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Cryptoanarchy is a means of organizing society under conditions of a very high defense/offense asymmetry (ie. if it costs Y resources to cause X harm to someone

Cryptoanarchy is a means of organizing society under conditions of a very high defense/offense asymmetry (ie. if it costs Y resources to cause X harm to someone, the ratio Y/X is high). The greater that this asymmetry is, the more useful cryptoanarchy becomes. Cryptoanarchy is already becoming increasingly successful with reputation systems and private arbitration, and the reason is that we are increasingly living in a world where that is the case, since with the internet it's difficult to find people, action happens across multiple jurisdictions, and greater economic decentralization in some respects makes regulation more difficult. In fact, what is particularly interesting is that Y/X is not just high, it's sublinear - if I'm three times as powerful, it is much less than three times as hard to hurt me. Arguably, in the face of governmental attackers, Y is sometimes _not even an increasing function of X_ - since one's main defenses against an entity that is nearly all-powerful in the sphere of violent force are speed and privacy, and one's speed and privacy both reduce with size, it's easier for the government to nab a single $100 million foe than it is to nab a single $10000 foe. You can see this clearly with the DPR seizure. The more extreme that this condition becomes, the stronger an influence crypto-anarchic law protocols will have on society. That's the general principle; anonymity is only one aspect of it.

yetanotherphd 13y ago
That is a very nice summary of the ideas, much clearer than the article itself. I think that the problem with your claims about the defense/offense asymmetry is that it is based on abstractions that only exist because of the government. All of the reputation/private arbitration systems that exist online still exist in the context of nations with laws that prevent, for example, someone killing you because you posted a bad review of them. Or simply stealing your goods in person ("X robbed me in the street and stole my clothes. I would not do business with him again"). Once you have established an upper limit on the kind of offensive actions that can be taken, it is easy to bootstrap reputation systems. But I don't consider this as evidence that there is a high defense/offense asymmetry at a fundamental level.
- vbuterin 13y ago
  There are several cryptoanarchist responses to that: 1. Some government-like mechanisms should definitely exist on the level of the physical world (this could be anywhere from Rothbardian private law to a concept of private cities to a more moderate vision of a Georgist government that taxes exclusively resources and perhaps even pays out a basic income). What matters is that these governmental mechanisms should/will stay out of trying to restrict human interaction. 2. We are already moving into a less materialistic society, and the trend will continue in the future. For myself personally, all of my physical possessions combined have a resale value under $1k and a replacement cost under $2k. If you mug me, you will get a moderately good cell phone, some cash in my wallet and maybe an old laptop, but not anything nearly worth the tiny risk that I or a bystander will be able to overpower you. When all wealth is stored in data or the mind, locked behind passphrases and encryption, physical crime simply becomes not all that interesting. 3. Contrary to Oleg's post, people's online identities should be cleanly separated from their physical identities, and it should be cryptographically difficult to make the mapping from the guy who wrote a bad review of you to the physical person living in a certain city. You can feel free to choose which of these you find more and less convincing; I have my own opinions on the issue and certainly do not represent "the movement" as a whole to any significant extent. But you are correct that the high offense/defense asymmetry characterized by the (cryptoanarchists' vision of the) internet does heavily rely on existing infrastructure; if this were not true, then we would have been living in a society organized largely along cryptoanarchist lines for the past ten thousand years.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

That is a very nice summary of the ideas, much clearer than the article itself. I think that the problem with your claims about the defense/offense asymmetry is that it is based on abstractions that only exist because of the government. All of the reputation/private arbitration systems that exist online still exist in the context of nations with laws that prevent, for example, someone killing you because you posted a bad review of them. Or simply stealing your goods in person ("X robbed me in the street and stole my clothes. I would not do business with him again"). Once you have established an upper limit on the kind of offensive actions that can be taken, it is easy to bootstrap reputation systems. But I don't consider this as evidence that there is a high defense/offense asymmetry at a fundamental level.

vbuterin 13y ago
There are several cryptoanarchist responses to that: 1. Some government-like mechanisms should definitely exist on the level of the physical world (this could be anywhere from Rothbardian private law to a concept of private cities to a more moderate vision of a Georgist government that taxes exclusively resources and perhaps even pays out a basic income). What matters is that these governmental mechanisms should/will stay out of trying to restrict human interaction. 2. We are already moving into a less materialistic society, and the trend will continue in the future. For myself personally, all of my physical possessions combined have a resale value under $1k and a replacement cost under $2k. If you mug me, you will get a moderately good cell phone, some cash in my wallet and maybe an old laptop, but not anything nearly worth the tiny risk that I or a bystander will be able to overpower you. When all wealth is stored in data or the mind, locked behind passphrases and encryption, physical crime simply becomes not all that interesting. 3. Contrary to Oleg's post, people's online identities should be cleanly separated from their physical identities, and it should be cryptographically difficult to make the mapping from the guy who wrote a bad review of you to the physical person living in a certain city. You can feel free to choose which of these you find more and less convincing; I have my own opinions on the issue and certainly do not represent "the movement" as a whole to any significant extent. But you are correct that the high offense/defense asymmetry characterized by the (cryptoanarchists' vision of the) internet does heavily rely on existing infrastructure; if this were not true, then we would have been living in a society organized largely along cryptoanarchist lines for the past ten thousand years.