Tim May: Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet
1997 Mar 15
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Tim May: Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet @ Satoshi Nakamoto
- Author
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Tim May
- Email
-
satoshinakamotonetwork@proton.me
- Site
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https://satoshinakamoto.network
This is a talk at the "Governmental and Social Implications of
Digital Money" panel at CFP '97.
1. Introduction
In agonizing over what to include in my 8 or 10 minutes of talking,
and my handful of pages here, I realized it would be best to concentrate
on a specific example rather than speak in generalities or try to
educate folks about what digital cash is, how it works, how regulators
and law enforcement types will try to control it, etc. I use an
experimental–and controversial–experiment I released on the Net several
years ago, BlackNet, as this example.
2. Anonymous Digital Cash
The focus here is on true, untraceable digital cash, offering both
payer and payee untraceability (anonymity). Mundane digital money,
exemplified by on-line banking, ATM cards, smartcards, etc., is not
interesting or important for CFP purposes. Payer-untraceable (but
payee-traceable) digital cash can also be interesting, but not nearly as
interesting and important as fully untraceable digital cash.
The implications of general digital money for national economic or
monetary policy is also not the focus here. I'm neither an economist nor
a policy expert, so effects on M1, M2, velocity of money, balance of
payments, etc., are for others to think about. I don't expect
earth-shattering effects anytime soon.
Digital cash will of course take many forms. Some digital cash will
be similar to small denomination coins. Some will be more similar to
cashier's checks, certificates of deposit, wire transfers, etc. The
"ecology of digital money" is yet to be evolved.
3. Is Digital Cash Really
Coming?
Whether digital cash is going to be deployed or not, whether it will
be allowed to come or not, how various countries will react, etc., is of
course unknown to any of us at this time. The best we can do is to look
at some probable implications, and discuss the difficulties involved in
trying to control it. (I am especially dubious about static analysis, as
in analyzing what happens if digital cash is "allowed" or is "banned."
The actual future development will involve partial restrictions,
workarounds, moves, and countermoves. Digital cash will not develop in a
regulatory vacuum, nor will simple acts of legislation stop it. The best
we can do here is to discuss some likely implications if certain aspects
of digital cash are deployed.
4. The Technology is Here
Technologically, digital cash is already here. Early versions are
already available from banks such as Deutsche Bank and Mark Twain Bank,
both affiliated with DigiCash, Amsterdam, the company founded by digital
cash inventor David Chaum. These current versions are not necessarily
both payer and payee anonymous, but they can be made fully anonymous
with some simple additional steps. (On-line clearing offers major
advantages. Anonymous bank accounts–offered of course in various
countries–also make for a straightforward form of full anonymity.)
The original papers of David Chaum discussed full payer- and
payee-untraceability in the context of on-line clearing, using his
patented blinding algorithm. (Blinding of numbers submitted to a mint is
the key idea to ensure untraceability. Chaum's various papers discuss
this in detail.) More recently, Chaum appears to be pushing for a
"banker-friendly" (or perhaps regulator-friendly) system in which part
of the untraceability is sacrificed. However, nothing in the basic
theory makes full untraceability unachievable, and several proposals
have been floated to provide true digital cash.
5. "Anyone a Mint"
Recent work by Ian Goldberg of UC Berkeley, and similar work by Doug
Barnes, Hal Finney, and others, makes a truly anonymous digital cash
system possible. Goldberg's scheme allows "e-cashiers" and
"e-moneychangers" to disintermediate the process and ensure
untraceability. Importantly, anyone can essentially become a "mint" of
digital cash. (This has another implication: the Chaum patents apply to
the blinding operation, done by the "customer," so any particular mint
need not license the patent; the customer is supposed to license the
patent, as it he doing the blinding operation, but he is untraceable by
the mint and others, using remailers.)
