing to take a risk on an entirely untested new technology. While bitcoin is largely to blame for this, by putting all of the potential of a truly distributed, anonymous network in the service of the market, to focus purely on this aspect of its unfolding is to ignore the potential that remains latent in Satoshi’s invention and example. It is to ignore the opportunity, rare in our time, to transform something conceived as a weapon into its opposite.

The arguments over the use of wartime weapons in a time of relative peace, made explicit in the Crypto Wars, have a clear analogue: nuclear technology. While the Allies’ desire for global dominance through atomic power was scuppered by Soviet espionage before it began, and the world settled into a Cold War backed by the horrifying possibility of mutually assured destruction, the nuclear powers agreed on one thing: if ever these weapons were to fall into the hands of non-state actors, the results would destroy not merely the social order, but life itself.

Similar arguments were made, at the end of the 20th century, about certain algorithms: the wide availability of cryptography would render toothless the apparatuses of state security and lead to the collapse of ordered society. While it’s easy to scoff now at the idea that the availability of certain complex mathematical processes would bring down governments, we are nevertheless faced with a different, more insidious, threat in the present: that of the substitution of one form of oppressive government with another.

While Tim May, part of the original Cypherpunk triumvirate, attested in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto that assassination and extortion markets were ‘abhorrent’, he had little time for those who weren’t part of the crypto utopia. In the sprawling Cyphernomicon, a wider exploration of crypto anarchy posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list, May was far clearer on the world he foresaw: ‘Crypto anarchy means prosperity for those who can grab it, those competent enough to have something of value to offer for sale; the clueless 95 percent will suffer, but that is only just.

With crypto anarchy, we can painlessly, without initiation of aggression, dispose of the nonproductive, the halt and the lame.

Lessons from the Atomic Age

Make no mistake: the possibility of cryptographically-enforced fascism is very real indeed.

A future where every transaction, financial or social, public or private, is irrevocably encoded in a public ledger which is utterly transparent to those in power is the very opposite of a democratic, egalitarian crypto utopia. Rather, it is the reinstatement of the divine right of kings, transposed to an elevated elite class where those with the money, whether they be state actors, central bankers, winner-takes-all libertarians or property-absolutist anarcho-capitalists, have total power over those who do not.

And yet, as in the nuclear age, there remains space for other imaginaries.

In the 1960s, in the name of the ‘friendly atom’, the United States instituted a series of test programs to ascertain whether the awesome power of the atomic bomb could be turned to peaceful ends. Their proposals, some of which were actually carried out, included the excavation of vast reservoirs for drinking water, the exploitation of shale gas (an extreme form of contemporary fracking) and the construction of new roadways. Another idea involved interstellar travel, using the intermittent displacement of atomic bombs in the trail of spacecraft to propel them to distant stars.

The former programme was given the name Project Plowshare, in reference to the Prophet Isaiah’s injunction to beat swords into plowshares. Long after the cancellation of the project in the face of keen public opposition, the name was taken up by the Plowshares movement, an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist organization that became well-known for direct action against nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy became a mainstay of everyday life, in the form of the greenest, if most deeply controversial, large-scale energy generation technology we possess. Its outputs, in the form of toxic, radioactive waste, became in turn a source of new contestations over the roles and responsibilities we have to one another, and to the environment.

There is no separation of our technology from the world. Bitcoin, in the decade since Satoshi Nakamoto first announced it, has succeeded technologically but failed politically, because we have failed to understand a central tenet, long established in political theory, that free markets do not create free people – only, and only occasionally, the other way round. A technology developed according to the founding principles of true anarchism – No Gods, No Masters – has already been suborned by capital, because of a lack of imagination and education, and a failure to organize ourselves in the service of true liberation, rather than personal enrichment. This is not a problem of technology, or technological understanding, but of politics.

Bitcoin’s touted environmental offenses are not a rogue emergent effect, nor the hubristic yet predictable outcome of techno-utopianism. Rather, they are a result of failing to grapple with the central problem of human relations, long diagnosed but rarely put to the test in such dramatic fashion: how to work together in the light of radical equality without falling back into the domination of the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak.

But the emergence of that particular offense at this particular time should chime with our position in history. The problem of taking effective global action in leaderless networks is not a problem confined to bitcoin; in the face of global climate change, it is the primary problem facing humanity today. Like language, the printed word, steam, nuclear power and the internet, another miraculous savior technology is revealed to be a timely question asked directly to our capacity for change.

At the time of writing, and despite the best, the worst, the most unconsidered and the most deliberate intentions of its progenitors, the blockchain is primarily being used to drive the creation of a new class of monopolists, to securitise existing asset structures, to produce carbon dioxide and to set in stone a regime of surveillance and control unprecedented in the dreams of autocrats.

And yet, and yet.

The problem created by blockchain, and dramatized by bitcoin, is fundamentally inseparable from the political situation it emerged from: the eternal battle between power structures and individual rights. The solution to this problem is not to be found in the technology alone, but in radically different political imaginaries. A word often heard in the corridors of the new blockchain industry seems to encapsulate the inherent contradictions of a cryptologically ordered future; that word is ‘trustless’. The concept of trustlessness is at the heart of a vision which seeks to escape from established systems of power by making each individual sovereign to themselves, cryptographically secured, anonymous, untraceable and thus ungovernable.

Yet lack of government is but one plank in the construction of freedom: commonality, community and mutual support are equally, if not more, important. This is demonstrated, ultimately, even in the market: as David Graeber has put it, ‘the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings’.

Blockchain, whatever products it might engender in the short term, poses a necessary problem that we should seek to answer not through technological fixes and traditional political forms but through the participation of the widest and most diverse public possible, and the creation of new forms of political relationships between one another.

Bitcoin image via CoinDesk archives

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/65lHi1

[etherealnexus]

I’ve decided to go through the head canon exploration list as I believe it could be interesting

1. Light

Originally the organization or group led by Chronos was known as the Alliance of the light i later decided to change that due to the nature of the world of which I created where things aren’t always as it seems and many common associations are useless as nothing is inherently good or evil this is a world not of black and white but a world of grey

2. Shadows

The realm of shadows is under the leadership of Orpheus the dragon of shadowsThe realm of shadows despite common belief is not entirely black there is light in fact without light the realm of shadows would not exist light is also required to move to and from this realm

3. Truth

Ironically the most truthful of all my characters is watcher despite his label of trickster he rarely lies if he ever does not to say he tells everything he generally withholds information this is how he creates confusion selectively withholding and giving information

4. Lies

Order is an entity labeled by many as a villain as he is corruption despite his goals of which he ironically has never strayed from like watcher he is the least likely to lie but he has but only to protect people and keep people from getting involved

5. Fall

Fallen is alternate version of order who has the lost memories of broken in his mind driving him into madness and self destruction from one who desired to unify and protect the world he has fallen far as he has lost his identity lost in a permanent downward spiral of confusion and agony

6. Secure

The entrance or ��door’ to the realm of soul is closely guarded by watcher in his “tower of doom” of which it is an irritating seemingly infinite and probably impossible to complete from either the bottom or the top whenever watcher is asked to protect something it generally ends up in his tower

7. Purpose

The apocalypse biowraith was never meant to be made it was an accident caused by the creations of others of which it has been pacified for now it is the ultimate punishment for those who played god by warping entities beyond understanding and attempting to weaponize them entities that know no mercy entities that are born of hatred, rage, and vengeance perhaps it would have been best to have let Armageddon fulfill its purpose

8. Meaning

{watcher} “42 ;o)”

9. past

The past cannot be changed, and sometimes it is doomed to repeat in fact it was looper who broke the time loop that started it all

10. future

It doesn’t matter what you have done in the past what matters is the now. The future is always ahead of you...

Looper Chronos was born in the future born after the sun became a red giant, 4593 years to be exact

11. Star

The star is dead yet alive the one who gave us hope sacrificed themselves by trapping his own realm within a loop this person was Occulta Chronos who is long since gone and in his place stand the Tower Looper Chronos

12. Sun

The Omniverse protection, surveillance, maintence system or just Omni for short was original tasked to do as its name implied until someone found the keys enabling them to access Omni and reprogram it, of which they gave it the command to destroy existence itself, though they forgot to delete the previous command causing Omni to crash, restart, and combine the commands to indirectly destroy existence... since then Omni has been encroaching upon the fine line between direct and indirect...

13. scar

Chronos has lost his left arm and right eye due to what he calls an accident but was a murder attempt by a serial killer changling of which back then he was a mechanic he was asked by a friend of his to look into and fix some machinery of which while working the changling turned on. The gears of the machine moved and caught his left arm pulling him into the machine in which another gear came around his right side and dug out his right eye a security personnel came into the surveillance room at that time and saw what was happening and a worker was able to turn off the machine Chronos had to go to the hospital which his friend payed for... he was only one of three survivors of the serial killer

14. Solitary

Aura lives within a tower of which he only leaves to STEAL books from his allies no one likes him due to what he had done not that he remembers of course but he doesn’t really care

15. Penance

There is a price to pay when a nine void soul directly hops dimensions a price that order had paid his identity was stolen from him leaving him as we see him today he is incapable of saying his real name...

16. Sinner

Aura was once an Arch mage the highest amongst his peers until he met Looper... after what he had done he lost many of his powers and memories

17. Saint

Chains is a very friendly person unfortunately he is unable to speak due to the fact he is a skeleton so he has no vocal cords but besides that he tries to befriend everyone

18.unconditional

The abyss is where it began the abyss is strange the abyss is eternal the abyss is all the abyss is what lies beyond time, space, void and even reality everything equal everything the same everything abyss

19. Rules

The universe is picky desiring to be stable and familiar void souls are ignored but their are instances where strange things happen things left behind by dimension hoppers things that don’t belong sometimes they are integrated sometimes not those that don’t end up in the void...

20. Tales

There are many tales and legends roaming around about the rebellion from times long forgotten to more recent events though it is quite hard to find them as there are many forces at work hiding them from the universe itself to what are equivalent to what can be defined as a god

21. Amazing

The infinity stone has infinite energy and a multitude of abilities such as turning people into stone or bringing objects to life, it is highly sought after and as per a deal a long time ago it is to be protect by the rebellion of souls by inheritance

22. Special

Abilities are hidden away in the soul generally tied to the personality and habits a person has each one special in its own way each one used differently

23.sick

The infinity stone despite having infinite energy can lose that energy resulting in a “dead” infinity stone of which begins to drain all kinds of energy around it and corrupt the environment decay and rot spreading around it

24.exhaustion

Abyssal is the prophet of the abyss... but there are costs to such a connection he always feels drained as his body constantly fights itself to keep him from becoming one with the abyss...

25. Choice

Xerixoth the guardian is a giant with multiple bodies of which it can mold into any shape his true self looks like a giant humanoid plant without a face he guards the labyrinth of the forgotten by choice as this was where he was born... but he does not guard that place alone that would be a waste of his talents in order to remain in what is considered an inconsequential place a useless relic of the past he guards many lands and is known by many names such as Cerberus, heimdall, ladon and many others...

26.Dream

Dreams is a nightmare or partially a nightmare as her abilities do not coincide with actual nightmares. She is able to wander the dream realm and bring people into it which she is very hesitant to do so as there are many dangers in doing so... Dreams is also able to manipulate the dream realm and she can use it to travel far distances in an instant

27.sex

The strangest gender belongs to watcher who likes to be refuted to as a male but in reality is reality itself

28. Passion

Looper is passion about machines he likes to make them and fix them he particularly likes to make machines that will help people

29.intense

There is an aura around watcher that he is able to turn on and off for people an aura that is suffocatingly intense. The aura of a god...

