Tokens by Rachel O'Dwyer

Author:Rachel O'Dwyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The Cypherpunks were influenced by books such as The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman (son of Milton), an anarcho-capitalist text arguing that law should be switched out for technological solutions, and William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davison’s The Sovereign Individual, which forecast a shift from the nation-state to entrepreneurial governance, in which shareholder votes and contracts (not unlike Weyl’s quadratic voting, in fact) would replace the democratic process.22 The group wanted to replace politics with a neat, automated solution. Anarchy, in the words of the Cypherpunk glossary, was ‘a technological solution to the problem of too much government’.23 Anarchy, May wrote, had a bad reputation because it was most often associated with chaos and an absence of control, but here it signified an ‘ “absence of government” (literally, “an arch,” without a chief or a head)’.24 It was rules without rulers. Chop off the head, but replace it with the right protocol.

The Cypherpunks favoured technological solutions over human politics. ‘Individual liberty can be assured by something more reliable than manmade laws,’ May argued, sounding a lot like a Winklevoss twin – ‘the unflinching rules of math and physics.’25 Politics would not bring freedom, but computation might. The Cypherpunk group tended to quash political wrangling (although there was still plenty of it happening on the list). Threads on the philosophy of libertarianism were shut down with an invocation of founder Eric Hughes’s maxim: ‘Cypherpunks write code’. In the words of one member, ‘technology … was more important and interesting than yet more gabbing about liberty and privacy’.26 ‘Cypherpunks write code’ was a motto, but it was also a universal putdown when arguments got too boring or complex – a geek’s variation on ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ And yet, it was through this sort of debate that many of the core technical and philosophical ideas that would later become Bitcoin were first teased out.

Hal Finney shared a reusable proof-of-work – a system, initially designed to mitigate email spam, that was later repurposed to ensure the trustworthiness of a shared database. Finney suggested the creation of encrypted tokens using proof-of-work.27 In 1994, Nick Szabo posted his seminal work on smart contracts – self-executing agreements that used cryptography rather than legal mechanisms to ensure compliance. Such contracts would work not because of the threat of external coercion by the state (as in the legal system), and not because the parties involved knew or trusted one another (as in the kin-communal systems of the Irish bank strikes), but simply because the contracting parties trusted in the technology to execute the contract.28 ‘You trust the thing because of the way it behaves, not because you trust the people who gave you access to it’, wrote Robert (Bob) Hettinga to the forum.29 It was not that these systems could complement a broader political process, but that they might replace it altogether – that technology could, in itself, remake the social. As Eric Hughes put it in his statement of purpose for the Cypherpunk list, ‘cryptographic protocols make social structures’.

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