"Anyone a mint" means that the artificial distinction between the
parts of the "Customer–Shop–Mint" circuit can be removed, with
peer-to-peer transfers. As with real cash, peers can exchange digital
cash with each other, and there is not necessarily a special status for
"shops," or even "mints." One way to look at this is that one-way
anonymity between the Customer and the Shop can be supplemented with
similar one-way anonymity between the Mint and the Shop: 1-way + 1-way =
2-way. The details of how this is accomplished are important, and should
be available soon by searching on the keywords.
6. Implications of
Anyone Becoming a Mint
This has profound implications. It means that anyone can mint digital
cash (not out of thin air, and various checking or pinging schemes will
enforce the authenticity of such minted cash). This means that Alice and
Bob, for example, can exchange digital cash securely and anonymously,
using Cypherpunks-type anonymous remailers to halt traceability of the
traffic. Regulators and even banks have no visibility into these
transactions. In fact, these transactions look exactly like encrypted
speech. (In computer science terms, we might say that money and speech
are both "first class objects," with no artificial distinctions between
the functions and objects. Likewise, payers = payees, and buyers =
sellers = mints. All first class objects, all essentially
indistinguishable.
As noted earlier, the precise form of the various possible financial
instruments is unclear. Not suprisingly, markets will decide what forms
these instruments take. "The street will find its own uses for
technology."
Reputations and "faith" play an important role in all money and
banking systems, and will almost certainly play a pivotal role in
digital cash systems. It is incorrect to say that "anyone a mint"
automatically means that scam artists and thieves can simply mint
digital cash, accept cash, and then disappear. For one thing, since the
digital cash is untraceably issued and resold, the minter never knows
when and how his mint is being "tested" for honesty. Testing agencies
will likely buy digital cash, redeem it, and report on which mints or
banks were honest. A dishonest mint will not prosper for long. Further,
the small denominations (coins) that can be used make it possible to
spread digital cash transactions amongst many mints, none of them
knowing who their customers are. Honesty is built in at an ontological
level rather than at a regulatory level. (There are still fascinating
issues to explore here, and no doubt some new types of scams will
emerge. Caveat emptor.)
7. Applications at the
"Margins"
The focus here will be on the "margins." That is, the margins of
legality, acceptability, and perhaps even morality. Not the mundane uses
of digital money in ordinary transactions, but on the exciting–and
possibly illegal–uses at the margins. These are the areas often
pioneered by early adopters, by those motivated by risk-reward
trade-offs to adopt new technologies. These are the incentivized users.
And this is where the law enforcement and national security communities
are also focussing.
Even if nations attempt to control digital cash (and control crypto
in general, which will be needed if digital cash is to be controlled),
those on the margins are strongly motivated to use crypto and digital
cash systems, and are not much scared off by the penalties which might
be imposed, especially when the protection against getting caught is
basically as strong as the rules of mathematics, not the rules of men.
(Unless truly draconian penalties are attached to even casual, innocent
use, which will have the effect of felonizing and imprisoning many
casual users; even if not applied in "non-serious" cases, such draconian
laws are more typical of police states than free societies. As one wag
put it, "use a random number, go to jail.")
Some of these "marginal" uses are terrible to consider. Extortion,
kidnapping, and even murder contracts become easier to set up.
Extortion, for example, becomes almost unstoppable at the usual place:
the collection of a payoff and/or the spending of the payoff money. The
extortionist makes his threat from the safety of his home PC, using
networks of remailers and message pools, and demands payment in
untraceable digital cash. What if U.S. banks are forbidden to issue
digital cash? Even if most nations and most banks decline to participate
in a digital cash scheme, all it really takes is one such bank or mint.