30. Soft

Despite being living metal gallium can choose to be soft whenever he feels like it by making himself ‘hotter’ of which makes the metal he is made of softer and surprisingly relaxing as despite whatever metal he is made of it never burns people

31. Unforgiving

You might not think it but watcher can be quite unforgiving due to the fact that it always seems like he does forgive people, but that is only because it doesn’t really bother him... No if you truly bother him he will bring down the full wrath of reality onto you he shows no mercy as those who bother him have done something that should be allowed to persist

32. Almost

The EtherealBane is a sword capable of threatening existence itself made and then broken by its own creator and the pieces scattered in a way that should have almost guaranteed it would never be reforged in fact it shouldn’t have ever had a chance and yet due to the time loop and the realm of soul free floating deep within the abyss it was able to increase its chances as now all three pieces have found their keeper when there should have only been two

33. Messy

The messiest character is Necros who generally has notes scattered about though the do generally get organized pretty fast... this messiness is due in part with Necros’s jumpy nature and Aura’s lack of respect for privacy and belongings ironically Aura’s tower is always organized but whenever he goes pillaging for new information he leaves a mess wherever he’s been and since Necros likes to make records of things he is generally the target

34. Memory

The blade of memories is a sword with the power to summon champions: people with great power that are separated from the norm generally people deemed as a hero or villain. The blade was made by the same person who made the EtherealBane in fact he made it so he could gain materials for it

35. Forgotten

Xerixoth is the only entity ever to be born in the labyrinth of the forgotten as usually entities only ever wander into it by accident the details of his birth are unknown there are no trace of his parents and yet he claims to remember them...

36. Time

Chronos has the power to manipulate time by either freezing it around him and unlike in many instances everything is frozen in place to move something it’s like pushong against a spring. And he can fast forward and rewind objects but specific objects such as if he were to fast forward the earth it would only fast forward the earth no the plants, people, buildings, etc.

37. Gift

Gifts from the elements allow great power and influence as such it is rarely give as people can use it to corrupt and control gifts from the elements are like stronger forms of rituals of which call upon the help of the elements but instead of having to ask for the power you already and may always have it, and there are worlds where everyone has this gift some thrown into chaos some in peace.

38. Red

Red is the symbol of blood, rage, determination, love, betrayal, power, strength, pain, life, healing and offense it is a color found within battlefields and berrys found within the nurturing flame and the raging wild fire Red is the color of Nature

39. Yellow

Yellow is the symbol of light, plasma, warmth, instinct, sight, safety, warnings, greed, wealth, lies, and trust it is a color that spreads rumors and light it is the color of precious metals and deception yellow is the color of information

40. Blue

Blue is the symbol of the sky, ocean, intelligence, water, truth, wisdom, trust, friendship, nobility, status, enforcement, judgement, sadness, unknown, fear, and calmness this is the color worn by officers and navy this is the color that spans far from land this is the color of the unknown and lurking Blue is the color of emotion

41. Gray

Gray is a symbol of equality, good and evil, impure, corrupted, imprisonment, loneliness, misfortune, emptiness, null, stone, protection, safety, home, smoke, metal, creation, machines, industry, gears, work, and unity gray is found within the concrete of homes and walls it separates us and protects us gray is the color of metal that is used to build our civilizations gray is the color of the stars that fall from the sky gray is the color of the sculptures we make gray is the color of the clay we mold gray is the color of creation

42. Sloshed

Watcher likes pretends to get drunk but as he is reality itself he can’t. as such even if he drinks a lot of alcohol he is very aware of his actions

43.regression

Bioweapon is very unpredictable as he (as Bioweapon prefers to be referred to) is only docile because he still cannot beat Chronos. Bioweapon is very destructive of which he has been getting better with but if thrown into a fit of rage he will go on a destructive rampage until he calms down which usually involves Chronos holding onto the tip of his tail with his robotic arm

44. Laughter

Watcher laughs a lot and each of his laughs have a different meaning. Hysteria means he’s either going to cause some chaos or is about to kill some one, a short laugh means he desires a different topic, a long slow laugh means he’s thinking, a dark laugh means he doesn’t like something, a slow dark laugh means he’s about to get serious a normal laugh just means he found something interesting or funny and the most dangerous is an obvious fact laugh which means he done with playing the role of the fool

45. Debt

For the crimes of binding the minds of others to do his bidding the hilt has taken away many memories from Aura including the title of high arch mage his power and spells that control the mind and soul have been sealed until aura learns respect

46. Work

small and intricate tasks There are machines created by Chronos for hard labor and teaching there are robots with free will also created by Chronos and finally within the library there is a spider centaur robot that looks over the library with its hive

47. Pain

The biowraiths live in perpetual pain and suffering and even once they were finally free they continue to endure as they desire to keep others from sharing the same fate... and upon this point one has to wonder if they are still even wraiths as they are no longer creatures of vengeance and rage but rather creatures of retribution and liberation

48. Hidden

Camo is an expert in scouting, archer, sniping, and camouflage it is almost impossible for one to find him if he wants to be hidden... and then there’s Chronos with his blasted eye... no matter what Camo does it always finds him

49. Power

There is no easy way to obtain gain power even if one is born with it they must learn to control it and those without it must work to get it these two principles make up this world

50. Animal

When forced to become an animal looper will either become a kobold, squid, or Phoenix based on a multitude of factors Watcher and Gallium can become whatever they want but Watcher prefers more obscure animals and gallium prefers more sturdy and offensive animals

51. Pretend

Do not be deceived as watcher is no fool he is no jester for your amusement in reality he is the strongest among them and he only plays along as he finds them interesting those foolish enough to threaten them will perish

52.pillows

Everyone has their own pillow Chrono has a normal one, watcher has one made of “dank memes and fluffy clouds” Necros used the same as Chronos but now sleeps on fortune, fortune sleeps on heated volcanic rock, Bioweapon sleeps in a tube, alchemist sleeps on himself, chains doesn’t sleep, aura uses magic when he does sleep, Camo sleeps in either trees or bushes, nebula uses foam pillow, and no one knows what gallium sleeps on... well watcher and Chronos know but they won’t tell.

53. Cigarettes

No one really likes cigarettes Bioweapon eats them I suppose but watcher destroys them alchemist sees them as poison and Chronos is neutral he doesn’t smoke but won’t stop others if they want to

54. Leader

The leader is chosen through voting and the current leader is Chronos due to the fact he try’s to get things done as efficiently as possible and is respectable of others

55.follower

Gallium is not a leader as he prefers to follow he has a strong sense of justice and desires to protect his friends

56.ring

Chronos has made rings before that had small machinery for tracking and communication as well as other tools such as lasers. There are also enchanted rings that are hoarded by aura and Necros wears some rings

57. Journal/diary

Watcher is the only one with a diary whereas Chronos, Necros, alchemist, Camo, and aura keep journals Chronos’s is filled with blueprints, Necros’s is filled with notes, records and some personal information, alchemist’s is filled with recipes for poisons and medicine, camo’s is filled with scouting information, and aura’s is filled with notes and spells. Watcher’s diary is filled with gibberish

58. Flowers

Arc has his own garden of corrupted flowers they were normal flowers that were effected by his presence becoming completely black and oozing out a black tar like substance. The flowers have the same properties as arc so he keeps people away from them

59. Tree

Many of the crash islands that seemed to have once floated spread out across the ruined planet there are long dead trees present each one have stone structures that were once powered by these trees and were able to create portals to other dimension few seeds remain and the trees seem to be uneffected by time as Chronos tried to fast forward one of the seeds

60. Nature

Being a dimension hopper allows one to experience many biomes and environments world made of fire, ecosystems that exist only in the ocean depths, a universe were the last star has gone out sending it into perpetual darkness

61. Gold

Money isn’t much of a problem as the infinity knives (knives made of shards of infinity stones) though they weaker abilities than the infinity stones allow one to clone inorganic material and because different dimensions generally don’t use the same currency they use gold... of which watcher once used to make an entire economy disappear

62. Silver

Chronos has had requests to use a silver coating instead of copper and bronze but he refused as he prefers them

63. Games

There are a variety of games available and played watcher likes to hang out by the gambling but he prefers more obscure games and particularly likes to play Ur

64. Foreign

The members of the rebellion of soul are diverse partly due to the fact that the ruined planet seems to have become the dumping ground for void souls of all ages from 0 to infinity many languages, cultures, beliefs and to Chronos’s delight technologies were learned and spread

65. Comfort

Because of the developing relationship between Necros and fortune the jumpy necromancer seems to spend a lot of time with fortune who with the motherly caring side and the confident, aggressive side comfort and help Necros become more confident

66. Music

Watcher likes to play Symphonias more specifically the hurdy gurdy, Looper is learning to play from watcher and he knows how to play a piano, gallium can play the trombone and trumpet.

67.air

Don’t underestimate air, many regard this as a supporter element but they are fools air is probably one of the elements that Looper uses the most as it is capable of creating platforms and tools they can create barriers and suffocate foes it can create invisible attacks to slice you unsuspecting target

68.water

Water is regarded as an element of healing and support capable of manipulating blood and many substance containing the molecule H2O whereas the element isn’t very suited for major defense it can be quite deadly pressurizing it can allow one to stab an enemy with many small hole

69. Fire

Fire is regarded as an offensive weapon which ironically alchemist uses for medicinal purposes one of which to seal off wounds or stop blood flow. It can also be used to regulate body temperature yes it is commonly used to destroy but the option is there

70. Earth

Earth is a hard hitting and defensive element capable of creating massive structures in seconds this is an element found with many artists

71. Definition

The ruined planet is the main base of operations for the rebellion of soul or alliance of soul it is also the area where the dark ages of their predecessors to place this is the place where many of their previous selves have died... this is where order was weakened and once sealed...

72. Forever

Chains is a four armed metal skeleton ‘wearing’ a black cloth and is covered with chains he is an immortal entity if you destroy him he will respawn in his coffin if you destroy his coffin it will simply fix itself. This is an entity fated to exist til the end... and perhaps even past that

73.never

The only person never can apply to is watcher due to the multiple dimensions meaning multiple versions of my characters that may do things these ones will never do. Because watcher is reality itself there is only one of him... well one Main him and there will never be a second

74.learn

Due to the fact the many universes have decided to dump all void soul of any age and of many types they’re going to have to be taught the same language and other more common things for some not that the ones who began it all aren’t still learning there are many things left behind from their predecessors and it doesn’t help that some of them only allow a select few of them read them

75. Teach

Some of The things taught are normal or similar to what is normally taught like math, science, reading, etc. but there are other classes that teach magic or help with learning to control abilities there are also other strange classes for many things these people may potentially deal with

76. Grief

Grief is not uncommon in fact it’s quite common there are many who grieve the sudden lost of their home and families having been dragged to a new unknown place there are others who have been here longer who grieve the loss of friends and companions who may have died in a mission there are tisks their are deaths no one likes it, and it’s unavoidable

77. Leaving

People are free to leave if they desire same with the robots unfortunately only the robots are truly allowed to leave though because after a bit perhaps a year, a month, a century, or decade the void souls always end up back on the ruined planet as such Chronos created a separate place for those who desire not to stay children are raised and at a certain age are allowed to leave if they desire...

78. Mundane

There are many mundane tasks that need to be done though interestingly they always seem to be finished... after awhile Looper learned watcher was doing it but said nothing...

79. Picture

Fortune and Necros have made many picture fortune making pictures of past or future events of people and Necros has many bizarre pictures which Watcher sometimes confiscates a few...

80. Crazy

Watcher acts crazy but he is Necros’s pictures seem crazy but they are connected to watcher, Aura is crazy but try’s to act like he isn’t. Chronos is crazy

81. Repression

Ever since looper broke the time loop he has suffered the constant torment of other versions of him who were once in the loop but failed Looper is constantly ignored by most of these past selves who disregard him as they try to take control despite how much farther Looper has come without them... Looper is chained up in his own mind barely able to use his own gifts forced to use what was used by the past selves

82. Tragedy

Chains was part of the predecessors he somewhat witnessed their end he was trapped in his coffin unable to get his chains out and something heavy preventing him from getting out he heard the final member die taking order with him sealing his soul before he himself died... it pained chains that he was unable to help his friends that he was forced to remain in his box as they all died... but at least he met them again in another life...

