One objection to the cryptosphere… to free cyberspace… is that it’s only for super-smart people, and not for average people. And that’s flatly false.
Building the cryptosphere requires technical expertise, but populating it – filling it with people and commerce and human decency – is for all who will.
And by daring to enter, you make yourself functionally smarter!
After the first part of this series ran, I was surprised to find an archive of the Dodge City Times in my inbox. I had forgotten about the DC Times. It was our third newspaper, centered on Rex’s Dodge City system. And it too was a gas.
After the first part of this series ran, I was surprised to find an archive of the Dodge City Times in my inbox. I had forgotten about the DC Times. It was our third newspaper, centered on Rex’s Dodge City system. And it too was a gas.
Here’s the review edition of The Times:
Here’s issue number 12:
And here’s an issue of the DC Slimes:
Here are some of the graphics:
The end.
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
Bitcoin has always been hard to understand. Even Satoshi, its author, complained about that. The problem isn’t so much its complexity, but its newness – there’s really almost nothing to compare it to.
Having nothing to compare to is also a problem related to the prices of Bitcoin and the other cryptos. We’ve never seen currencies start from nothing and grow into serious players. We’ve always had silver and gold, at least in the background, but more or less all other currencies (certainly in our time) have been imposed by force.
Bitcoin, unless I’m forgetting something, is the first independent, world-recognized currency to pop up in a long, long time. And because of that, understanding its price is complicated.
The key to understanding the price of cryptos is realizing that there are two separate crypto economies: the speculative and the commercial. These two economies are currently bumping into each other and occasionally running over each other… sometimes synergistically and sometimes antagonistically.
The speculative economy is the one that shows up on the news. It’s the home of both serious speculators and hucksters promising Lamborghinis. The speculative economy tends to be philosophically shallow, focusing on price and more or less nothing else((Which is not to say that all speculators care about nothing but price.)). This is the economy of CNBC, the futures markets, and get-rich-quick schemes.
The commercial economy is the one that doesn’t show up on the news. It’s the economy of actual commerce and hardworking developers. The commercial crypto economy tends to be philosophically deep. The people who are struggling to build and spread this technology are doing it because they believe in the better future it can bring into the world. This is the economy of Bitcoin taxis in Africa, international settlement transactions, and millions of smallish transactions between friends and business associates.
What we had in late 2017 was the speculative economy running to excess and overflowing the commercial economy.
What we had in late 2018 was the speculative economy flowing back out and draining liquidity from the commercial economy.
This has been inconvenient for many of us, but it’s something we’ll have to put up with. Evidently this is the way new currencies form.
While it appears mundane to the outer world, it’s the commercial crypto economy that really matters.
If there were no utility to Bitcoin and the others, they would have no value at all, save as a curiosity. And without underlying value, speculation would be ridiculous. And so it is the commercial economy that underlies everything. And for those of us who are serious about cryptocurrency, this is the economy we need to stay busy with, building and promoting.
And there is so much to be done.
Consider first that there are some two billion humans with no access to fast and simple financial transfers. That is, they have neither a bank account nor the associated services. These people are perfectly situated to become crypto users. They have the inherent need of trade and they generally have cell phones. And with crypto, that’s enough. Early crypto developers are working in these areas already, but there will be huge needs in this sector for a long time.
Consider also that nearly every cryptocurrency is immune to capital controls. Sadly, we can probably expect more of these in the years ahead, and cryptocurrency is, as we say, censorship-resistant. You can send money to anyone with a connection, anytime and in any amount.
Cryptocurrencies are also immune to monetary inflation… perfectly, mathematically immune. There are a fixed number of currency units in Bitcoin and its children, unlike the units of government currencies, which are created billions at a time by the actions of elites rather than by market participants. The value of the US dollar has fallen 90% over my lifetime because of such actions.