The extortionist can demand that blinded digital cash be bought from the
one of the few banks that do offer digital cash: the victim is
incentivized to cooperate (he can refuse, but...) and will make other
arrangements, possibly including travelling to the country in which the
bank is located. (Forbidding communication outside national borders,
and/or forbidding travel, would of course be problematic to enforce. Not
even totalitarian regimes of late have been able to stop such
communicaitons, and the U.S. and Western nations have vastly more
channels of communication. Messages can easily be made indistinguishable
from noise, as in packing 160 MB of data (!) in just the least
significant bits of a 2-hour digital audio tape recording. If bales of
marijuana cannot be stopped, how can bits be stopped? Bits are ever so
much smaller...
Similar to extortion are markets for kidnappings (riskier, due to the
physical act), and even untraceable markets for murders. For murder
contracts, the usual risk is in setting up the hit–asking around is
almost a guaranteed way of getting the FBI involved, and advertising in
traceable ways is a similar invitation. This risk is largely removed
when anonymous contact and payment methods are used. To ensure the job
is completed, third party escrow services–anonymous, of course, but with
an established cyberspatial reputation–hold the digital cash until
completion. Much more has been written on this in various places. Search
for my "Cyphernomicon" for more information.
Not all markets made liquid with digital cash are quite so heinous.
And , to be fair, social interactions will likely change in a situation
of "crypto anarchy." Ameliorations may arise to head off the worst of
these potentialities.
One of the most interesting applications is that of "information
markets," where information of various kinds is bought and sold.
Anonymity offers major protections for both buyers and sellers, in terms
of sales which may be illegal or regulated. Some examples: corporate
secrets, military secrets, credit data, medical data, banned religious
or other material, pornography, etc. (Note: People commonly think in
terms of U.S. law, U.S. interests, U.S. secrets, etc. Think beyond U.S.
borders. Think of a woman in an Islamic country banned from obtaining
birth control information. Think of the German banned from accessing
sites carrying Neo-Nazi material. Think of the Singaporan banned from
seeing "Playboy" pictures. Dozens of similar examples are easily
constructed.)
As an important example, credit information on prospective lendees or
renters may be bought from "data havens" which ignore U.S. laws (such as
the unconstitutional law which says credit records may only be kept for
8 years, the so-called Fair Credit Reporting Act). As such credit
records may be of considerable value in helping to make lending, hiring,
or renting decisions, but keeping or accessing such records would
violate the FCRA, the use of an untraceable information market is
obviously advised. Similar scenarios for lawyer and doctor data bases
are obvious: a customer ignores the laws of his local or national
jurisdiction and accesses an offshore or cyberspatial data haven via a
series of remailers and pays for information with digital cash. (He
obviously cannot use his VISA card, and sending cash through the mail is
fraught with danger. Ergo, digital cash.)
Such offshore data bases are an example of "regulatory arbitrage."
The credit records may be fully legal to compile and sell in, say,
Belize. Or images of nude 15-year-olds may be fully legal in, say,
Denmark. To the Iraqi censor trying to ban certain items, the U.S. is a
place where vast amounts of banned items are readily available. The
ability to move data bases around the world leads to "regulatory
arbitrage": the siting of items in favorable jurisdictions. The
implications of this for money have been with us for a long while, e.g.,
banking laws, Switzerland, etc.
And modern cryptography allows this regulatory arbitrage to move into
cyberspace, as the location or nexus of a market may not be traceable to
any particular physical site. BlackNet provides a concrete example,
albeit an early one, of this.
9. The BlackNet Experiment
A few years ago I devised a working information market, using PGP for
secure communication and digital signatures, chained anonymous remailers
for untraceability, and message pools (e.g., alt.anonymous.messages on
Usenet) for making contact and sending later messages. My intention was
to directly demonstrate the feasibility of such markets, and to explore
some of the nuances of such markets. (At no point was BlackNet actually
used for espionage, though I did get a few strange offers, including an
offer to sell me information on how the CIA was targetting the diplomats
of certain African nations in Washington.)