83. Comedy

Watcher plays the role of the fool he is the jester the joke he is an excellent distraction as he can be loud and generally says the right things to get people’s attention

84. Romantic

Of of the ‘romantic’ relationships is between the hermaphrodite humanoid hydra known as fortune and the necromancer spectral lich known as Necros

85. What if

Watcher loves the what if game... Chronos doesn’t particularly like it especially if he’s busy or it’s referring to a past instance

86. Paternal

The male side of fortune gives of a fatherly ir paternal aura whenever around Necros probably due to the fact the more caring side is effecting it, or it actually does care for Necros and it is leaking out in its aura, or both

87. Maternal

The female side of fortune always gives off an maternal aura and the aura only ever changes when around Necros when it becomes more of a loving aura

88. Better

Chronos likes to improve things it’s instinctual he might begin to make something as he suggests it he may have already made it before he suggests it sometimes it embarrasses him and others it gets him in trouble

89. Worse

Chronos has made many attempts to help the biowraiths but generally it only ends up making things worse for them he has attempted making his own which turned out fine but he couldn’t find a way to transfer that to them... in the end he simply gave up he tried and failed it was simply beyond him

90. Coping

Everyone has their own way of coping Chronos makes maxhines, watcher never seems to need to(watcher doesn’t grieve he tries to do what they would have wanted finishing anything they left unfinished killing the one who killed them he will do all of these BY ANY MEANS NESSASSARY) Necros used to hide in a corner now copes with fortune, Aura throws things, Alchemist melts the floor, Bioweapon destroys everything in sight, etc.

91. Young

The infinity stone halts the aging process at a preferred point in time and gives people immortality to age they of course can still die by fatal wounds and such just not age or disease

92. Old

The oldest people within the rebellion of soul are Chains who is immortal, and ??? Excluding watcher Who has every cancer and a lot of mutations don’t know what they were or even what gender but they are also immortal

93. Crisis

In a time of crisis the infinity stone will temporarily turn people into stone to protect the and once it’s over it will restore them this ability will also heal them and put them into a sleep like state until they are turned back

94. Body

The body is the home of the soul it is a focus for mana and the elements it is how one interacts with the physical world

95. Soul

The soul is a source of life energy it is a source and conduit for mana it last forever but be warned it can be destroyed and the soul can never be hidden

96. Mind

The mind is what controls the body it is the instructor for spells it allows thought and emotion but some are broken and can be broken it may not be physical but it is as vulnerable as the body

97. Reason

Aura is one who acts on reason he likes to know why before he does something if he does something

98. Logical

Watcher defies all logic and reason mainly because he is reality itself so he can just edit that he actively defies it as he enjoys the confusion caused

99. Hypnotize

Auras punishment was due to the fact he used a spell to control the mind and soul of others to make them do what he wanted him to when caught he was punished

100. Wisdom

The wisest of all my characters once again is watcher he is the 3rd oldest being in existence he seen it all even the beginning and creation he just has a round about way of saying things and you have to ask him if you want the information but no one expects the fool to know anything anyways

[marcosplavsczyk]

Scenario

When working in a development environment, developers often use Visual Studio for coding, and it also has an option to connect to SQL Server and open a query window in which they can work on creating new objects or updating existing objects directly on their local Dev database, which further requires a way to compare SQL Server database schemas with the QA database.

Once the development part is done, developers will need a tool to compare SQL Server database schemas and push schema changes to the QA database for further testing before reaching production. So, they need a tool that can handle comparison of SQL Server database schemas, push (synchronize) schema changes to the QA database without errors and enable developers to review actions and any potential issues before the synchronization process.

Out of the box solution in Visual Studio

First, let’s start with the built-in feature that Visual Studio has for comparing SQL Server database schemas – the Schema Comparison feature. This feature can be located under the Tools > SQL Server > New Schema Comparison:

In the newly opened query window, the SqlSchemaCompare query window, source, and target SQL databases should be chosen from the drop-down list:

Once selected, the Compare button should be clicked, and the comparison process will be initiated. This will provide results and for each selected object in the Results grid, the source, and target SQL object script can be seen in the Object Definitions panel below:

Once desired objects are selected to be updated in the target database, click the Update button and the process will start:

After the update process is finished, the execution messages are shown in the Messages panel. This is where all information can be viewed to check if a target SQL database was successfully updated or if it failed and why:

To learn more, check out this article on how to compare SQL Server database schemas in Visual Studio.

As explained, the Schema Compare feature of Visual Studio has an easy way to compare SQL Server database schemas, and it has almost everything when it comes to scenarios like this one. However, it’s noticeable lack of a couple of things:

Backup a target database before synchronization, or a rollback script in cases when something goes wrong

Warnings before the synchronization process starts

More detailed object filtering

Dependent database objects

Support to synchronize other data source types

Automation of the comparison and synchronization process

Solution with 3rd party tool

The other tool that will be described in this article is ApexSQL Diff – a standalone tool, with an option to integrate into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and Visual Studio. This tool can compare SQL Server database schemas, backups, script folders, snapshots, and source control projects. While it can compare the previously mentioned data sources, it can create a synchronization SQL script direct synchronization on a destination data source, C# solution, and executable installer.

To perform SQL Server database schema comparison from Visual Studio with ApexSQL Diff, during the installation of the application under the integration step, check the Visual Studio version that will be used:

By default, Visual Studio and SSMS versions that are installed on a machine are shown in this step, but when all versions are installed, make sure to check only the desired one(s). In this example, Visual Studio 2017 and 2019 are checked for the integration, but the process will be shown in Visual Studio 2019.

Once the application is installed, along with the host integration part, it can be accessed from Visual Studio main menu by going to Extensions > ApexSQL > ApexSQL Diff:

To initiate the SQL Server database schemas comparison with ApexSQL Diff, follow these steps:

Connect to a SQL Server database via the Server Explorer or SQL Server Object Explorer panel, or if a connection already exists, right-click it, locate the Schema compare in the list and click the Set as source command:

The Schema comparison query window is now shown and a source database is loaded:

Now, right-click a destination database that needs to be synchronized and click the Set as destination command:

Note that instead of the right-click command, a destination database information can be entered directly in the Schema compare query window and the Destination data type can be changed, so it doesn’t necessary limits comparison to a SQL Server database, rather than choosing one of the five data source types mentioned above:

Before starting the comparison process, switch to the Options tab in the Schema compare query window where various comparison and synchronization options can be set:

Now, when everything is set, in the bottom-right corner click the Compare button and the compare of SQL Server database schema will start by running the standalone application

As can be seen, the standalone application is shown now with the comparison results:

These results can be exported in the below show export output types:

Review and check the objects that should be synchronized. If needed, check out the article on how to narrow schema comparison and synchronization to affected objects only

Under the Home tab, click the Synchronize button to run the Synchronization wizard for compared SQL Server database schemas:

In the Synchronization wizard, the Synchronization direction step will be shown with information about the source and destination data sources:

Under the Dependencies step, by default, all dependent objects will be included to avoid any SQL Server database schemas synchronization fail:

All dependencies can be exported in six different output types with a click on the Export button on the right side.

The next step is the Output actions step, in which four actions can be chosen:

If the Synchronize now action is chosen, it will load a few options, such as:

Save a copy of the synchronization script

Backup database before synchronization

Additionally, if the More pre-sync actions link is clicked, the following options can be selected:

Create a snapshot file of a destination database before synchronization

Create a differential snapshot file with differences only

Create a rollback script to revert changes on a destination database

Two output actions will be shown – Create synchronization script and Synchronize now, and for both the last step, the Summary and warnings step is the same, with only difference in the name of the button to finalize the process

Under the Summary and warnings step, two tabs are shown:

Warnings – list of all warnings categorized by importance level:

Actions – list of all actions which the synchronization script contains and that will be executed:

Both warnings and actions can be exported to six different output types with a click on the Export button on the right side.

Before starting the SQL Server database schemas synchronization process, the complete project setup can be saved as a batch file or as a PowerShell script with a click on the Automation script button:

In this way, the complete process can be automated and run on a click, without the need to go through all these steps each time when changes need to be synchronized.

Depending on which action was chosen, these are the outcomes:

If the Create synchronization script action was chosen with the Open the script in an editor option selected, the Create script button will be shown in the bottom-right corner of the Synchronization wizard and once clicked; the schema synchronization script will be opened in the selected editor – Integrated editor in this case:

Generated schema synchronization script can be reviewed and edited if needed; syntax can be checked and if everything is good, click the Execute button in the top-left corner and the synchronization script will be executed. If there are any issues, those will be shown under the Messages panel.

If the Synchronize now action was chosen, the Synchronize button will be shown and once clicked the confirmation message will be shown, after which the Results dialog will be shown along with the message at the end whether the synchronization was successful or not:

With a click on the Save button, the execution results can be saved in four different output types, to review them if needed.

Once the Close button is clicked in the Results dialog, the re-comparison process will start and once finished, only the equal objects are shown in the Results grid as a result of successful synchronization:

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen how to compare SQL Server database schemas using the native Visual Studio’s feature called Schema Comparison. This, as most out-of-the-box solutions, does the job, but it’s limited from the functionality point of view. Therefore, we looked at another third-party software solution that gives developers full control of pushing schema changes to production and much more. Additional features are linked in the tool’s description above, so feel free to check those out and learn more about the capabilities of this tool.

[click2watch]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared in the world, as far as anyone is aware, with the publication of the Bitcoin white paper. There is no trace of the name before that date, and after a few months of interacting with other developers on the project, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared just as abruptly from public view at the end of 2010.

With the exception of a couple of private emails (indicating that the developer had ‘moved onto other things’), and a forum post disavowing an attempt to ‘out’ the developer in 2014, Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since. Perhaps instead, more accurately, we might say that the entity referring to itself as Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since 2010.

For less interesting than the ‘real’ identity of Satoshi is the way in which that identity operates in the world – in a way that perfectly accords with Cypherpunk and blockchain doctrine.

Eating the dog food

In Section 10 of the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi outlines the privacy model of the system. In the traditional banking model, the flow of money through an exchange is anonymized by the third party administering the transactions; they hide what they know from everyone else. However, on the blockchain, where all transactions are public, the anonymity happens between the identity and the transaction; everyone can see the money moving, but nobody knows whose money it is.

The common idea of cryptocurrencies is that they set assets free, but a cryptocurrency is a monetary unit like in any other currency system – one that, because of the blockchain, is closely monitored and controlled. What’s really liberated is identity. It is liberated from responsibility for the transaction and liberated from the ‘real’ person or persons performing it. Identity, in fact, becomes an asset itself. This is also what marks out the idea of the blockchain from earlier cryptosystems like PGP; it’s not the messages that are being hidden, but the actors behind them.

A necessary part of software development is the use of the technology in real-life situations for the purposes of testing.

This is often done by the developers themselves in a process known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ While the developers of bitcoin could test mining and transacting coins between them, the real ‘product’ of bitcoin – a decentralized, deniable identity – could only be tested by someone (or a group) willing to build and sustain such an identity asset over a long period of time – and who better to perform that test than the creator of bitcoin themselves?

Satoshi Nakomoto is an exercise in dogfooding – and proof of its efficacy.

Newsweek Magazine, 2014

When Satoshi disappeared into the ether, they left on the blockchain, unspent, the piles of bitcoins they’d personally mined in the early days of the project – over a million of them. These bitcoins are still there, and only someone who holds Satoshi’s private keys can access them. Today, Satoshi ‘exists’ only to the extent someone can prove to be that individual – the only proof of which is possession of those private keys. There is no ‘real’ Satoshi.

