Transcript bitcoinet.pl

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