BlackNet allowed fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of
all sorts. The basic idea was to use a "message pool," a publicly
readable place for messages. By using chains of remailers, messages
could be untraceably and anonymously deposited in such pools, and then
read anonymously by others (because the message pool was broadcast
widely, a la Usenet). By including public keys for later communications,
two-way communication could be established, all within the message pool.
What was missing at the time of this experiment was some form of
untraceable payment, i.e., digital cash.
As Paul Leyland so succinctly described the experiment:
"Tim May showed how mutually anonymous secure information trading
could be implemented with a public forum such as usenet and with public
key cryptography. Each information purchaser wishing to take part posts
a sales pitch and a public key to Usenet. Information to be traded would
then have a public key appended so that a reply can be posted and the
whole encrypted in the public key of the other party. For anonymity, the
keys should contain no information that links it to an identifiable
person. May posted a 1024-bit PGP key supposedly belonging to"Blacknet".
As May's purpose was only educational, he soon admitted authorship."
(I should add that copies of the BlackNet message circulated widely
and even appeared at some national laboratories doing sensitive work.
Oak Ridge issued an advisory warning employees to report any contacts
with BlackNet!)
The implications for espionage are profound, and largely unstoppable.
Anyone with a home computer and access to the Net can use these methods
to communicate securely, anonymously or pseudonymously, and with no fear
of detection. "Anyone a spy." Troop movements can be reported, for a fee
in digital cash, by anyone with a view of a harbor or train tracks.
Military or corporate secrets are saleable by anyone with access to
them. Corporate business and technical secrets can be sold safely and
untraceably. "Digital dead drops" can be used to post information
obtained, far more securely than the old physical dead drops...no more
messages left in Coke cans at the bases of trees on remote roads.
Aldrich Ames was a piker, maybe the last of his breed.
(There are well-known methods to detect who is selling secrets.
"Canary traps" involve seeding disinformation to localize the source.
The KGB called this "barium," as it made the source visible. Expect more
sophisticated countermeasures to this new ease in selling
information.)
Untraceable digital cash will likely play a central role, especially
in non-ideological, or "casual," espionage. With real digital cash on
the verge of becoming available, such espionage markets will become
feasible. Not all of them will be widely advertised, of course. The
advantages for spies are incredible. No longer will Aldrich the Spy face
risks of contact (dead drops, payments) when contacting Boris the
Spymaster. Rather, he can make contact from the safety and anonymity of
his home PC, using chained remailers to make his offer in a place read
by Boris, then using encrypted messages for later contact. Even the
payment can be made safely. "Digital dead drops" will revolutionize
espionage, military and corporate. As with "anyone a mint," this makes
for an "anyone a spy" situation.
This is a concrete example of an application on the "margins."
Arguments that people will not be "interested" in using digital cash
must be considered in the light of examples like this. There are, of
course, less controversial applications.
11. Can Digital Cash be Banned?
Can digital cash be regulated or restricted? (And in which countries?
The discussion here will be more U.S.-centric than other sections have
been.) Many issues here, including the power of regulators, the use of
foreign accounts (not currently restricted, though taxes must be paid
and reporting requirements met), and possible restrictions on
speech.
Yes, speech is involved. "Digital Cash = Speech." To use the Eric
Hughes phrasing, "to utter a check." Spending money is often a matter of
communicating orders to others, to transfer funds, to release funds,
etc. In fact, most financial instruments are contracts or orders, not
physical specie or banknotes. Money is increasingly just speech.
As Michael Froomkin notes in his
position paper, restricting digital cash may impinge on free speech,
as it is generally impossible to know before looking if a message is
"pure speech" (whatever that is) or has significant digital cash
aspects. And note that while money laundering and tax fraud are illegal,
the U.S. relies almost exclusively on detection after the crime, as
opposed to inspecting private communications for evidence of criminal
behavior. For U.S. authorities to begin random inspections of messages,
or to ban encryption, would almost certainly mean violations of the
First and Fourth and maybe other Amendments.
