Anarchist

 Sharing a message from Amir here, worth reading:

I've tried to think many times what the future of money or economics looks like. When you are trapped within a system, it's hard to escape its mental gravity, in the same way the soviet citizens lived in a state of 'hyper-normalisation'. They had grown up in the system and couldn't imagine any other form of existence which made their escape much harder. For this I find it often helpful to turn to history, such as the origins of finance in mesopotamia (see Werner for example), or history of technology.

The Sovereign Individual written in 1997 argues that cryptocurrency will lead to the demise of the nation-state, decisively undermining its ability to extract wealth from society. Together with Cryptonomicon (which I plan to read next), these are are fundamental historical crypto-anarchist texts. The book argues history from the perspective of purely material forces which through this lens it arrives to many interesting and thoughtful conclusions.

The industrial era brought rising returns on the use of violence, which nation states were effective means of extracting resources from society. The standardized army was a bargain with citizens, rather than tribes and communities as the social order existed before.

# Dark Renaissance

Today the information age has enabled new means for society to protect itself from extractive violence. This renders nation states increasingly ineffective and obsolete.

Hard power is defined as military and economic power, but we argue there is a new third category: cryptography. Because of cryptocurrency, during the last decade there has been an never seen before investment into honing these powerful techniques. The latest iteration of those, techniques such as MPC, HE or ZK, unlock entirely new design spaces which have never been explored before. We term that design space anonymous engineering.

The proverbial dark forest is the safehaven refuge of the cyber-guerilla that provides cover and concealment. It opens another front in the struggle for freedom.

The darkfi dev team coordinates through a fully anon chat system where we have no registration or IDs, but people can choose nicks and change them at will. Much of the crypto space is corrupted by silicon valley ideology, Discord/Reddit/Twitter, proprietary software, VC capital (stolen through money printing), and such, and this is actually blinding people to create tech for the agorist parallel polis paradigm. That's why much of the tech is absolute crap and more of the same garbage 'apps' that just don't work well at all, rather than being novel and liberatory.

Free software had incredible vitality and inventiveness because of, not despite of their ethics or ideology. Interesting smart people choose where they want to be and aren't slaves to money. Free people follow their destiny. All interesting tech is borne of philosophy, see Ada and computing, or McCarthy and the internet.

There are many things AssangeDAO couldn't do because all voting decisions are public and on chain, carrying enormous liability for every token holder participating in governance decisions.

# RegFi - DarkFi Split

Crypto will inevitably split into two. It's an idea who time has inevitably come. The nation states existing today were born from the industrial era when words like command and control, and central planning were popular. But the diminishing returns to violence has rendered nation states obsolete.

The incentive with online digital markets is for efficient p2p and popular democratic governance.

If crypto means anything about the law, it means fuck your law!

There will be a RegFi. Crypto which is regulated and above ground. It will be hugely encumbered and nearly impossible to use. All interesting uses of crypto will be regulated into oblivion.

And there will be DarkFi. Underground and unregulated, it will be free and unencumbered. This is where crypto is free to explore it's true self and come into being.

We are creating the infra for this movement to stand its ground, innovate and push forwards.

# The Impending Storm

Crypto is fundamentally antagonistic. There is no resolving this dilemma. Everything useful about crypto is about circumventing state civilization paradigm. Allowing for example new financial flows that are otherwise blocked. Many companies in the industry believe they can dance with the state.

People in the US were trying for years to create "crypto banks" or "Bitcoin ETFs" while hostile legislation is constantly passed. Their applications never being accepted, just silently passed up. Then imagine the only ETF to be allowed was a SHORT bitcoin ETF.

Other companies try to play this delicate balancing act with offshore safehavens, and regulatory arbitrage, but the complexity is mounting as the regulators close in. That type of activity cannot last long term. Especially as crypto inevitably comes into being and fulfills its destiny.

That's why I don't believe any of these US-based heavily-VC backed crypto companies are truly prepared to weather the storm or participate in this struggle. Their rhetoric is just: LARP

# AI vs Crypto

AI is currently mostly used to aggregate data and better manage society. Crypto is our best hedge against dystopia preserving spaces of cyber freedom (the dark forest).
The destiny of crypto is a major invention in the history of humanity, in the same way the printing press or invention of gunpowder changed the fundamental logic of power.
We can add crypto as a third category to the definition of hard power alongside military and economics.

Hacker revolutionaries have gained the ultimate decisive technic in their struggle for freedom.

# Agorist Parallel Society

There are two legacies within technology. What Lewis Mumford calls monotechnics vs ecotechnics: https://wiki.polytech.barcelona/index.php?title=File:Mumford_authoritarian_vs_democratic_technics.pdf

The authoritarian technics (monotechnics) is the state civilization tendency, which is technology that serves power, domination and mechanisation of society. It is a tool to extract wealth from society, for example surveillance capitalism, much of the AI research and automated weapons.

Look how Wikipedia defines civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

> "Civilizations are organized densely-populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations"
> "Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings."

The other major legacy in technology, is the democratic technics (ecotechnics) tendency. Technology which expands the realm of human activity, or empowers movements within society. It allows people to resist power and act freely in their own parallel spaces. These parallel spaces nurture new thought and are the seeds from which intellectual movements spring forth.

Crypto will make people more autonomous than ever before. And however ruthlessly states behave in the transition period, combining the IRS with the CIA will have no effect. They will be more and more forced to bargain with autonomous society on their terms.

People through DAOs and anonymous crypto-finance will declare their economic independence. When the people conduct their own economic policies over the internet, it will cease to matter that the state controls the industrial-era money-printing. Their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms. Cryptocurrency controlled by anonymous online markets will supersede fiat money issued by states.

# The Demise of the Nation State

Modern state economics presupposes society is dominated by an instrument of compulsion so powerful that can seize the wealth created by society. But the returns to violence will inevitably fade away.

This will have vast implications on representative democracy replaced by now forms of nascent direct democracy. The politics of the next century will be much more varies than what we know now.

The industrial institutions will downplay the inevitability of these changes or to argue they are undesirable as if it were their decision how history evolves.

Historically when a civilization was dying, its death was neither widely anticipated nor understood. Nonetheless the prevailing mood was one of deep gloom. We can see this today where all our movies are deeply pessimistic, post-apocalyptic. Everybody feels deep down that in the next 5 years, there will be a major macro-economic or political event of huge significance. At the end of an era, its typical that conventional thinkers sense things are falling apart, but their mental inertia is often too great to fully comprehend the implications of the the reconfiguration of power.

Mass production of books was subversive to the church, just as crypto will prove subversive to the nation-state. There is a close analogy with the attempts by the US state to suppress encryption technology, which will not suppress the spread of this subversive technology but merely guarantee it will be put to its most subversive use.

The temptation of crypto markets, alongside necessity will make it increasingly costly for the state to operate on its own accord as it loses vital revenue.

The current nation states have grown to senile extremes fitting closely the needs of industrial society, but their doctrine and mode of thinking are ill suited to the needs of this technological age. The nation-state model is obsolete.

Naturally the breakdown of an order coincides with a tremendous surge in crime. The old systems of control break down. It's the healthy sign of a breaking era.

Hardly a criticism of crypto, more something that should be embraced with its totality.

Crypto eats the sacred character of the nation-state. Crypto forms its own morality and dissolves the paramount power of the nation-state.