Crypto-Power¶
This is a joke, but it’s also onto something serious:
Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA.
Hope you all realize that.
— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016
A cryptocurrency that maintains a perfect log of every single transaction, and which can be controlled by the party with the most CPUs.
— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016
And best of all, the creator has maintained 100% opsec since releasing his paper.
— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016
In my eternally on-the-way Bitcoin book, the point is raised like this:
While the governmental response to Bitcoin is doubtless guided by a strategy (or in fact multiple strategies) of capture, this does not reduce to an agenda of public regulation, still less suppression, but also includes cooptation in accordance with deep state functions, as well as the private interests of state agents. Insofar as every real state includes a ‘deep’ or sub-public aspect, it will inevitably relate ambiguously to the emergence of elusive social capabilities, although this ambiguity will be only minimally reflected in its public relations. The empowering of private agents to evade state scrutiny and regulation represents a manifest erosion of government or ‘public’ authority, and is liable to be denounced on those grounds (if not transparently in those terms). Yet the crypto-secure transaction systems responsible for such governance complications are also opportunities for covert action, and are therefore to be counted as virtual assets. The novel functions introduced by Bitcoin tend to the exacerbation – or sophistication – of agency problems.
The politics of Bitcoin can be expected, eventually, to catalyze a multitude of obscure metamorphoses in the nature of the state. If the distinct but overlapping occult fields of clandestine security functions and resilient sub-public interests are bundled into a provisional concept of the dark state, it can be quite confidently predicted that the balance of attraction and repulsion between such elements and crypto-currency will be highly asymmetric with respect to public communication. As a corollary, it is realistic to assume that the openly stated position of public authorities in regards to crypto-channels of all kinds, very much including Bitcoin, will be systematically misleading, in a negative direction. Bitcoin tends to empower the invisible, and to disempower the visible.
An event on the cryptic plane is not to be confused with its public presentation. Even if the NSA did not create Bitcoin (and — like Clark — I seriously doubt that it did), it’s unlikely that it would be distraught about the discreet rumor that it had.