I expect moves to regulate digital cash, but I doubt they'll be
enforceable in any meaningful way. Especially not to the risk-takers
likely to be early adopters.
Certainly one predictable move against digital cash will be that
unsupported forms will not receive access to the court system. That is ,
parties in a contract using digital cash will not be able to use the
courts to enforce performance on contracts (just as participants in
illegal markets, such as gambling or prostitution, cannot use the
courts). This lack of access to the courts has not stopped a wide range
of activities, and digital cash should only slightly be disadvantaged by
this lack. Importantly, some of the robust features of digital cash make
court remedies less important.
12. No Middle Ground
There really is no middle ground between digital cash being
essentially unfettered and being completely regulated (i.e., no longer
being anonymous). As with cryptography, where a cipher is either
breakable or unbreakable, digital cash is either traceable or is not.
The "in between" region is small, and constantly moving. The two
extremes are "attractors," pulling the outcome to one side or the
other.
A potential regulator must either take the word of users (and
anonymous remailers make even this problematic) or inspect messages
regularly or randomly to ensure compliance. Even inspected messages may
carry other messages, via so-called covert channels.
It is conceivable that a combination of random inspection of packets
on the Net, combined with draconian penalties for using apparently
unauthorized crypto, could push use of digital cash out of the
mainstream for the foreseeable future. I would argue that this solution
is not "middle ground," but is, rather, what one might have expected in
Stalinist Russia or in Orwell's "1984."
The "brittleness" (all or nothing) of cryptography means that the
real choice is between a total state and crypto anarchy. There is no
"compromise" on the horizon, no middle ground acceptable to both sides.
Hopes for some compromise on strength of crypto algorithms, on backdoors
in ciphers, or in regulation of digital cash appear to be based on naive
understandings of the mathematics involved.
13. Effects on Taxation
The application described here, that of information markets,
especially black markets and illicit markets, has historically been an
incentive for alternate payment and banking schemes. Participants in
such markets are aware of the risks they're taking, and typically cannot
report their incomes to tax and other authorities (nor do they want to,
of course, and tax evasion is often the least of their concerns).
And of course many businesses want above-board transactions, for
their own tax deductions, reporting requirement compliance, etc. The
notion that large numbers of people will be paid in "untraceable
salaries" is far-fetched...at least for the next decade or two.
The effects on taxation are unclear, but my hunch is that the effects
will take a while (decades) to be felt in a major way. Most economic
transactions are not the "margin" examples alluded to here (or are at
the margins but are already largely untaxed, as in underground
economies, black markets, smuggling, criminal activities, etc.).
Certainly Joe Sixpack will not be "moving into cyberspace" anytime
soon.
However, the usual denunciation of cyberspace transactions, along the
lines of "You can't eat cyberspace," misses the key point. In an
information economy, with many degrees of freedom for foreign travel,
consulting arrangements, purchase and sale of art and other valuables,
etc., many mechanisms can be found to transfer (or launder) money into
the real world. And there's no reason the money can't be in various
offshore accounts, available for foreign trips, purchase of goods, etc.
The digital spy who sold chip fabrication secrets for a million dollars
may not be bothered by having his million in several European bank
accounts, accessible to him on trips to Europe or for when he becomes a
"perpetual tourist."
(And to the extent "anyone a mint" becomes more ubiquitous, much of
this digital cash may be deliberately left in cyberspace form, being
used to buy information and services directly with digital cash; the
amount of digital cash which needs to be laundered into traditional
money and reported on tax returns may be a small fraction of the total.
Many interesting issues to explore here.)
14.
Crypto Armageddon: The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse
U.S. law enforcement and national security personnel are already
sounding the alarm about strong cryptography in general and untraceable
digital cash in particular. Scare tactics are the norm in certain
circles. The director of FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network, is warning of money laundering with digital cash, and David
Aaron, Louis Freeh, and others are even floating trial balloons about
domestic restrictions on strong crypto. "The Bad Guys will use crypto."