So, which is a better place to put the fruit of one’s labors? Government currencies are all but guaranteed to lose value consistently. Cryptocurrency is all but guaranteed (aside from speculative waves) to retain value.
Finally and probably most importantly, crypto is a path around a dangerous and tyrannical set of government currencies. I’ll leave off the details for today, but central banks and their associated systems have become networks of surveillance, control, and dominance. For the sake of our species, they need to be made obsolete.
So, in the long run, cryptocurrency is terribly attractive, first of all for its direct benefits, and secondarily as a speculation.
Until all these things play out, we’ll have to put up with speculative waves rolling back and forth over the commercial crypto economy.
More than that, we need to get even more serious about building the commercial side. Not only does the world need this, but the larger the commercial side, the less damage waves of speculation can cause.
* * * * *
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* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
“Bitcoin is evil” articles exist in profusion, and these days I pretty much ignore them. But one of the recent types – raising awareness of Bitcoin’s environmental unsustainability – has engaged me. As it turns out, I have an unusual background to bring to this topic, and I think I should contribute.
So, here we go:
Let’s be honest and admit that most of the “environmental movement” sells fear of an apocalypse. And as we should all realize by now, humans have an innate weakness for fear.
More or less every apocalyptic environmental prediction has failed. (I’m talking about those that could actually be measured, obviously.) That won’t stop the fear-sellers of course, and now Bitcoin has come into their sights.
The fear is that because crypto mining uses so much power, it will bring down the grid or cause various environmental disasters. The advocates of this fear throw around scary sounding numbers (measured in terawatts) and assorted scientific terminology. (“They understand it and you don’t… don’t expose yourself to ridicule.”)
But it’s mostly just fear. Sure, proof-of-work sucks up power, but that’s nothing new. How much power do you suppose all those millions of air conditioners suck up every summer? I haven’t dug up the figures, but I’m ready to take bets that it’s several times more than crypto mining. Shall we now fear the air conditioner?
I worked for decades in the electrical industry, and so I’d like to give you some facts from that perspective:
Power use has been going up since the beginning. These days most houses get 200 amperes of electrical service. But there are still thousands of houses that are wired with only 60 amperes. That was plenty 60 years ago. New loads (devices using power) come along all the time. In just my time, we’ve added air conditioning, microwaves, and lots of computers.
Mining is a nice, steady load. The kind power companies thrive on. What makes their lives crazy are seasonal loads like air conditioning, which occur only a few months per year.
Power failures happen every year, especially in summer due to the aforementioned air conditioning load. It’s a good bet that several fear-sellers have press releases ready to go for this summer.
The utilities are making money on this. More power use means more income.
If people use too much power, the providers will raise their prices. Econ 101.
Cryptocurrencies don’t finance war.
The public hasn’t actually paid for a war since WW2. Since then the whole game’s been run on credit. (The same goes, more or less, for everything Big Guv does to save us poor, helpless sheep.)
With Bitcoin and all the cryptos that I know of, you can’t do such things. If you want to throw a war in a crypto-based economy, you’ll have to convince people to pay for it. Good luck.
* * * * *
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* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
– Princess Leia, Star Wars
Assange, Ulbricht, Manning, Snowden… we’ve seen a slow stream of revolutionaries over the past decade or so, a few of whom became well-known. More will be coming.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
– Princess Leia, Star Wars
Assange, Ulbricht, Manning, Snowden… we’ve seen a slow stream of revolutionaries over the past decade or so, a few of whom became well-known. More will be coming.
The reason I’m sure of this is that the two forces driving it are increasing:
On one hand, humanity is becoming better. You’ll never believe that if you watch “the news,” but out here in the real world humans are slowly improving. I’m tempted to say that I’d like the progress to be a bit more rapid, but the truth is that recent progress has sometimes been faster than I expected.
On the other hand, elite control, empowered by the internet’s parasitic “free stuff” model, has bypassed all known limits and is riding the numbness and compliance of the past few generations into new territory.