There is only a set of assets and a key. ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is creator, product and proof of bitcoin, all wrapped up in one.

Once again, the creation of money is the creation of a myth. In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber proposes that the connection between finance and sacrifice runs deep in Western culture: ‘Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the ‘redeemer’? The primary meaning of ‘redemption’ is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying of a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.’

Satoshi’s sacrifice is something different, but in the anarchic frame from which the individual emerged, not dissimilar. In order to secure the future of bitcoin, Satoshi gave up all personal gains from its invention: some 980,000 bitcoins, valued at $4 billion in late 2018. This is a gesture that will continue to inspire many in the bitcoin community, even if few of them understand or even consider its true meaning.

The power of brands

Back in 1995, another regular Cypherpunk contributor, Nick Szabo, proposed a term for the kind of sacrificial identity deployed so successfully by Satoshi: a ‘nym’. A nym was defined as ‘an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community’. Thus the nym is opposed to a true name, which links together all kinds of information about the holder, making them vulnerable to someone who can obtain information that is, in the context of the transaction, irrelevant.

Or as Szabo put it: ‘As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one’s enemies.’

Szabo used as examples of nyms the nicknames people used on electronic bulletin boards and the brand names deployed by corporations. The purpose of the nym, in Szabo’s reading, is to aggregate and hold reputation in particular contexts: in online discussions on particular topics, or in a marketplace of niche products. But online handles and brand names are not the same things, and their elision is an early echo of the reductionism which the ideology forming around the blockchain would attempt to perform on everything it touched.

Brand names are a particular kind of untrue name, one associated not merely with reputation but also with financial value. If the brand attracts the wrong kind of attention, its reputation goes down, and so does its value – at least in theory. But because of their value (financial, not reputational), brands also bestow power on the corporations that own them – that know their real name – while often hiding behind them. Brands can sue. They can bribe. They can have activists harassed and killed. Because of their value, brands become things worth maintaining and worth defending. Their goal becomes one of survival, and they warp the world around them to that end.

Online handles are a different kind of untrue name. Their value lies precisely in the fact that they are not tied to assets, not associated with convertible value. They exist only as reputation, which has its own power, but a very different kind. They can be picked up and put down at any time without cost. The key attribute of online handles is not that they render one free through rendering one anonymous, but that they render one free through the possibility of change.

It is precisely this distinction, between financial freedoms and individual autonomy, that underlies many of the debates that have emerged around bitcoin in recent years, as it struggles to articulate a political vision that is not immured in a technological one. While bitcoin has proved to be a powerful application for the idea of the blockchain, it has also distorted in the minds of both its practitioners and many observers what the blockchain might actually be capable of.

In many of its practical applications, bitcoin has so far failed to deliver on its emancipatory promises. For example, one strand of bitcoin thinking is premised on its accessibility: the widely touted aim of ‘banking the unbanked’ claims that the technology will give access to financial services to the full half of the world who are currently excluded from real market participation. And yet the reality of bitcoin’s implementation, both technological and socio-political, makes this claim hard to justify.

To use the currency effectively still requires a level of technological proficiency and autonomy, specifically network access and expensive hardware, which put up as many barriers to access as the traditional banking system. Regulatory institutions in the form of existing financial institutions, national governments and transnational laws regarding money-laundering and taxation form another barrier to adoption, meaning that to use bitcoin is either to step far outside the law, into the wild west of narcotics, credit card fraud and the oft-fabled assassination markets, or to participate legally, handing over one’s actual ID to brokers and thus linking oneself to transactions in a way that undermines the entire point of an anonymous, cryptographically secure system.

What is blockchain for?

Even if Bitcoin can’t emancipate everyone, it might at least do less harm than current systems. Yet in the last couple of years, bitcoin has made as many headlines for its environmental impact as for its political power.

The value of bitcoin supposedly comes from the computational work required to mine it, but it might more accurately be said that it derives from a more traditional type of mining: the vast consumption and combustion of cheap Chinese coal.

It’s become terrifyingly clear that the ‘mining’ of bitcoin is an inescapably wasteful process. Vast amounts of computational energy, consuming vast quantities of electricity, and outgassing vast quantities of heat and carbon dioxide, are devoted to solving complex equations in return for money. The total power consumption of the network exceeds that of a small country – 42TWh in 2016, equivalent to a million transatlantic flights – and continues to grow.

Bitcoin mining facility, from CoinDesk archives

As the value of bitcoin rises, mining becomes more and more profitable, and the incentive to consume ever more energy increases. This, too, is surely in opposition to any claim to belong to the future, even if one is to take into account the utter devastation imposed upon the earth by our current systems of government and finance.

These complaints, which are both uncomfortably true in the present and addressable in time by adjustments to the underlying system, mask the larger unsolved problem posed by the blockchain: what is it really for? Somewhere between the establishment of the Cypherpunk mailing list and the unveiling of the first bitcoin exchange, a strange shift, even a forgetting, occurred in the development of the technology.

What had started out as a wild experiment in autonomous self-government became an exercise in wealth creation for a small coterie of tech-savvy enthusiasts and those insightful early adopters willing to take a risk on an entirely untested new technology. While bitcoin is largely to blame for this, by putting all of the potential of a truly distributed, anonymous network in the service of the market, to focus purely on this aspect of its unfolding is to ignore the potential that remains latent in Satoshi’s invention and example. It is to ignore the opportunity, rare in our time, to transform something conceived as a weapon into its opposite.

The arguments over the use of wartime weapons in a time of relative peace, made explicit in the Crypto Wars, have a clear analogue: nuclear technology. While the Allies’ desire for global dominance through atomic power was scuppered by Soviet espionage before it began, and the world settled into a Cold War backed by the horrifying possibility of mutually assured destruction, the nuclear powers agreed on one thing: if ever these weapons were to fall into the hands of non-state actors, the results would destroy not merely the social order, but life itself.

Similar arguments were made, at the end of the 20th century, about certain algorithms: the wide availability of cryptography would render toothless the apparatuses of state security and lead to the collapse of ordered society. While it’s easy to scoff now at the idea that the availability of certain complex mathematical processes would bring down governments, we are nevertheless faced with a different, more insidious, threat in the present: that of the substitution of one form of oppressive government with another.

While Tim May, part of the original Cypherpunk triumvirate, attested in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto that assassination and extortion markets were ‘abhorrent’, he had little time for those who weren’t part of the crypto utopia. In the sprawling Cyphernomicon, a wider exploration of crypto anarchy posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list, May was far clearer on the world he foresaw: ‘Crypto anarchy means prosperity for those who can grab it, those competent enough to have something of value to offer for sale; the clueless 95 percent will suffer, but that is only just.

With crypto anarchy, we can painlessly, without initiation of aggression, dispose of the nonproductive, the halt and the lame.

Lessons from the Atomic Age

Make no mistake: the possibility of cryptographically-enforced fascism is very real indeed.

A future where every transaction, financial or social, public or private, is irrevocably encoded in a public ledger which is utterly transparent to those in power is the very opposite of a democratic, egalitarian crypto utopia. Rather, it is the reinstatement of the divine right of kings, transposed to an elevated elite class where those with the money, whether they be state actors, central bankers, winner-takes-all libertarians or property-absolutist anarcho-capitalists, have total power over those who do not.

And yet, as in the nuclear age, there remains space for other imaginaries.

In the 1960s, in the name of the ‘friendly atom’, the United States instituted a series of test programs to ascertain whether the awesome power of the atomic bomb could be turned to peaceful ends. Their proposals, some of which were actually carried out, included the excavation of vast reservoirs for drinking water, the exploitation of shale gas (an extreme form of contemporary fracking) and the construction of new roadways. Another idea involved interstellar travel, using the intermittent displacement of atomic bombs in the trail of spacecraft to propel them to distant stars.

The former programme was given the name Project Plowshare, in reference to the Prophet Isaiah’s injunction to beat swords into plowshares. Long after the cancellation of the project in the face of keen public opposition, the name was taken up by the Plowshares movement, an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist organization that became well-known for direct action against nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy became a mainstay of everyday life, in the form of the greenest, if most deeply controversial, large-scale energy generation technology we possess. Its outputs, in the form of toxic, radioactive waste, became in turn a source of new contestations over the roles and responsibilities we have to one another, and to the environment.

There is no separation of our technology from the world. Bitcoin, in the decade since Satoshi Nakamoto first announced it, has succeeded technologically but failed politically, because we have failed to understand a central tenet, long established in political theory, that free markets do not create free people – only, and only occasionally, the other way round. A technology developed according to the founding principles of true anarchism – No Gods, No Masters – has already been suborned by capital, because of a lack of imagination and education, and a failure to organize ourselves in the service of true liberation, rather than personal enrichment. This is not a problem of technology, or technological understanding, but of politics.

Bitcoin’s touted environmental offenses are not a rogue emergent effect, nor the hubristic yet predictable outcome of techno-utopianism. Rather, they are a result of failing to grapple with the central problem of human relations, long diagnosed but rarely put to the test in such dramatic fashion: how to work together in the light of radical equality without falling back into the domination of the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak.

But the emergence of that particular offense at this particular time should chime with our position in history. The problem of taking effective global action in leaderless networks is not a problem confined to bitcoin; in the face of global climate change, it is the primary problem facing humanity today. Like language, the printed word, steam, nuclear power and the internet, another miraculous savior technology is revealed to be a timely question asked directly to our capacity for change.

At the time of writing, and despite the best, the worst, the most unconsidered and the most deliberate intentions of its progenitors, the blockchain is primarily being used to drive the creation of a new class of monopolists, to securitise existing asset structures, to produce carbon dioxide and to set in stone a regime of surveillance and control unprecedented in the dreams of autocrats.

And yet, and yet.

The problem created by blockchain, and dramatized by bitcoin, is fundamentally inseparable from the political situation it emerged from: the eternal battle between power structures and individual rights. The solution to this problem is not to be found in the technology alone, but in radically different political imaginaries. A word often heard in the corridors of the new blockchain industry seems to encapsulate the inherent contradictions of a cryptologically ordered future; that word is ‘trustless’. The concept of trustlessness is at the heart of a vision which seeks to escape from established systems of power by making each individual sovereign to themselves, cryptographically secured, anonymous, untraceable and thus ungovernable.

Yet lack of government is but one plank in the construction of freedom: commonality, community and mutual support are equally, if not more, important. This is demonstrated, ultimately, even in the market: as David Graeber has put it, ‘the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings’.

Blockchain, whatever products it might engender in the short term, poses a necessary problem that we should seek to answer not through technological fixes and traditional political forms but through the participation of the widest and most diverse public possible, and the creation of new forms of political relationships between one another.

Bitcoin image via CoinDesk archives

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '239547076708948'); fbq('track', "PageView"); This news post is collected from CoinDesk

Recommended Read

Editor choice

BinBot Pro – Safest & Highly Recommended Binary Options Auto Trading Robot

Do you live in a country like USA or Canada where using automated trading systems is a problem? If you do then now we ...

9.5

Demo & Pro Version Try It Now

Read full review

The post Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

More Details Here → https://click2.watch/free-markets-dont-create-free-people-bitcoins-tech-success-masks-its-failure-7

[mccartneynathxzw83]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto...

http://bit.ly/2Hvu8SU

[teiraymondmccoy78]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto...

http://bit.ly/2Hvu8SU

[bobbynolanios88]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto...

http://bit.ly/2Hvu8SU

[adrianjenkins952wblr]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto...

http://bit.ly/2Hvu8SU

[courtneyvbrooks87]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto...

http://bit.ly/2Hvu8SU

[vanessawestwcrtr5]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto...

http://bit.ly/2Hvu8SU

[cloudandcode]

Benefits of Immutability

"Maximum reliance on immutable objects is widely accepted as a sound strategy for creating simple, reliable code." - source - Oracle

But first, a joke...

