"The Dark Net" by Jamie Bartlett was a book with a perhaps overly dramatic and actually a bit misleading title/graphics, that nonetheless does a very, very good

"The Dark Net" by Jamie Bartlett was a book with a perhaps overly dramatic and actually a bit misleading title/graphics, that nonetheless does a very, very good job of explaining the so-what of crypto-anarchism. Also, as it was published in 2014, so it was a bit prophetic. To crib a Goodreads review of it, it's actually about: > Bartlett spends the bulk of the book analyzing the impact and development of the internet on human life: To get to the point, what is really interesting about the crypto-anarchist movement is a concept Bartlett does a good job explaining. The cipherpunks, for all their libertarian wackadoodle beliefs, believed that if you could enable 3 pillars of internet use, the impact of how the internet could be used would be radically improved. Or like, those 3 pillars would enable something really "meaningful" about internet use.. Those three pillars are natively digital... 1) private browsing 2) private communications 3) private spending If you look at how the past 20-30 years turned out, 1 and 2 came into existence and proved to have immensely impact: Tor and PGP. Tor perhaps didn't shake things too much although has its niche, but consumer-accessible encryption today plays fundamental roles in internet infra basic functionality the same way that web servers and DNS does. So, the cipherpunks sort of called it accurately on 1 and 2. Along comes 3 in Oct 21, '08 with bitcoin's white paper. At a minimum, that means btc merits attention in my mind, as it comes out of a community that has some other very prescient commentary on how the internet could, should, and would eventually work.