And so the best and brightest are increasingly caught between hammer and anvil. And when struck, they’re tending to see the entire system as retrograde and absurd. Which of course it is.
What happens when the young and healthy see themselves cast in the role of “the permanently abused,” then, is quite predictable, all the more so because they’re expected to thank their abusers: They rebel. As they should.
You’ll notice that the four revolutionaries mentioned above have been fully non-violent. That of course is a very good thing and can be attributed to a mix of intelligence, information, and general goodness. What truly healthy person, after all, prefers violence as a tactic?
This, however, is bad news for elite power addicts. They need rebels to lash out violently. Their propaganda systems are designed to scare the rest of the sheep with images of violence and to use the whole drama to their advantage. That’s “their thing,” as John Lennon noted decades ago:
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.
This is why, as you may also have noticed, all four of these revolutionaries have relied upon cryptography: because cryptography transcends violence.
You can bomb a car or a building, but you cannot bomb a math problem… and cryptogrphy is simply math.
In the end, it is cryptographers who are preventing violent revolution, while the elites are provoking it.
And so, whether or not you think new tools like cryptocurrencies are flawed (and why would we expect perfection of anything?), it remains very much in your interest to support them in one way or another. We do not want violence, and the current system is pushing the young generation into it. Instead, we want abused young people to find peaceful, productive outlets, and crypto is pretty much it these days. (Though others would certainly be welcome.)
It really boils down to a type of equation:
Pressure A + Pressure B = Expulsion Energy C
Whatever values we plug in for these variables, we know that A and B are increasing. Humans really are improving and the elites have become degenerate control addicts; they can’t even see anything else.
Expulsion Energy C, therefore, will increase. We’ll be having more and more revolutionaries, whether or not they show up on authorized vid feeds.
It is very important that these young people find productive avenues. If they do, a benevolent future can form.
* * * * *
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* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
Once you know a storm is coming, the only sensible actions are to either protect yourself or to get out of the way. And so it has become time to roll up the Jay’s Bar show and move along. If we simply vanish from view now, there won’t be much in the way of targets to destroy.
None of us, however, are about to deny ourselves: what we are, what we love. We’re still going to live our lives our way. But neither do any of us want to be locked into cages; that helps no one, save self-righteous enforcers. (About whom I can’t help remembering a line from Jesus: Whoever kills you will think he’s doing God a service.) And so we’ll simply change tactics and survive into another day.
The Crypto House looks like it wasn’t connected to this storm, so as long as none of us from the bar make things worse, they should be fine. But Esther will have to avoid the sanitarium for some time. (She and young Johnny have moved in together.)
The kids running the seminars face a harder issue. I’ve talked to them about this and they’re divided. Some want to just sell videos on the darknet and be done with it, while others want to keep going, albeit more carefully… doing it the underground way. I suspect that various of them will take each of those paths.
And what of Mike, our exchange operator in Poland, who is in the enforcers’ sights? Well, I’m as sure as I can be that his friends will warn him to move along. The Polish government is far too close to the US government; they’d pick him up in a minute if asked.
Personally, I hope he gets far away from the Western enforcement sphere (maybe to Southeast Asia). And that he winds down or sells his business, waits for the statute of limitations to expire, then comes back home for a visit. His record will be marked, but so long as he colors mostly inside the lines, they’ll probably leave him alone.
As for myself, I will cease reporting this story. This is my last dispatch.
But this is the closing of a chapter, not the closing of a movement. These kids have broken out of the status quo and have been exposed to the life of adventure. They won’t just give it up.
I’ve warned them, of course, about dealing with such storms: that you must not only be smart about it, but you must have a “why” for what you do. You need a larger reason than “to make money” or “because it’s cool.” If you don’t, the first wave of tribulation is likely to wash you away.