Definition of an Immutable Object

"In object-oriented and functional programming, an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created." – Source - Wikipedia

Example of a Mutable Object

let username = 'Ben' username = 'Charles'

Example of an Immutable Object

const username = 'Ben' username = 'Charles' Uncaught TypeError: Assignment to constant variable. at <anonymous>:1:10

Understanding Immutability in Javascript - Under the Hood

In JavaScript, only Objects and Arrays are mutable, not primitive values - e.g. Strings and Numbers, which are immutable.

Immutability in this case means that the place in memory where the string is stored in will not be modified.

let a = 'hello' a = a + ' world' console.log(a) // hello world

What's happening

The existing value of a is retrieved from memory

"World" is appended to the existing value of a

The resultant value is then allocated to a new block of memory

a object now points to the newly created memory space

Previously created memory space is now available for garbage collection.

source - MDN Glossary

Javascript Native Objects that are Mutable

Objects

Arrays

Functions

Classes

Sets

Maps

Javascript Primitive Data Types that are Immutable

String

Number

Boolean

Null

Undefined

Symbol

source

Symbol is used to make object properties that are anonymous. This data type is used as the key for an object property when the property is intended to be private, for the internal use of a class or an object type.

source - MDN Glossary

We will deal with const and Object.assign later in the talk.

Benefits of Immutability

Immutable objects:

are thread safe

are simpler to construct, test, and use

avoid temporal coupling

avoid side effects

avoid identity mutability issues

avoid invalid state

increase predictability

improve performance *

enable mutation tracking

provide failure atomicity

are much easier to cache

prevent NULL references, which are bad

* - debatable

1. Immutable Objects are Thread Safe

Immutable objects are thread safe. This means that multiple threads can access the same object at the same time without clashing with one another.

If no object methods can modify its state, no matter how many of them and how often they are being called parallel — they will work in their own memory space in stack.

In Javascript, Thread Safety is usually not an issue since the Browser is single threaded, meaning that only one command (of your code) is executed at a time.

That said, multi-threading is possible with Web Workers, which spawn real OS-level threads.

However, since web workers have carefully controlled communication points with other threads, it's actually very hard to cause concurrency problems. There's no access to non-threadsafe components or the DOM. And you have to pass specific data in and out of a thread through serialized objects. So you have to work really hard to cause problems in your code.

That said, MDN themselves provide an example of a threading error using Web Workers, so it's possible.

source MDN

2. Immutable Objects are Simpler to Construct, Test, and Use

Mutable objects can have different internal states throughout their lifetime, all of which need to be tested explicitly.

Imagine having to test the following:

let request = new Request() let updateComments = comments => { request.method = "PUT" request.payload = comments sendXHR(request) } let fetchPosts = () => { request.method = "GET" return sendXHR(request) // payload may have been set by updateComments } let sendXHR = request => { $.ajax(request) }

If request is mutable, then by the time it gets to sendHXR, you're not really sure what's in it. You have to write lots of extra tests to check and verify its internal state.

If request was immutable, there would be no such uncertainty.

3. Immutable Objects Avoid Temporal Coupling

Temporal Coupling occurs when two actions are bundled together into one module just because they happen to occur at the same time.

source - Wikipedia

let request = new Request(url) request.method = "POST" let first = request.send() request.body = payload let second = request.send()

This code works. However, you must remember that the first request should be configured before the second one may happen. If we decide to remove the first request from the script, we will remove the second and the third line, and won't get any errors from the compiler:

let request = new Request(url) // request.method = "POST" // let first = request.send() request.body = payload let second = request.send()

Now the script is broken although it compiled without errors. This is what temporal coupling is about - there is always some hidden information in the code that a programmer has to remember. In this example, we have to remember that the configuration for the first request is also used for the second one, and that the second request should always stay together and be executed after the first one.

If the Request class were immutable, the requests would not be coupled, and removing one will not stop the other from working.

const post = new Request(url, "POST") const first = post.send() const second = post.send(payload)

4. Immutable Objects Avoid Side Effects

A function or expression is said to have a side effect if it modifies some state outside its scope or has an observable interaction with its calling functions or the outside world besides returning a value.

source

In the following code, we only intended to send requests to 2 URLs, but another part of the app added a url, and now a side effect has occurred where an unexpected & unwanted request is being sent. If urls was immutable, this could not have happened.

let urls = ['cred.com', 'loans.com'] // Some other part of the app makes an unexpected addition urls.push('refi.com') for (let i = 0; i < urls.length; i++) { sendXHR(urls[i]) }

XKCD - Side Effects

5. Immutable Objects Avoid Identity Mutability Issues

In my research, I found 2 different opinions on what Object Identity means.

* Reference Identity - the identity of an object is what address it points to in memory * Value Identity - the identity of an object consists of the values it contains.

Equality

i.e. With regard to Reference Identity, 2 objects are considered equal if they both point to the same place in memory. Re Value Identity, 2 objects are considered equal if they contain the same values.

source - Oracle

For the purposes of this lecture, I'm only going to deal with Value Identity.

Identity mutability issues

In certain situations, you may want to use an Object Identity as a key in a Map (key value pairs). If this object is mutable, and its identity changes, it will no longer be usable as a key in that Map.

let d1 = new Date() let guests = {} guests[d1] = "Value" console.log(guests[d1]) // Value d1.setDate(d1.getDate() + 1) // Changed by something else console.log(guests[d1]) // Undefined

If using a Date object as a key is unpalatable to you, then consider if we were to use an object property as the key.

e.g.

let person = new Person({id: 1234, name: "Ben"}) let guests = {} guests[person.id] = "Ben Grunfeld" person.id = "4321"

6. Immutable Objects Avoid Invalid State

Ensuring that a mutable object maintains a valid state can be extremely difficult. Imagine we have a rate (e.g. APR) that has a minimum and a maximum, and that the current value must stay between those two limits.

let rate1 = new Rate({min: 1, max: 100, current: 50}) rate1.max = 45

The object is now in an invalid state. Of course, we can enforce coding standards by convention, but it's hard to know how other parts of the application will use our code and if they will follow our conventions. If our object is mutable, then we have to start checking validity both in the constructor (when the object is created) and on any mutation.

Here is an incomplete list of rules to ensure valid state when using mutable objects:

Rule 1: Always re-validate every rule to ensure the correctness of an object.

Rule 2: You must always validate before mutating.

Rule 3: The second rule doesn't need to be followed in a constructor. In a constructor you are always allowed to mutate and then validate afterwards.

Rule 4: If there is a way to fix an invalid object, you are allowed to mutate and validate even outside of a constructor.

Rule 5A: Mutable objects must have some kind of notification mechanism when they change.

Rule 5B: Mutable objects must have a Copy function that can create deep copies of an object.

Rule 6A: Every mutable object we return must have a changed event that gets fired when an object was mutated.

Rule 6B: Never return mutable objects directly. Return defensive copies instead.

Rule 6C: Don't allow access to internal mutable objects at all.

Rule 7: Events can only be used if there is a way to fix an invalid object. If there is no way to fix an invalid object, use defensive copies.

Rule 8: If your mutable objects are accessed by multiple threads (mutable shared state) you also must add synchronization primitives to avoid race conditions that can bring an object into an invalid state.

Bonus Rule: Just because every method of an object has synchronization primitives doesn't mean it is thread-safe. Because of this, you probably want to ignore Rule 8.

Agreeing on a set list of such rules inside of a large engineering team is difficult (to say the least). As the saying goes, "2 programmers, 3 opinions". Educating new devs in the above rules and enforcing/ensuring that they are ALL implemented becomes a big headache really quickly, and I'd argue that it borders on being impossible. People make mistakes, especially when things are complex - it's simply human nature.

Alternatively, when using truly Immutable objects, there are only two rules for ensuring valid state.

Rule 1: All validation logic must be contained in the constructor.

Rule 2: The constructor must be used when instantiating an object.

Now that is MUCH simpler, and easier to agree upon and enforce in a large engineering team.

source

7. Immutable Objects Increase Predictability

Needing to know the contents of an object

If you don't truly know what the contents of the object you're working with are, it becomes much harder to predict what will happen.

Combining immutable objects with pure functions

If your object is immutable, and is passed to a pure function, as soon as it executes once correctly, you know that it will work the same way forever.

8. Immutable Objects Help Improve Performance

Arguments that immutability hurts performance:

Creating new objects in memory is more expensive that mutating existing ones

Defensive copying (making a complete copy of an object and implementing changes on the copy instead of the original) creates a lot of garbage which would be avoided by mutating existing objects

Oracle's rebuttal

"Programmers are often reluctant to employ immutable objects, because they worry about the cost of creating a new object as opposed to updating an object in place. The impact of object creation is often overestimated, and can be offset by some of the efficiencies associated with immutable objects. These include decreased overhead due to garbage collection, and the elimination of code needed to protect mutable objects from corruption."

source

Arguments that immutability improves performance

Performance is largely a Productivity metric in a non-trivial codebase - i.e. developer performance

With an increase to productivity and (thread) safety can often come an increase to practical performance, if only because the developers have more time to tune and optimize their code without being swarmed by bugs.

source

Regarding Immutable.js' performance

Some people claim that Immutable.js is actually much faster than native Javascript in some circumstances.

source

Immutable-focused libraries such as Immutable.JS have been designed to overcome the issues with immutability inherent within JavaScript

In particular, immutably manipulating large, complex data sets, such as a nested Redux state tree, can generate many intermediate copies of objects, which consume memory and slow down performance as the browser’s garbage collector fights to clean things up. Immutable.JS avoids this by cleverly sharing data structures under the surface, minimizing the need to copy data.

source

9. Immutable Objects Enable Mutation Tracking

One of the more complicated operations in Javascript is tracking if an object changed.

Subscribing to data events throughout your application creates a huge overhead of book-keeping which can hurt performance, sometimes dramatically, and creates opportunities for areas of your application to get out of sync with each other due to easy to make programmer error.

source

However, if you keep your state immutable you can just rely on oldObject === newObject to check if state has changed or not. This is way less CPU demanding.

source

10. Immutable Objects Provide Failure Atomicity

"Failure atomicity" means that if a method threw an exception, the object should still be usable afterwards.

When using Immutable objects, failure atomicity happens by default, since the object's state cannot be modified.

Example of lack of failure atomicity when working with mutable objects

let size = 3 let data = 'abc' while (size > -2) { data.repeat(--size) } // Uncaught RangeError: Invalid count value

After this code runs, the size object will be left in an inconsistent (negative) state, causing any future method invocations on the object to fail.

Now lets try the same example using immutable objects

const size = 3 const data = 'abc' function repeater(num) { console.log(data.repeat(size - num)) console.log(num) if (num > 5) return repeater(num + 1) } repeater(0)

You still get the error, but size is in a consistent and usable state

After an object throws an exception, it is generally desirable that the object still be in a well-defined, usable state, even if the failure occurred in the midst of performing an operation. This is especially true for checked exceptions, from which the caller is expected to recover. Generally speaking, a failed method invocation should leave the object in the state that it was in prior to the invocation. A method with this property is said to be failure atomic.

There are several ways to achieve this effect. The simplest is to design immutable objects. If an object is immutable, failure atomicity is free. If an operation fails, it may prevent a new object from getting created, but it will never leave an existing object in an inconsistent state, because the state of each object is consistent when it is created and can’t be modified thereafter.

For methods that operate on mutable objects, the most common way to chieve failure atomicity is to check parameters for validity before performing the operation (Item 38). This causes any exception to get thrown before object modification commences.

source

11. Immutable Objects are Much Easier to Cache

You can freely share and cache references to immutable objects without having to copy or clone them; you can cache their fields or the results of their methods without worrying about the values becoming stale or inconsistent with the rest of the object's state.

