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Cypherpunks once saw the crypto-currency as a victory for freedom and decentralization. Instead, bitcoin has become a playground for the already powerful, creating new forms of control.
Hughes was a mathematician, and on The List were academics, computer scientists, technologists and hackers. Sometimes g ossip landed in his inbox, and political schemes, or fantasies and code. He and the others were gripped by a question they thought the greatest of the age: Would the spread of technology usher forth a new world of autonomy and freedom?
Or would it bring in an age of surveillance? Would the new nether-space of the Internet allow individuals to become truly free? Or would it be captured by the world of states, hierarchies and corporations? The digital revolution, as they saw it, was poised on a knife-edge: In the early 90s, The List was fast becoming the online home of a fractious, pugnacious, confrontational new movement focused on developing and applying a technology that members thought would be the clincher in the battle.
It was called cryptography: Those on The List called themselves cypherpunks, and in Hughes sat down to write something that looked like their manifesto: For almost a decade, The List was the centre of the crypto world. Hundreds of people joined, drawn to its strange mix of ciphers and radical politics — part technical to-and-fro and informal peer review, part learning guide, part rhetorical sand pit.
It shut down in , but new versions quickly appeared. The most notable was called the Cryptography List, and was where many of the original cypherpunks migrated. In , a new poster sent a message to the list. It briefly laid out how the idea worked and linked to a longer technical paper. The poster called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. But none of these attempts had ever quite been successful. In the eyes of many of the cypherpunks, money was a key battleground in the broader struggle for freedom.
Old money suffered from a fatal flaw: Governments and banks issued the currency — by fiat — and so had control over it. They could enrich themselves by manipulating it, and could spy on people using it. Old money was one of the ways that these old concentrations of power controlled reality.
Another said that the system would get hijacked. It was striking because it seemed to create a currency without the need for central control. Nakamoto presented a system where the network of people using bitcoin could play the role of states and banks, making sure transactions were legitimate.
You could have rules and enforce them without having to create a central authority that could abuse its power. The watchword of the new idea was decentralization. Old currencies were hostage to centralized, capricious bureaucrac ies full of scheming, ambitious humans.
This new currency would be enforced by the cold, hard impartiality of protocols, without centre or core. The cypherpunks argued decentralized systems were less likely to fail accidentally, pointing out that these systems were more expensive and difficult to attack, destroy and manipulate, because they had no vulnerable central points that someone could target to seize control of the much wider system.
But for the cypherpunks, the desire for decentralization went deeper than this. It was about changing the way economies were organized. The political ideologies that flourished on The List were various and often radical, but members could all find something to like about decentralization.
For the communitarians, it meant a world with hierarchy. For Libertarians , a world without authority. For the radical left, a world without bankers and banks. For the radical right, a world without states. It is always fraught to claim the true intentions of those who created bitcoin, but within the tradition of the cypherpunks, decentralization was all about the struggle for liberation in the digital age.
The arms race that Nakamoto referred to was between the technologies of control and of liberation. Freedom from the abuses of conventional life could only be won if dominant concentrations of power were broken up. Bitcoin, then, was part of a wider war with a deeper aim.
Shortly after Nakamoto shared his idea for bitcoin, the poster disappeared into the shadows, and never surfaced again. Most commentaries use a masculine pronoun, however. Almost a decade since its inception, bitcoin is now considered a fairytale story. Its price has surged and surged — the subject of fascination for commentators around the world. KFC has also launched the BitcoinBucket: This bank-destroying cypherpunk dream is now being used to sell and buy fried chicken.
Bitcoin has gone mainstream. With bitcoin now a household name, it is time to ask the same question as the cypherpunks. Who is the digital world for? What are the new forms of control and liberation? Most of all, can technology make people more free? As power transforms and reforms in a changing world, who does bitcoin really put in control?
Bitcoin has become a new kind of social institution, of sorts. But what these rules are is at least as important as how they are enforced.
As bitcoin rose in influence, a group of people emerged that had tremendous power over setting the rules: Back in , Nakamoto released the initial code that set out how bitcoin should work.
But like any piece of software let loose into the world, it had to be a living, breathing thing. New challenges and new problems emerged, and the rules of bitcoin had to evolve. And like any popular open-source project, lots of people have worked on it over the years, suggesting improvements that are tested and discussed.
There is a loosely meritocratic process, where being active and helpful in improving the code leads to more influence in building a consensus, or breaking it. They define, really, what bitcoin is, and ultimately decide when someone is given this power, or indeed when it is taken away.
One of them — Gavin Andresen — once had his commit access revoked because of a disagreement over who Nakamoto really was. The Bitcoin Core developers are not all-powerful, however. Without a formal political system, there is no way of officially resolving arguments when others disagree. Developers can change the rules, he explained, but they have to bring people along with them.
They have to convince and cajole, and try to attain consensus. There is lobbying, there are factions, bitter infighting and bickering. There are different interests, visions and ideologies that would take bitcoin one way or another.
The cypherpunks might have hated political systems, but there was no way for bitcoin to escape politics. And in this system, developers are not the only ones with control. There are two other new centres of power that really matter: SanShiangLiang industrial park sits on the flat grassy planes of inner Mongolia. Nestled among abandoned, half-built coal mines, eight long, narrow hangars sit in a row. Each has a gently sloping roof, and the corrugated metal walls are painted blue and white.
On the end of each hangar is the name of their owner: Nakamoto was asking people to earn bitcoin by doing something that became known as mining. Miners are bitcoin's auditors, doing the work of verifying bitcoin transactions. As new transactions are made, miners check back through all the previous transactions to make sure they are legitimate.
Miners verify blocks of transactions at a time, and, when they are done, add them to a chain of previous and verified blocks. Nakamoto designed the whole process to consist of a mathematical puzzle every 10 minutes.
For each block, miners raced against each other to find the solution. The first one that did so received a bounty of newly minted bitcoins. It was a complex, elegant and brilliant idea that gave miners incentives for throwing computing power at tasks needed by the whole network. At first, mining was easy. But the puzzles that miners had to solve were programmed to become more difficult over time. The community that had formed around bitcoin started firing off pictures of their own mining rigs: Home-brewed sets then gave way to large bitcoin mining companies like Bitmain.
Fifty staff work and often live at its sprawling complex. There is a dormitory, a canteen and a repair centre. Inside the hangars are rack after rack of winking, blinking machines — 25, in total — all built for only one purpose: At the end of each aisle, huge fans with blades over a foot long wash the machines with cooling air. Those companies have conglomerated even further, although more loosely, into mining pools: Bitmain is run by young Chinese financial analyst Jihan Wu, who also set up one of the largest mining pools, called AntPool.
The balance constantly changes miners change pools often but the three biggest pools account for half of the hash power that keeps the blockchain going.