The Crypto Promise of a Cyberian Paradise

Facebook's announcement of Libra should come with zero shock attached. The social media company's entire business model revolves around keeping people within their walled garden, invading all aspects of their attention and lives. Creating an internal ecosystem that includes micropayments makes as much sense as their purchase of virtual reality company Occulus. What does it mean to live in a digital world, and how can Facebook complete its transition into a Weyland-Yutani-esque mega-corporation?

Azeerm Azhar had an excellent analysis of Libra in the paid version of his Exponential View newsletter. He discussed some of the finer points of the technology, and it's potential geo-political impact. In many ways, Libra sends a false sense of openness by creating a non-Facebook owned entity to manage the technology, while the Calibra "wallet" essentially creates a cryptocurrency transfer mechanism, but allows Calibra-to-Calibra transfer outside of the Libra blockchain. This parallels (to a certain extent) what the Lightning Network is trying to do with Bitcoin—a transaction layer based on trust that only needs to go to the blockchain when its time to reconcile the balance. The difference is that Facebook wholly owns Calibra, and it's clear that they want to use this to create their own financial ecosystem for their users. You can even see a Black Mirror future were Facebook users are "awarded" crypto in their wallets for their engagement in the Facebook ecosystem.

This sort of control runs counter to the entire purpose of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. The purpose of something like Bitcoin was to provide an immutable ledger of transactions that could be verified in a way that was permission-less without requiring "trust" in the traditional banking sense. Nobody controlled the network: Not banks, not governments, and certainly not social media giants.

Bitcoin is a natural extension of the cypherpunk movement. This same movement gave us PGP, Julian Assange, and the left libertarian ideals of what privacy and security should truly entail. It has been a growing movement in spite of the opposition of government and corporate entities, and it is likely to continue to grow after revelations of internal conversations in the Trump administration about encryption (although kudos to Tim Cook and Apple for seeing the slippery slope of backdoor technology for government use a few years back).

This history of a digital cryptography subculture runs parallel with the history of money, and it's detailed a great deal in Finn Brunton's Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. It's a question of freedom, and was one of the founding ideas of the computer movement.

Early computer culture opened up a new dimension to the disenfranchised, the experimental, and those dissatisfied with the economic and political climate at the time. From the late 70's to the early 80's and the Reagan administration, those on the fringe coalesced around the computer as a place to find Timothy Leary's "others." This meant a strange mix of psychedelics, computer science, self-help, and even the occult. Socialists, post-capitalists, and anarchists reveled in the freedom that personal computers provided, and even to this day, many of those early sub-genres still influence the computer industry.

The multitude of ideas and principles from various sub-genres also can cause problems. The extreme conclusion of some of these intersections can lead to anarcho-capitalism—a combination of libertarian principles, Randian philosophy, and yes, cryptocurrency thanks to its decentralized nature.

But what does this lead us to? Latin America is filled with havens for disgruntled American, Canadian, and European citizens, bringing their privileged ideas and wealth to countries in turmoil, while carving out paradise because of the exchange rate. The increasing value of cryptocurrency has led to events like Anarcapulco, various communities popping up, and ultimately the much publicized death of John Galton, who embraced the anarcho-capitalist lifestyle, while eventually setting up his own drug business in Acapulco—something that likely was the immediate reason for his murder.

The moral here is that Galton took cryptocurrency and cryptography as a means to circumvent the state, and express his freedom. In the end, his choices cost him his life, as not everyone subscribed to his values. What is the moral of the Facebook announcement? What are the repercussions when the company attempting to control currency has a different set of values than its users.

Decentralized currency and currency exchange might be the most empowering technological innovation to come from the Internet thus far. But what are we going to do with it?