Thought-provoking article in Bitcoin Magazine about a conference that happened at the end of September, the Hackers Congress Paralelni Polis in Prague.
It’s an interview with two crypto-anarchists who explain their views on the direction of society and the possibilities of a future that includes mainstream usage of Bitcoin and encryption technologies.
One of the first questions asked by the interviewer is, “what is cryptoanarchy?”
This is their answer:
Sip: Simply put, crypto-anarchy is the idea that people can govern and organize themselves without governments, by using the tools of cryptography, cryptocurrencies and other means of decentralization.
Lupták: With these tools, we can build a more effective, a more free and a more voluntary society…
This is a nifty idea, and what makes it nifty is that free software and open source developers have been collaborating for decades and have been more effective, more free and all open source developers are contributing voluntarily.
In fact, there was a recent article by Daniel Pink suggesting that the further we are from a problem, the more creatively we will think about it. In open source development, we are close to the problem but when reviewing other people’s code or submitting patches, we are further away from the problem meaning we can be more creative in coming up with solutions.
So at least for software development, a decentralized model can work. Can it work as a replacement for government? That question is still open but we have seen lots of actions to make government more transparent and more accountable to the people. If you’re looking for small-scale examples of “anarchy” in action, you can look at the Workplace Anarchy described by someone who works at Igalia, a software co-operative that sells consulting service and is quite profitable.
In the interview they mention OpenBazaar which is free/open source software that lets you run a peer2peer ecommerce site. The idea there is to reduce transaction costs to whatever the bitcoin transaction costs are and to remove any middlemen that would cut into profits. A thoroughly free-market-oriented concept that is based on market efficiency and accomplished through free/open source software with the BitCoin currency.