Nonetheless, some small number of us will suffer for moving the world into a better day. It has happened innumerable times in the past, and it’s already happened this time… and it more than likely will happen again. We’re moving out of an archaic and barbaric era and into a humane and open era… and that won’t happen without resistance; people addicted to status, power, and control will fight it.
But I do think I’ve shown these young people how to turn the odds in their favor, which was my mission from the beginning.
Further, I’m convinced that this will spread. As I was working on this article a quote from the psychologist Carl Jung came to mind:
[M]an doesn’t permit, forever, his nullification.
Man does allow himself to be nullified for a time. And this has been seen in the status quo world over several generations: in the docile compliance of the factory model, in the forced grouping and conditioning of government schooling, in the modern West’s automated obedience to authority… no matter how badly authority screws up.
But that’s changing now. My young friends are no longer happy being nullified. They could live on government handouts if they wanted – everyone in their generation knows how, after all – but they don’t want to be null beings, housed and fed by a monster state until they die. They want to be alive and self-determinant. They’ll take the blame for their errors and the credit for their successes.
This mindset, which is spreading, will eventually break up the old, archaic regime and bring something better into the world.
To wrap everything up, I went by Jay’s yesterday, to give Michele the news. He understood very well – half a dozen of his customers have been run over by the feds in recent years – but I think he’ll miss us. He very much respected that we were helping disabled people.
As I bade him goodbye for a while (I’ll still stop in occasionally), he smiled. He obviously had something on his mind, and so I waited for him to let it out. And it didn’t take long.
“You’ll be back with a new group in another 20 years, Professor?”
We both laughed.
“God willing, Michele,” I replied as I turned to leave… “God willing.”
* * * * *
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* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
I walked into Jay’s expecting to find Johnny to be his usual gregarious self. And he was, so long as he was greeting people at the bar. Once we sat by ourselves in the restaurant, however, he changed.
I had never seen Johnny scared before. I’d seen him angry, disgusted, and irritated, but not scared. We were barely through the usual “How’s your family?” stuff before he jumped into crypto.
“I did some looking, Paul, and it seems like you’ve got a handle on this stuff. Do you really?”
“I suppose so, John, but there’s so much action these days that no one can keep up with it all. So I can help you with the basics but not on the newest things. There’s just too much.”
The idea that this crypto thing was expanding beyond the ability of its friends to monitor frightened him further, but neither of us pursued that avenue.
“Listen,” he said. “I know you’re a reasonable guy, even if you are a little crazy…”
We both laughed; I was always the crazed radical in our group of friends.
“But a lot of us are concerned about this. It’s like a genie let out of its bottle, and it may not be controllable pretty soon.”
It was the usual fear of control addicts, but Johnny is my friend and I wanted to help him.
“I think you’re right, Johnny, this thing is growing wildly, but I want to set your mind at ease in at least one way: With the exception of a few scam artists and a small fraction of just plain assholes, the crypto crowd are decent people. They may disagree with the political class on how the world should operate, but they’re not remotely interested in forcing their ideas on people.”
John was partly comforted but only partly.
“Yeah, I get that,” he said, slowly nodding his head. “The question is how far can this thing go? How big can it get?”
This put me into a bit of a dilemma. John is my friend, but I don’t want to give him information that he could pass along to bigger operators than himself. So I addressed only the currency aspect of it.
“The real issue is that this is currency. And it’s better currency. Right now all the cryptos combined account for less than 1% of world currency value. So the question is how much of world currency should be in cryptos rather than government currencies? Are the cryptos good enough for 1% of world value? 10%? 50%?”
Johnny shook his head and waited for me to answer my own question.
“I don’t know where it will end up, but I do know that this stuff is better in a bunch of ways, and people will eventually figure that out.”
“So you think they could really win?”
“I’m not sure ‘win’ is the right word, John, but yeah, there’s a good chance they’ll keep spreading for a long time and become a very significant thing.”
Then without skipping a beat, Johnny pulled out his iPhone and typed something on it.