If an object is mutable, you have to exercise some care when storing a reference to it

source

12. Immutable Objects Prevent NULL References, Which Are Bad

Tony Hoare once said: I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.

source

One reason why null references are evil is that you cannot see if a function could return null or not. There are many others.

source2

So, let's just agree for the moment that null is bad.

Nulls can creep into your code and cause havoc. E.g.

let user1 = {name: 'Ben'} function greet(user) { return `Hello there ${user.name}` } // Unintended mutation from another part of the app // attempting to update the user1 object user1 = fetch(user) // error occurs and returns null greet(user1) // Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'name' of null

Enforcing Immutability by Convention

Some developers may try to enforce immutability in their code by convention, but this approach has several problems regarding the capabilities and limitations of the language.

The Problem with Using Defensive Copying for Immutability

If Javascript, we can use Object.assign to perform defensive copying. As noted above, the problem is that extensive use of defensive copying has a significant performance cost, which is why it's best to use optimized libraries like Immutable.js that mitigate these issues.

const a = { name: "Ben"} const b = Object.assign({}, a)

The Problem with Using const for Immutability

[const] does not mean the value it holds is immutable, just that the variable identifier cannot be reassigned.

source

The problem is that const creates a read-only variable, although if the variable is an object or an array, its properties are still mutable.

const a = 5 a = 6 // Uncaught TypeError: Assignment to constant variable. const b = { name: "Ben" } b.name = "Bob" // Works without error const c = [1, 2, 3] c[0] = 5 // Works without error

The Problem with Using Object.freeze for Immutability

[Object.freeze] prevents new properties from being added to it; prevents existing properties from being removed; and prevents existing properties, or their enumerability, configurability, or writability, from being changed, it also prevents the prototype from being changed.

That sounds great! The variable can still be reassigned, but if we use Object.freeze together with const, we should be moving in the right direction... Nope!

The problem is that Object.freeze is shallow, meaning that if a frozen object contains other mutable objects, then it will not be truly immutable.

To ensure that it is truly immutable, every property needs to be recursively frozen (deep freeze), which can get dangerous. If an object contains cycles (circular reference), then an infinite loop will be triggered.

Another danger is that if you recursively freeze everything in the object without knowing exactly what's in there, you may freeze something that should be frozen e.g. the window object.

source

Conclusion

Use Immutable.js. You get all of the benefits listed above, but the dangers of doing immutability yourself and the performance costs associated with techniques like defensive copying are mostly, if not entirely mitigated.

Other Sources

Objects Should be Immutable

Three Benefits of Using Immutable Object

Why is immutability so important(or needed) in javascript?

About Thread Safety in Javascript

Mutability vs Immutability re Valid State

IMB - To mutate or not to mutate

Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake

[pagedesignhub-blog]

What All of Your Computer's Specs Really Mean

New Post has been published on https://pagedesignhub.com/what-all-of-your-computers-specs-really-mean/

What All of Your Computer's Specs Really Mean

Computer specifications may be a baffling blend of acronyms and numbers at the pleasant of times, but it’s worth getting to know some thing approximately them: It’ll assist you to select a brand new PC, troubleshoot your antique laptop, and normally apprehend greater about the connection among the specifications at the web page and the enjoy you’re getting.

Such is the complexity of the modern-day-day computer, we may want ‘ve written an article twice this length on any individual of the categories listed beneath (look at any snap shots card forum for proof)—but the main aim right here is that will help you recognize the specs you spot indexed with computer systems and laptops and come up with a concept of the distinction they make to overall performance.

The Central Processing Unit, or CPU, or processor, is the brains of the operation: it handles all the one’s calculations that maintain your laptop without a doubt working. The CPU interior your system is the primary (but not the best) contributor to its common pace and performance. CPUs have a certain number of cores, mini computing units which can be effectively CPUs of their very own proper—they let your computer work on multiple obligations at the identical time, so the extra cores the higher. On the pinnacle of this, every middle has a clock pace, a measurement of the way rapid it is able to do its wide variety crunching, normally measured in gigahertz (GHz).

Comparing the performance of CPUs based totally on the middle range and clock speeds is notoriously tough (sorry buyers). That’s because a couple of elements are worried, most associated with the microarchitecture of the CPUs. The microarchitecture is largely the way that the cores and the other bits of a CPU are packed together.

The two massive PC CPU makers, Intel and AMD, have their very own microarchitecture designs. When you spot references to Intel Skylake, Intel Kay Lake, or AMD Zen (on Ryzen chips), that is what’s being referred to, and more modern is usually better as successive microarchitectures permit the CPU to work faster and more efficiently (and use much less electricity).

Intel and AMD additionally follow their very own labels—i3, i5, and i7 in Intel’s case—to suggest relative overall performance within a microarchitecture circle of relatives. It’s a useful shorthand connection with the electricity you could count on, with i7 CPUs the excellent of the bunch from Intel. In AMD’s case, you’re speaking approximately Ryzen three, Ryzen 5 and the top-give up Ryzen 7.

If you need the very great processors round, you must also appearance out for what Intel calls hyper-threading and what AMD calls simultaneous multi-threading. This technology efficaciously double the quantity of cores (without a doubt, not physically) so that you’ve were given extensively progressed overall performance for annoying applications like video editing or CAD software.

Unless you’re constructing your personal PC from scratch, that’s probably all you want to recognize whilst searching at gadget listings, however, CPUs have several different specifications, such as the amount of excessive-velocity reminiscence cache and the extra portraits processing skills which can be on board. If your CPU has sufficient integrated snap shots oomph, you don’t need a separate card or chipset, of which more underneath.

The different big factor in computer overall performance, specifically if you’re gaming or working with loads of video and pix, is photographs.

We simplest gave it a quick mention inside the processor section, but many Intel CPUs now include a respectable quantity of pix processing electricity built in, sufficient for most customers to get by with a bit of web browsing, Twittering, essay writing or even light photo editing and gaming. You also can get integrated graphics chipsets constructed into the motherboard as well as the CPU.

Integrated pictures proportion reminiscence with the CPU and aren’t as effective as having a devoted (or discrete) card, but it’s a cheaper option that also draws much less power, which is why it’s often deployed on laptops in which battery existence is critical.

Wherever it’s set up on your machine, the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) churns via calculations similar to the CPU does, but simplest the quantity-crunching associated with rendering pics, animations, and films on screen. GPUs are tons better at acting many operations in parallel, as you may see here, that is why they’re now being used in different areas like technological know-how and encryption.

In terms of specs, it’s now not specially easy to weigh one graphics card or GPU against some other. You’ll see connection with quantity of compute devices (like cores in a CPU) and raw clock speed. As with a CPU, those are two key elements to consider, but also preserve an eye out for FLOPS, or Floating Point Operations Per Second—a kind of maths operation mainly important in pix.

Video card GPUs come with their personal RAM or video RAM (vRAM). This works in a comparable manner to the computer’s major RAM, however deals totally with photos (with the same specifications references to speed and bandwidth). The greater RAM your images card has, the extra pixels it can render in reminiscence right away, which leads to video games running at higher resolutions with faster body quotes.

Essentially video cards are like separate miniature computers, with processors, RAM and structure all of their very own, and the same performance elements apply.

For the non-expert, there are a couple of beneficial shortcuts to working out how powerful a snap shots setup is while not having to pour over the specs in too much detail: how a great deal it fees and the benchmarks stated on the internet.

Random Access Memory or RAM gives your computer room to suppose, and the extra of it the better, so long as you could find the money for it. When you’ve got three,000 browser tabs open, the RAM is the primary to go through, due to the fact your computer’s looking to bear in mind what’s in all of those 3,000 tabs right now.

More RAM helps your PC cope with larger pics and documents, or more images and files at once, or extra open tabs, or more applications going for walks simultaneously—it’s now not an immediate measure of the uncooked pace of your gadget but it surely enables overall performance, in particular when you’re looking to do a lot.

If the RAM gets overloaded, your computer every now and then shops facts it desires at the (slower) difficult drive as a substitute, that is one reason more RAM equals a speedier revel in.

For the majority of customers purchasing for a computer or pc, all that absolutely matters is how a great deal RAM is mounted, but dig deeper and there are plenty of extra specifications to do not forget—in particular in case you’re looking to build the quickest computer you could.

Clock speeds seem again, normally in terms of a frequency fee, which help to determine how fast the RAM can examine and write information as well as how a great deal statistics the RAM can handle without delay (its general switch charge). Latency, or how speedy the RAM responds to commands, is an critical specification as well.

One other distinguished specification is DDR or Double Data Rate, with DDR4 being the great but for customer computers (and an improve over DDR3)—it has faster clock speeds, lower power draw, and lower latency.

Yet more RAM specifications relate to stability and how nicely your RAM sticks can handle errors, however again, this isn’t something that maximum folks will should worry about: the overall performance variations simplest end up obvious in very expert obligations.

[click2watch]

Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure

James Bridle is a writer working across technologies and disciplines and author of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com. The following work will appear as an introduction to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be published by Ignota Books. 

For more on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, check out our new interactive feature Bitcoin At 10. 

————-

It’s difficult to know when humans first started securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to hide them from unwanted readers; the practice must, by human nature, be almost as old as written language, although examples are sparse. We know, for example, that Julius Caesar used a simple form of letter substitution to communicate with his generals, shifting each character three steps down the alphabet in order to scramble it.

The ancient Greeks, particularly the military-minded Spartans, used a device called a scytale, which allowed a hidden text to be read by wrapping a strip of parchment around a cylinder of a particular size so that the letters lined up in a particular order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are full of secret messages, not least the story of Histiaeus, a commander who, according to Herodotus, shaved the head of his favorite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution in the city of Miletus.

When the slave’s hair grew back he was dispatched to the city, with the instructions that the recipient should shave him once again and read the message there revealed.

Such extreme measures were taken due to the fear of government surveillance, a justification often cited today. The Persian king controlled the roadways, and had the power to examine any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very beginning, cryptography has been both a military technology and a tool for undermining existing powers.

Cryptography’s value as a military tool is double-edged, of course.

Like other weapons, its effectiveness depends on the ability of one side to outgun the other. For a long time, this balance mostly held, with efforts by one side to crack the secrets of the other forming long-running and fascinating backstories to many conventional conflicts. It was an act of decryption that brought the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services decoded the infamous Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico.

In the closing months of the war, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher by French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a final German offensive on Paris.

Cryptography was first mass-manufactured in the Second World War, in the form of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, and then digitized in the form of the Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed to break the German military’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and ultimate success of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries can be read as the first of many instances of the digital overcoming the physical; the Lorenz SZ42 was a massive, complex machine of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years.

By the end of the war, it was completely readable by an electronic machine. The secrecy around the Colossus itself meant that its existence had little influence on future computer design, but it marks the point at which cryptography changed radically in nature – because what is digital is ultimately distributable, although it would take the growth of the internet in the 1990s for this to become widely understood.

In 1991, a computer security researcher called Phil Zimmermann created a programme called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled users of home computers to strongly encrypt email messages using a combination of numerous well-known algorithms. What turned PGP from another homemade software product into one of the most contentious artifacts of the decade wasn’t how it was made, but how it was distributed. Since the Second World War, nations had been forced to legally define cryptography as a weapon; like any other munition, cryptography was subject to something called the Arms Export Control Act.

At the time of PGP’s release, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export.

PGP used keys which were 128 bits long and almost impossible to crack at the time, and this made it precisely the kind of technology that US authorities wanted to prevent falling into foreign hands. Zimmermann never intended to export PGP, but, fearing that it would be banned outright, he started distributing it to friends, saying, “I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.”