What I call the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are being invoked:
nuclear terrorists, child pornographers, money launderers, and drug
dealers.
(Ironically, often these Horsemen are government agents, or
ex-agents. Arms deals to repressive regimes, drug smuggling by nominal
drug enforcement agents, bribery, etc. The smuggling of nuclear material
out of the former U.S.S.R. is apparently in the hands of the Russian
Mafia and their allies, assorted former (or even current) agents of the
GRU and KGB. Examples of smuggling, dealing, and child porn rings can be
found in similar milieus elsewhere. Note that all of these folks will
have access to strong cryptographic technologies, and, in any case, will
not likely be scared off by laws against strong crypto or digital cash!
Governments even give themselves the right to create fictitious
identities for their agents, their friends, and those who help in
prosecutions, as the tens of thousands of persons in the Witness
Security Program can attest to.)
And just who are these Bad Guys, anyway? The Appendix lists a bunch
of Enemies of the People in various regimes at various times. Everyone
from revolutionaries to religious heretics have been persecuted;
basically, every government known to man has used laws and restrictions
on liberties to attack its enemies and to stay in power. You may be
surprised to find yourself on the list at all, let alone in several
contexts. These are the people and groups which the hundreds of nations
currently extant, and the countless past regimes, kingdoms, satrapies,
and fiefdoms have oppressed, surveilled, wiretapped, raided at midnight,
and shorn of privacy and freedom. Any "global agreement" on crypto, any
"Crypto World Order," even if led by the U.S., must be analyzed and
attacked in terms of who is targeted. The freedom fighter in the jungles
of Burma, using PGP on her laptop, is as affected by a ban on crypto use
as a man in Saudi Arabia prevented from anonymously connecting to a
banned Web site. Is this what we want?
To be sure, strong crypto, anonymous remailers, message pools, data
havens, and digital cash will of course be used by some to hide crimes.
It would be disingenuous to claim otherwise. But so are locked doors,
closed curtains, whispers, and coded signals used to hide criminal
activities. And yet in free societies we do not allow random searches,
bans on strong locks, or insist that curtains have a special "law
enforcement transparency mode" to assist in the "legitimate needs of law
enforcement." The Founding Fathers of the United States of America
certainly did not envision that the goal of catching criminals,
heretics, dissidents, or even revolutionaries would justify searches of
homes and papers without a specific, court-ordered reason; this is what
the Fourth Amendment specifically ensures. (And the First Amendment
rather explicitly makes it clear that the U.S. government cannot dictate
the form speech may take, and encrypted speech is just another
language.)
In fact, and importantly for the legality of digital cash, free
societies place few if any restrictions on buying things with cash. The
few restrictions in the U.S. involve guns, explosives, and a few other
such restricted items. And sometimes age credentials must be produced.
In general, economic transactions do not require identities of those
involved, and shops and merchants are not required to collect or report
identities to the government. Not even for tax purposes (which can be
handled at the merchant level without knowing the identity of the
payer). Even the catch-all "regulate commerce" clause would not seem to
be sufficient to compel identities to be disclosed in all economic
transactions.
Even in Russia, China, and other totalitarian regimes, or formerly
so, people bought things with cash. Why, ipso facto, should digital cash
not receive similar treatment? (And not to belabor the point, but even
non-cash payments are not automatically reported to the government. Yes,
records of credit card and check transactions may exist and be subject
to subpoena, but there is no automatic requirement that anonymity be
nixed, nor do merchants have to verify identities (or even have the
payer be the same as the purchaser). And so on. Requiring extensive
"identity escrow" would be a major shift away from the last few hundred,
or thousand, years of support for anonymous transactions.)
15. The Price of Digital Cash
True digital cash–the fully untraceable form–will allow some new
channels for criminal activity. Privacy has its price. The ability of
people to plot crimes and commit crimes behind closed doors is obvious,
and yet we don't demand secret cameras in homes, apartments, and hotel
rooms.