“It’s from your cousin,” he said. “Cousin” is his slang for our mutual friend. I looked at the screen. It clearly was not an incoming message; it displayed only what Johnny had just typed. It said,
Laugh like it’s funny.
I did. The second line said,
Turn off your cell phone and sit on it.
I typed back,
I turned it off and pulled the battery before walking in.
He read it, we both laughed together, and he turned off his phone then slid it under his leg, while making it look like he was putting it into his pocket. And I quickly remembered that as we were seated, Johnny asked for a different table than the one we were first shown. Johnny’s better at cloak-and-dagger than I thought.
We each took a sip of wine and waited a few seconds. Then Johnny leaned in.
“Like I say, I checked on this, and a couple of the agencies are watching the group meeting at the bar.” I groaned a little. “The first thing that got their attention was the kid who flew off to Poland and opened an exchange.”
“I knew the kid, but I didn’t know he went to Poland.”
“Well, he did, and he stepped right into their sights. They’re paying a lot of attention to those exchanges.”
I nodded my head and said, “Yeah, I know… they have to. It’s the last control point and they need to collect taxes from this.”
“Yeah,” Johnny said, “they do.”
“And the second thing was the seminars?”
“Yes,” he said. “They probably wouldn’t have cared about them, but they think these kids are taking that same kind of rebellion on the road…” He trailed off.
“And so they need to kill it,” I said, concluding the statement.
Johnny nodded his head in agreement.
“Okay, Johnny, please tell the agencies two things. First, that I’ll do what I can to get the kids to pull back. Second, that they’re fools if they try to take these kids down in their usual hyper-aggressive way. Look at what they did to Ross Ulbricht: They wanted his head on a pike, but all the exercise did was make the agencies look like maniacs, turn Ulbricht into a martyr, and spawn a dozen new dark markets.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Well, it’s true,” I went on. “These guys have no idea how barbaric they look to the kids on the darknet.”
“I believe you, Paul, but I don’t think I can say that to the agencies; they really believe that they’re working for God.”
I quickly realized that he was right.
“You’re right, John. Don’t tell them anything. Say something about me not realizing how extreme those kids were getting and leave it at that. They’re never going to see what they don’t want to see. Let ’em screw themselves again.”
John and I ordered more drinks and went back to talking about old friends. He pulled out his phone and turned in back on. I picked up the check, we hugged, I thanked him, and I headed back home.
At least we have a storm warning, I muttered to myself as I went.
* * * * *
A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:
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* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
Ten years ago the cypherpunks were almost entirely forgotten. But now – and quite shockingly to those of us who were involved – cypherpunks are cool again. More than that, the discoveries of the cypherpunks are starting to change the world in a serious way.
That being so, I’d like to briefly recap what the cypherpunks discovered, because what these people found was a new world… a “terra nova.”
Our new territory was created by a combination of the internet and encryption. The internet gave us unlimited community, and encryption became our “city walls,” allowing us to separate ourselves from the rest of the world.
The first cypherpunks, being clever lads, began using the internet and encryption because they were interesting and fun. Shortly, however, they realized that they were actually building a terra nova and were instantly confronted with a huge question: How should we arrange our new world? That cranked everything into high gear.
I didn’t know this passage from Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776) at the time, but it captures the astonishing thought that sprang from the discovery of terra nova:
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Not all was sweetness and light, however. Encryption was considered a munition, and exporting it was highly illegal. But it was easy to see that public key encryption (actually key exchange, published by Diffie and Hellman in 1976) was the perfect technology for the internet… and the internet was not limited to the USA.
So, a group of the clever lads hatched a plan in 1991: They’d write a nice little encryption program and send it around the world. An anti-nuke advocate named Philip Zimmerman drove the project but everyone involved wanted to avoid the jail sentence that would come from exporting their new program. They did have one trick available to them, however: the First Amendment.