Shortly after that, PGP found its way onto the internet and then abroad. In 1993, the US government started a formal investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions without a license. As knowledge of the case spread, it became a flashpoint for early digital activists who insisted on the rights of everyone to protect their own secrets and their own private lives.

The freedoms and dangers of code became the subject of earnest debate, and in another foreshadowing of future digital style, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the software’s source code printed as a hardback book, allowing anyone to purchase a copy and type up the software themselves.

As he was fond of pointing out, export of products commonly considered munitions – bombs, guns and planes – could be restricted, but books were protected by the First Amendment. Variants on the RSA algorithm – the 128-bit process at the heart of PGP – were printed on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went further, having lines of code tattooed onto their arms and chests.

The crypto wars

The Crypto Wars, as they became known, galvanized a community around the notion of personal – rather than national – security, which tied into the utopian imagination of a new, more free, more equal and more just society developing in cyberspace.

Another development that prompted widespread public disquiet was the US government’s proposal for a chipset for mobile phones. The Clipper chip was designed by the NSA to provide encryption for users while allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on communications – a situation that was ripe for abuse, either by corrupt officials or by skilled hackers.

Clipper chip via Wikimedia.

The idea that a government would deliberately weaken the protections available to its citizens made for an even more powerful and accessible argument for the individualists than the attack on PGP. By the late 1990s, Clipper was dead – and so was the case against Zimmermann. The hackers and privacy activists declared victory in the Crypto Wars.

Yet what’s often regarded as a victory for everyone against government overreach can also be read as a moment of terrifying breach: when the state’s most powerful weapons escaped government control and fell into the hands of anyone who wanted to use them. Today, thanks to the rise in digital communications, cryptography is everywhere, not least in banking systems, protecting the billions of electronic transactions that flow around the planet every day.

Even more than in the 1990s, the idea that anyone would deliberately make it easier for someone to steal money seems like an attack on the basic functions of society, and so it should come as no surprise that it’s a technology best known for – but by no means limited to – the distribution of currency that should be the focus of a new outbreak of the Crypto Wars, as well as the full flood of individualist, utopian thinking that accompanied the first round. There’s something about money that focuses the mind.

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money on his travels to China in the 13th century, he was astounded. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, he spends a great length of time explaining, and wondering at, the monetary system established by the Great Khan. Until recently, and as was still the case in Europe, the Chinese had used a range of value-bearing commodities to settle commerce and taxation: copper ingots, iron bars, gold coins, pearls, salt and the like.

In 1260, Kublai Khan decreed that instead, his subjects would use apparently valueless paper, printed and certified by a central mint, and, writes Polo, “the way it is wrought is such that you might say he has the secret of alchemy in perfection, and you would be right.” Through a carefully choreographed process of manufacture, design and official imprimatur, “all these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver.”

The process was alchemical in the truest sense, as it did not merely transform material, but also elevated the Khan himself to even more unassailable heights of power: the only arbiter of finance. Those who refused to accept the new currency were punished with death, and all trade flowed through the state’s coffers. Like the Persian king before him, the Khan had realized that controlling traffic – in commerce and in information – was the way to situate oneself at the true heart of power.

True magic

The processing and accounting of money – fiat money, created by decree rather than having inherent value – is essentially the manipulation of symbols, and the gradual but ever-accelerating authority of capitalism, money’s belief system, tracks the development of symbol-manipulating technologies, from the double-entry bookkeeping of the European Renaissance to the development of databases and planet-spanning electronic networks; from physical technologies to virtual ones.

Money also involves the magical transformation of symbols into value. It requires belief to operate.

Around such belief systems other beliefs tend to gather, and the industrial quantities of belief required to breathe life into new systems of value tends to gives succor to any number of outlandish ideas, whether these be the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the nation state or the inviolable will of technology itself.

Money, then, is a belief system backed by state infrastructure which, for a long time, assured centralized power. But as computational technologies, long the sole province of the state, became less about asserting government power than asserting individual freedom – in other words, as the weapons forged in the crucible of the Second World War became increasingly available to the common citizen – it became clear to the veterans of the Crypto Wars how they might make other adjustments to ancient power dynamics.

The idea for digital money and virtual currencies had been floating around for some time before the Crypto Wars. Money has been tending towards the virtual for some time, from the first ATMs and cards in the 1960s, to the spread of digital networks and connections between retailers and banks in the 1980s and 1990s. For anyone with a little technological foresight, it was easy to see which direction we were heading in.

For those concerned with privacy and individual sovereignty, it was a worrying development.

The first ATM via TIME

Digital money, significantly, has none of the advantages of cash; it can’t be stored and exchanged outside of the system of banks and third parties, such as credit card companies, which can regulate and impede its flow. To a cryptographer, or anyone who has imbibed cryptography’s lessons on the potential to separate oneself from overbearing powers, this arrangement looks like a kind of enslavement. So what would digital cash actually look like?

The first quality of digital cash is that it needs to be private, in the sense that no one other than the spender and receiver should be party to the transaction: no bank or security agency should know who is spending the money, who is receiving it, what it is for or at what time and place the exchange is taking place. Because no physical assets, such as notes or coins, are being exchanged, it should also be secure. The receiver should be able to verify they were paid and the spender that they had paid – a two-way receipt for the transaction.

In this way, digital cash would have all the privacy of physical cash, with the added benefit of the participants being able to prove that a transaction had actually taken place.

The opening shot

One of the earliest proponents of digital cash was an American computer scientist called David Chaum.

Chaum believed that both the privacy and the security problems of digital currencies could be solved by using cryptography: encoding messages between the two parties, the sender and the receiver, in such a way that nobody else can read them. Chaum’s solution to this problem involved both parties digitally signing the transaction with a private key, akin to an unforgeable and unguessable digital signature. In this way, both parties validate the transaction. In addition, they communicate through encrypted channels, so that nobody else can see that the transaction has taken place.

Chaum’s system worked, and was implemented by a number of companies and even one bank, but it never took off.

Chaum’s own company, DigiCash, went bankrupt in 1998 and there was little incentive to compete against the growing power of credit card companies. Chaum felt that people didn’t understand what they were losing as digital networks and the money that flowed across them became more centralized: “As the web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them,” he said in 1999.

David Chaum via Elixxir project.

Yet some people, including those radicalized by the Crypto Wars of the early 1990s, did understand the value of privacy.

A group which came to be known as the Cypherpunks gathered first in San Francisco, and then online, with the intent of picking up from Chaum’s work the tools that could be used to disempower governments. From the very beginning, Chaum’s ideas about privacy and security had been tied to ideas about society and the way it was being changed by digitization.

“Computerisation is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used,” he wrote in 1985, foreseeing a Big Brother-like “dossier society” where everything was known about individuals but individuals knew little about the information held over them.

Yet Chaum was forced to partner with existing institutions to get DigiCash of the ground – and this was very far from the Cypherpunk dream. Eric Hughes, a Berkeley mathematician and one of the original Cypherpunks group, published ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ in 1993, arguing that privacy was a requirement for an open society, and privacy on electronic networks could only be achieved through the use of cryptography.

Tim May, another member of the group and a former chief scientist at Intel, went further in the The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto:

“The State will, of course, try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Cypherpunks elaborated on the principles that would bring their utopia of encryption into being, as well as the technical innovations required to make digital currency possible.

One of the biggest hurdles to doing so was the double-spending problem. Physical cash can only be spent once; when a banknote is handed over to a merchant, the buyer can’t at the same time use the same note at another shop around the corner. Virtual currencies face the problem that while encryption can guarantee that this specific piece of data is a form of money belonging to this specific person, it can’t say whether that data has been copied and is also in circulation elsewhere.

In other words, it can’t say whether or not someone is trying to spend the same coin twice at the same time. The need to have a central register to check each transaction was what forced David Chaum to partner with banks.

This necessitated routing all electronic transactions through credit card companies, and re-introduce dthe Cypherpunks’ worst enemies: loss of privacy and the need to trusts some hierarchical organization, a government, bank or corporation, with the authority to verify and, if necessary, roll back transactions.

The blockchain

The solution to the double-spending problem appeared quite suddenly in October 2008, with the publication of a paper on the The Cryptography Mailing List entitled “Bitcoin: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Citing several forerunners in the field, the author of the paper, the previously unknown Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed one key innovation which solved the double-spending problem while preserving anonymity and preventing the need for trusting third parties.

This was called the ‘blockchain’: a distributed ledger, or record of transactions, which would be maintained by everyone participating in the system. It’s called the blockchain because groups of transactions are gathered together into ‘blocks’ as they occur, and as each block is turned out it is added to the ‘chain’ of all transactions. That’s it. It’s simply a list of things that happened.

If everyone can see every transaction, then there is no need to hand over control to banks or governments, and if everyone follows the encryption practices of the Cypherpunks, there is no way to know who is spending the money.

Of course, if everyone has a copy of this ledger, we need to know it hasn’t been forged or tampered with in any way. So in order to extend the blockchain, in other words to write in the ledger, a certain amount of computational ‘work’ has to be done: the computer doing the writing has to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem.

Bloomberg Magazine, 2015

The fact that it’s relatively easy for everyone else’s computers to check if this problem really was solved makes it very difficult – in fact, practically impossible – for anyone to create a fake version of the ledger. In a particularly clever twist, participants are incentivized to help maintain the ledger by receiving a small number of bitcoins when they do solve the mathematical problem. This is where the notional value of Bitcoin comes from: someone has to put in an amount of time and energy to produce it, which is why this process is known as ‘mining’.

Over time, more and more coins are produced, to an eventual total of 21 million sometime in or around 2140. Satoshi’s paper had the good fortune to appear at a particular time. Encoded into the very first block on the Bitcoin chain is a timestamp, the kind of timestamp more familiar from ransom demands: a proof of life.

The phrase embedded forever into the beginning of the blockchain is ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,’ a reference to the front page headline of The Times newspaper on that date.

On one level, it’s a simple proof that no valid coins were mined before that date. On another, it’s an ironic comment on the state of the standard economic system that bitcoin set out to replace. It’s also, for those fascinated by such things, one of the earliest clues to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto appeared in the world, as far as anyone is aware, with the publication of the Bitcoin white paper. There is no trace of the name before that date, and after a few months of interacting with other developers on the project, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared just as abruptly from public view at the end of 2010.

With the exception of a couple of private emails (indicating that the developer had ‘moved onto other things’), and a forum post disavowing an attempt to ‘out’ the developer in 2014, Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since. Perhaps instead, more accurately, we might say that the entity referring to itself as Satoshi Nakamoto has not been heard from since 2010.

For less interesting than the ‘real’ identity of Satoshi is the way in which that identity operates in the world – in a way that perfectly accords with Cypherpunk and blockchain doctrine.

Eating the dog food

In Section 10 of the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi outlines the privacy model of the system. In the traditional banking model, the flow of money through an exchange is anonymized by the third party administering the transactions; they hide what they know from everyone else. However, on the blockchain, where all transactions are public, the anonymity happens between the identity and the transaction; everyone can see the money moving, but nobody knows whose money it is.

The common idea of cryptocurrencies is that they set assets free, but a cryptocurrency is a monetary unit like in any other currency system – one that, because of the blockchain, is closely monitored and controlled. What’s really liberated is identity. It is liberated from responsibility for the transaction and liberated from the ‘real’ person or persons performing it. Identity, in fact, becomes an asset itself. This is also what marks out the idea of the blockchain from earlier cryptosystems like PGP; it’s not the messages that are being hidden, but the actors behind them.

A necessary part of software development is the use of the technology in real-life situations for the purposes of testing.

This is often done by the developers themselves in a process known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ While the developers of bitcoin could test mining and transacting coins between them, the real ‘product’ of bitcoin – a decentralized, deniable identity – could only be tested by someone (or a group) willing to build and sustain such an identity asset over a long period of time – and who better to perform that test than the creator of bitcoin themselves?