Cash is currently allowed in most countries in nearly all
transactions. No identification is required to buy most items, with some
exceptions (guns, explosives, certain chemicals, and a few other
specifically mentioned items). While there may be no specific mention of
privacy in the U.S. Constitution, many would argue that the First and
Fourth Amendments make private economic transactions not subject to
government intrusion.
16. Conclusions
Untraceable digital cash is here. It will become easier to use and
more established in the next several years. It is indistinguishable from
speech, so any laws intended to control it will almost certainly impinge
on speech in general. While scare tactics may work to drive average
users away from using digital cash, those operating on the margins have
the most to gain and lose and will likely not be dissuaded by such laws.
Not only have criminals rarely been dissuaded by tax and banking laws,
but here the chances of getting caught are nearly zero. Boom markets in
information of all kinds can be expected. Crypto anarchy has its
benefits as well as its problems.
It's going to be an exciting world.
A longer version of this paper is due to appear in "True Names : And
the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier," by Vernor Vinge, due in 1997.
An earlier version of most of these ideas is contained the paper "Crypto
Anarchy and Virtual Communities," 1995, available on the Web in a couple
of locations. URLs are transitory. Search engines are the best way to
find articles and sites containing information. Search on the various
keywords here. A very large (1.3 MB) encyclopedic FAQ, the
Cyphernomicon, was sent out by me in 1994. It's getting dated, but it
contains a lot of discussion of these issues. Likewise, searches on
BlackNet, "crypto anarchy," and "Cypherpunks" should return many hits.
Use Boolean narrowing filters to make the number of hits more
manageable.
Appendix: Who are those
Bad Guys, anyway?
Depending on which nation one is in, which regime is in power, and
other factors, here are some of the enemies of the people the laws
against strong crypto and the banning of digital cash are intended to
crush:
Enemies of the People, the opposition party, the Resistance, friends
of the Bad Guys, family members of the Bad Guys, conspirators, Jews,
Catholics, Protestants, atheists, heretics, schismatics, heathens,
leftists, rightists, poets, authors, Turks, Armenians, Scharansky,
Solzhenitsyn, refuseniks, Chinese dissidents, students in front of
tanks, Branch Davidians, Scientologists, Jesus, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela,
African National Congress, UNITA, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry,
colonial rebels, patriots, Tories, Basque separatists, Algerian
separatists, secessionists, abolitionists, John Brown, draft opponents,
communists, godless jew commies, fellow travellers, traitors,
capitalists, imperialist lackeys, capitalist roaders, anarchists,
monarchists, Charlie Chaplin, Galileo, Joan of Arc,, Martin Luther,
Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, civil rights workers,
Students for a Democratic Society, Weathermen, Margaret Sanger, birth
control activists, abortionists, anti-abortionists, Michael Milken,
Robert Vesco, Marc Rich, Nixon's Enemies, Hoover's enemies, Clinton's
enemies, Craig Livingstone's high school enemies, Republicans,
Democrats, labor organizers, corporate troublemakers, whistleblowers,
smut peddlers, pornographers, readers of "Playboy," viewers of images of
women whose faces are uncovered, Amateur Action, Jock Sturges, violators
of the CDA, alt.fan.karla-homulka readers, Internet Casino customers,
Scientologists, Rosicrucians, royalists, Jacobins, Hemlock Society
activists, Jimmy Hoffa, John L. Lewis, Cesar Chavez, opponents of United
Fruit, land reformers, Simon Bolivar, Robin Hood, Dennis Banks, American
Indian Movement, Jack Anderson, Daniel Ellsberg, peace activists, Father
Berrigan, Mormons, Joseph Smith, missionaries, Greenpeace, Animal
Liberation Front, gypsies, diplomats, U.N. ambassadors, Randy Weaver,
David Koresh, Ayotollah Khomeini, John Gotti, Papists, Ulstermen, IRA,
Shining Path, militia members, tax protestors, Hindus, Sikhs, Lech
Walesa, Polish labor movement, freedom fighters, revolutionaries, Ben
Franklin, Thomas Paine, and "suspects".