So, they took the program, called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, and printed it as a book. And since books are protected speech, they pushed copies of the book into envelopes and mailed them to friends in Europe. Once on the far side of the Atlantic, the books were keyed back into computers and turned back into a program… and then distributed everywhere.
Zimmerman very nearly went to jail (based upon an upload to a BBS system), but the world received strong encryption.
Once you begin exchanging encrypted messages with friends, one of the next ideas to cross your mind is, Gee, some kind of electronic currency would be really nice to go with this. (David Chaum, for example, began working on digital cash after he invented cryptographic mixes back in 1981.) And once you start imagining encrypted commerce, you quickly realize just how radical this technology can be.
One by one this thought dawned upon us all. I wasn’t among the very first to grasp it, but by the mid-1990s I was struck by it as well. In a continuing education course I conducted for Iowa State University, I wrote this:
Another huge thing in years ahead will be electronic cash for Internet commerce. Electronic cash can be transferred on-line instantly, inexpensively (almost free), and, if encrypted, privately. Think about this for a minute – it will change the world.
The awesome power of encryption is not something that is instantly grasped.
The quote above is from Julian Assange (also a cypherpunk), and it’s quite true. Encryption, after all, is merely applied math, and math is built into the structure of the universe.
Now, to illustrate just how strongly the universe favors encryption, please consider this:
It is roughly 2100 (2 to the 100th power) times harder to decrypt a message than it is to encrypt it (unless you have the key).
Engineers debate this number of course, but it’s clearly in that range. Here it is precisely:
1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376
So, when people like Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin, talk about an arms race between cypherpunks and old-world power, don’t simply assume that the old way will win((You should also know that post-quantum encryption already exists and is being incorporated into leading edge systems.)).
But while the cypherpunks dropped off the radar for a couple of decades, they still produced things like BitTorrent, The Onion Router network (aka Tor, or the darknet), I2P (an even better darknet), a variety of digital cash systems, privacy systems (including the first commercial VPNs), and even commercial tools like digital escrows and dispute resolution.
The big, new cypherpunk creations, however, everyone knows: WikiLeaks and Bitcoin. I’ve explained WikiLeaks before and we have a report on Bitcoin, so I’ll leave those aside for today. But suffice it to say that a cypherpunk world has been building for some time and may form much further in the years ahead.
A Planet Cypherpunk would be a radically different place from our current Planet Status Quo, and that scares some people very badly.
That fear isn’t rational of course. The ancient world is very happily long gone. We live better and behave better. The rational choice, then, is to keep that progress going, and that necessarily includes change, including radical new adaptations.
Status quo systems, however, major on fear. That’s the secret ingredient that keeps their game together. And so “right-thinking” moderns have been trained to fear anything new. That’s not rational, but it makes people feel safe.
But rather than conducting a further discourse on why Planet Cypherpunk would be better than Planet Status Quo, I’ll simply leave you with the conclusion of one of the very first cypherpunk documents: Timothy C. May’s Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, published in November 1992:
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!
* * * * *
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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
A few months ago, as I was having a conversation with another crypto advocate, these words escaped my lips: “I hate to say it, but maybe we need a price crash.” As I said them, I had a slightly sick feeling of “Be careful what you wish for.”
Now, the price has crashed. But in spite of all the pain that has caused, it was probably necessary. Why? Because it chased away the scammers and the people who were only in cryptos for a fast buck. “Bitcoin will get you a Lambo” was a pretty damned juvenile idea, after all. It was certainly nothing worth building upon.
So, whether we’ve enjoyed it or not, the fire has raged, the forest has been pretty well cleansed, and those who remain can build without ridiculous distractions.
A few days ago I reran the numbers on the market cap of world currency (about $200 trillion) and all cryptocurrencies (about $400 billion). So, crypto = 0.2% of government currencies… meaning that fiat currencies are worth 500 times what cryptos are worth. And that makes the choice in front of us nice and clear:
If you think cryptocurrencies aren’t worth one five-hundredth of fiat, sell now and go back to your Life Before Bitcoin.