Satoshi Nakomoto is an exercise in dogfooding – and proof of its efficacy.

Newsweek Magazine, 2014

When Satoshi disappeared into the ether, they left on the blockchain, unspent, the piles of bitcoins they’d personally mined in the early days of the project – over a million of them. These bitcoins are still there, and only someone who holds Satoshi’s private keys can access them. Today, Satoshi ‘exists’ only to the extent someone can prove to be that individual – the only proof of which is possession of those private keys. There is no ‘real’ Satoshi.

There is only a set of assets and a key. ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ is creator, product and proof of bitcoin, all wrapped up in one.

Once again, the creation of money is the creation of a myth. In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber proposes that the connection between finance and sacrifice runs deep in Western culture: ‘Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the ‘redeemer’? The primary meaning of ‘redemption’ is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying of a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.’

Satoshi’s sacrifice is something different, but in the anarchic frame from which the individual emerged, not dissimilar. In order to secure the future of bitcoin, Satoshi gave up all personal gains from its invention: some 980,000 bitcoins, valued at $4 billion in late 2018. This is a gesture that will continue to inspire many in the bitcoin community, even if few of them understand or even consider its true meaning.

The power of brands

Back in 1995, another regular Cypherpunk contributor, Nick Szabo, proposed a term for the kind of sacrificial identity deployed so successfully by Satoshi: a ‘nym’. A nym was defined as ‘an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community’. Thus the nym is opposed to a true name, which links together all kinds of information about the holder, making them vulnerable to someone who can obtain information that is, in the context of the transaction, irrelevant.

Or as Szabo put it: ‘As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one’s enemies.’

Szabo used as examples of nyms the nicknames people used on electronic bulletin boards and the brand names deployed by corporations. The purpose of the nym, in Szabo’s reading, is to aggregate and hold reputation in particular contexts: in online discussions on particular topics, or in a marketplace of niche products. But online handles and brand names are not the same things, and their elision is an early echo of the reductionism which the ideology forming around the blockchain would attempt to perform on everything it touched.

Brand names are a particular kind of untrue name, one associated not merely with reputation but also with financial value. If the brand attracts the wrong kind of attention, its reputation goes down, and so does its value – at least in theory. But because of their value (financial, not reputational), brands also bestow power on the corporations that own them – that know their real name – while often hiding behind them. Brands can sue. They can bribe. They can have activists harassed and killed. Because of their value, brands become things worth maintaining and worth defending. Their goal becomes one of survival, and they warp the world around them to that end.

Online handles are a different kind of untrue name. Their value lies precisely in the fact that they are not tied to assets, not associated with convertible value. They exist only as reputation, which has its own power, but a very different kind. They can be picked up and put down at any time without cost. The key attribute of online handles is not that they render one free through rendering one anonymous, but that they render one free through the possibility of change.

It is precisely this distinction, between financial freedoms and individual autonomy, that underlies many of the debates that have emerged around bitcoin in recent years, as it struggles to articulate a political vision that is not immured in a technological one. While bitcoin has proved to be a powerful application for the idea of the blockchain, it has also distorted in the minds of both its practitioners and many observers what the blockchain might actually be capable of.

In many of its practical applications, bitcoin has so far failed to deliver on its emancipatory promises. For example, one strand of bitcoin thinking is premised on its accessibility: the widely touted aim of ‘banking the unbanked’ claims that the technology will give access to financial services to the full half of the world who are currently excluded from real market participation. And yet the reality of bitcoin’s implementation, both technological and socio-political, makes this claim hard to justify.

To use the currency effectively still requires a level of technological proficiency and autonomy, specifically network access and expensive hardware, which put up as many barriers to access as the traditional banking system. Regulatory institutions in the form of existing financial institutions, national governments and transnational laws regarding money-laundering and taxation form another barrier to adoption, meaning that to use bitcoin is either to step far outside the law, into the wild west of narcotics, credit card fraud and the oft-fabled assassination markets, or to participate legally, handing over one’s actual ID to brokers and thus linking oneself to transactions in a way that undermines the entire point of an anonymous, cryptographically secure system.

What is blockchain for?

Even if Bitcoin can’t emancipate everyone, it might at least do less harm than current systems. Yet in the last couple of years, bitcoin has made as many headlines for its environmental impact as for its political power.

The value of bitcoin supposedly comes from the computational work required to mine it, but it might more accurately be said that it derives from a more traditional type of mining: the vast consumption and combustion of cheap Chinese coal.

It’s become terrifyingly clear that the ‘mining’ of bitcoin is an inescapably wasteful process. Vast amounts of computational energy, consuming vast quantities of electricity, and outgassing vast quantities of heat and carbon dioxide, are devoted to solving complex equations in return for money. The total power consumption of the network exceeds that of a small country – 42TWh in 2016, equivalent to a million transatlantic flights – and continues to grow.

Bitcoin mining facility, from CoinDesk archives

As the value of bitcoin rises, mining becomes more and more profitable, and the incentive to consume ever more energy increases. This, too, is surely in opposition to any claim to belong to the future, even if one is to take into account the utter devastation imposed upon the earth by our current systems of government and finance.

These complaints, which are both uncomfortably true in the present and addressable in time by adjustments to the underlying system, mask the larger unsolved problem posed by the blockchain: what is it really for? Somewhere between the establishment of the Cypherpunk mailing list and the unveiling of the first bitcoin exchange, a strange shift, even a forgetting, occurred in the development of the technology.

What had started out as a wild experiment in autonomous self-government became an exercise in wealth creation for a small coterie of tech-savvy enthusiasts and those insightful early adopters willing to take a risk on an entirely untested new technology. While bitcoin is largely to blame for this, by putting all of the potential of a truly distributed, anonymous network in the service of the market, to focus purely on this aspect of its unfolding is to ignore the potential that remains latent in Satoshi’s invention and example. It is to ignore the opportunity, rare in our time, to transform something conceived as a weapon into its opposite.

The arguments over the use of wartime weapons in a time of relative peace, made explicit in the Crypto Wars, have a clear analogue: nuclear technology. While the Allies’ desire for global dominance through atomic power was scuppered by Soviet espionage before it began, and the world settled into a Cold War backed by the horrifying possibility of mutually assured destruction, the nuclear powers agreed on one thing: if ever these weapons were to fall into the hands of non-state actors, the results would destroy not merely the social order, but life itself.

Similar arguments were made, at the end of the 20th century, about certain algorithms: the wide availability of cryptography would render toothless the apparatuses of state security and lead to the collapse of ordered society. While it’s easy to scoff now at the idea that the availability of certain complex mathematical processes would bring down governments, we are nevertheless faced with a different, more insidious, threat in the present: that of the substitution of one form of oppressive government with another.

While Tim May, part of the original Cypherpunk triumvirate, attested in The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto that assassination and extortion markets were ‘abhorrent’, he had little time for those who weren’t part of the crypto utopia. In the sprawling Cyphernomicon, a wider exploration of crypto anarchy posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list, May was far clearer on the world he foresaw: ‘Crypto anarchy means prosperity for those who can grab it, those competent enough to have something of value to offer for sale; the clueless 95 percent will suffer, but that is only just.

With crypto anarchy, we can painlessly, without initiation of aggression, dispose of the nonproductive, the halt and the lame.

Lessons from the Atomic Age

Make no mistake: the possibility of cryptographically-enforced fascism is very real indeed.

A future where every transaction, financial or social, public or private, is irrevocably encoded in a public ledger which is utterly transparent to those in power is the very opposite of a democratic, egalitarian crypto utopia. Rather, it is the reinstatement of the divine right of kings, transposed to an elevated elite class where those with the money, whether they be state actors, central bankers, winner-takes-all libertarians or property-absolutist anarcho-capitalists, have total power over those who do not.

And yet, as in the nuclear age, there remains space for other imaginaries.

In the 1960s, in the name of the ‘friendly atom’, the United States instituted a series of test programs to ascertain whether the awesome power of the atomic bomb could be turned to peaceful ends. Their proposals, some of which were actually carried out, included the excavation of vast reservoirs for drinking water, the exploitation of shale gas (an extreme form of contemporary fracking) and the construction of new roadways. Another idea involved interstellar travel, using the intermittent displacement of atomic bombs in the trail of spacecraft to propel them to distant stars.

The former programme was given the name Project Plowshare, in reference to the Prophet Isaiah’s injunction to beat swords into plowshares. Long after the cancellation of the project in the face of keen public opposition, the name was taken up by the Plowshares movement, an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist organization that became well-known for direct action against nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy became a mainstay of everyday life, in the form of the greenest, if most deeply controversial, large-scale energy generation technology we possess. Its outputs, in the form of toxic, radioactive waste, became in turn a source of new contestations over the roles and responsibilities we have to one another, and to the environment.

There is no separation of our technology from the world. Bitcoin, in the decade since Satoshi Nakamoto first announced it, has succeeded technologically but failed politically, because we have failed to understand a central tenet, long established in political theory, that free markets do not create free people – only, and only occasionally, the other way round. A technology developed according to the founding principles of true anarchism – No Gods, No Masters – has already been suborned by capital, because of a lack of imagination and education, and a failure to organize ourselves in the service of true liberation, rather than personal enrichment. This is not a problem of technology, or technological understanding, but of politics.

Bitcoin’s touted environmental offenses are not a rogue emergent effect, nor the hubristic yet predictable outcome of techno-utopianism. Rather, they are a result of failing to grapple with the central problem of human relations, long diagnosed but rarely put to the test in such dramatic fashion: how to work together in the light of radical equality without falling back into the domination of the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak.

But the emergence of that particular offense at this particular time should chime with our position in history. The problem of taking effective global action in leaderless networks is not a problem confined to bitcoin; in the face of global climate change, it is the primary problem facing humanity today. Like language, the printed word, steam, nuclear power and the internet, another miraculous savior technology is revealed to be a timely question asked directly to our capacity for change.

At the time of writing, and despite the best, the worst, the most unconsidered and the most deliberate intentions of its progenitors, the blockchain is primarily being used to drive the creation of a new class of monopolists, to securitise existing asset structures, to produce carbon dioxide and to set in stone a regime of surveillance and control unprecedented in the dreams of autocrats.

And yet, and yet.

The problem created by blockchain, and dramatized by bitcoin, is fundamentally inseparable from the political situation it emerged from: the eternal battle between power structures and individual rights. The solution to this problem is not to be found in the technology alone, but in radically different political imaginaries. A word often heard in the corridors of the new blockchain industry seems to encapsulate the inherent contradictions of a cryptologically ordered future; that word is ‘trustless’. The concept of trustlessness is at the heart of a vision which seeks to escape from established systems of power by making each individual sovereign to themselves, cryptographically secured, anonymous, untraceable and thus ungovernable.

Yet lack of government is but one plank in the construction of freedom: commonality, community and mutual support are equally, if not more, important. This is demonstrated, ultimately, even in the market: as David Graeber has put it, ‘the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings’.

Blockchain, whatever products it might engender in the short term, poses a necessary problem that we should seek to answer not through technological fixes and traditional political forms but through the participation of the widest and most diverse public possible, and the creation of new forms of political relationships between one another.

Bitcoin image via CoinDesk archives

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '239547076708948'); fbq('track', "PageView"); This news post is collected from CoinDesk

Recommended Read

Editor choice

BinBot Pro – Safest & Highly Recommended Binary Options Auto Trading Robot

Do you live in a country like USA or Canada where using automated trading systems is a problem? If you do then now we ...

9.5

Demo & Pro Version Try It Now

Read full review

The post Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

More Details Here → https://click2.watch/free-markets-dont-create-free-people-bitcoins-tech-success-masks-its-failure-6