If you think cryptos are worth more than one five-hundredth of fiat, get back to work.
We have a full crypto economy to build, and the worst obstacles have just been removed. Let’s get busy.
* * * * *
A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:
Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)
* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
I got a strange phone call the other day. The person on the other end played like it was a wrong number, asking for Angie something, but they were listening to my voice way too closely. What they were doing, I was pretty certain, was to see if it was really me using the phone billed to me.
The next day, I stopped by Jay’s Bar*, partly because I was nearby and partly to see if anyone was hanging around looking for me. I sat at the far corner of the bar, where I had a good angle on nearly the whole of the establishment. I ordered a tonic and lime (I don’t drink a lot of booze) and read through some of my notes.
I could see the look in Michele’s eye. He greeted me and then moved past, wiping down the bar. But as he did, looking away from me, he said, “There was a man asking about you a day ago… forty-ish, white… a pro.”
“Grazie,” I murmured while taking a drink.
That settled it; “they,” whoever they were this time, were looking for me. And so I started making notes. Some kind of government operative (and there are literally hundreds of spy agencies to choose from these days) wanted information on me and my new friends. Since we all use encryption and anonymization, getting information the usual way hadn’t done them much good. Now they were back to old-school methods: sending someone to watch and perhaps to confront.
After scribbling down a number of ideas, examining them, and choosing between them, I came to three big conclusions:
We’d move our meetings between small taco joints on the north side.
I’d make myself available to the watchers.
I’d immediately have a talk with an old friend who is deeply connected.
I finished my second tonic and lime while trying not to look too disgusted. I motioned for Michele, handed him my money, and said, loud enough but not too loud, “See you Thursday after work.”
If “they” were listening somehow, they’d be waiting for me.
The next day I went to where my connected friend habitually eats lunch. I have his old phone number somewhere, but things like this are better done in person. And fortunately, I found him. We caught up on family and friends for a few minutes, and then I told him precisely what was going on and asked for his advice.
My friend thought for a moment, smiled at me, and pulled out his phone.
“Hey, Johnny,” he said into it. “You still bored?”
I was pretty sure whom he was talking to: a mutual friend who used to be a major player in state politics but who had left the big game and wasn’t doing much. And the continuing conversation between the two (or at least the half of it I heard) confirmed it.
“So,” my friend said as he turned to me, “you’ll meet Johnny at that bar Thursday at six, then buy him dinner next door?”
“Deal,” I said.
I thanked my friend for setting up the dinner and tried to pick up his check. He stopped me, but I protested.
“You did me a favor,” I said. “You can let me pay for your lunch.”
He shook his head and held the check.
“No,” he said. “Friends do favors for friends.”
I thanked him again and left, making a reservation at the Italian place on my way home.
Thursday I’ll meet the retired politician at Jay’s. My guess is that we’ll talk about anything but crypto for 90% of the evening: old friends, interesting stories, our families, and so on. Johnny’s a very entertaining guy.
But at least the watchers will see that I have a friend with some juice, and maybe they’ll back off a little. If nothing else, I think it will secure my position on the “non-violent dissident” list. That’s a position I can live with.
Our group’s weekly meetings, however, will have to move from place to place. That way they’ll need extended surveillance on at least some of us if they want to bug our meetings… and I can’t imagine that we’re important enough for that. The worst these kids would do is to stiff the IRS.
Our only “weapon” is cryptography… which boils down to math. This is a point that Satoshi Nakamoto made when he announced Bitcoin:
[I wrote Bitcoin to] win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
The “arms race” of Satoshi and the cypherpunks was this:
They have cops, guns, and bullets… and court orders backed by them.
We have crypto.
And I still think that’s a good way to look at things.
More next time.
* Please note that the stories set in and around Jay’s Bar are fictional. They’re often based upon real people and events, but they are fiction.
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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