Tim May: Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet
1997 Mar 15 See all postsTim May
satoshinakamotonetwork@proton.me
https://satoshinakamoto.network
This is a talk at the "Governmental and Social Implications of Digital Money" panel at CFP '97.
1. Introduction
In agonizing over what to include in my 8 or 10 minutes of talking, and my handful of pages here, I realized it would be best to concentrate on a specific example rather than speak in generalities or try to educate folks about what digital cash is, how it works, how regulators and law enforcement types will try to control it, etc. I use an experimental–and controversial–experiment I released on the Net several years ago, BlackNet, as this example.
2. Anonymous Digital Cash
The focus here is on true, untraceable digital cash, offering both payer and payee untraceability (anonymity). Mundane digital money, exemplified by on-line banking, ATM cards, smartcards, etc., is not interesting or important for CFP purposes. Payer-untraceable (but payee-traceable) digital cash can also be interesting, but not nearly as interesting and important as fully untraceable digital cash.
The implications of general digital money for national economic or monetary policy is also not the focus here. I'm neither an economist nor a policy expert, so effects on M1, M2, velocity of money, balance of payments, etc., are for others to think about. I don't expect earth-shattering effects anytime soon.
Digital cash will of course take many forms. Some digital cash will be similar to small denomination coins. Some will be more similar to cashier's checks, certificates of deposit, wire transfers, etc. The "ecology of digital money" is yet to be evolved.
3. Is Digital Cash Really Coming?
Whether digital cash is going to be deployed or not, whether it will be allowed to come or not, how various countries will react, etc., is of course unknown to any of us at this time. The best we can do is to look at some probable implications, and discuss the difficulties involved in trying to control it. (I am especially dubious about static analysis, as in analyzing what happens if digital cash is "allowed" or is "banned." The actual future development will involve partial restrictions, workarounds, moves, and countermoves. Digital cash will not develop in a regulatory vacuum, nor will simple acts of legislation stop it. The best we can do here is to discuss some likely implications if certain aspects of digital cash are deployed.
4. The Technology is Here
Technologically, digital cash is already here. Early versions are already available from banks such as Deutsche Bank and Mark Twain Bank, both affiliated with DigiCash, Amsterdam, the company founded by digital cash inventor David Chaum. These current versions are not necessarily both payer and payee anonymous, but they can be made fully anonymous with some simple additional steps. (On-line clearing offers major advantages. Anonymous bank accounts–offered of course in various countries–also make for a straightforward form of full anonymity.)
The original papers of David Chaum discussed full payer- and payee-untraceability in the context of on-line clearing, using his patented blinding algorithm. (Blinding of numbers submitted to a mint is the key idea to ensure untraceability. Chaum's various papers discuss this in detail.) More recently, Chaum appears to be pushing for a "banker-friendly" (or perhaps regulator-friendly) system in which part of the untraceability is sacrificed. However, nothing in the basic theory makes full untraceability unachievable, and several proposals have been floated to provide true digital cash.
5. "Anyone a Mint"
Recent work by Ian Goldberg of UC Berkeley, and similar work by Doug Barnes, Hal Finney, and others, makes a truly anonymous digital cash system possible. Goldberg's scheme allows "e-cashiers" and "e-moneychangers" to disintermediate the process and ensure untraceability. Importantly, anyone can essentially become a "mint" of digital cash. (This has another implication: the Chaum patents apply to the blinding operation, done by the "customer," so any particular mint need not license the patent; the customer is supposed to license the patent, as it he doing the blinding operation, but he is untraceable by the mint and others, using remailers.)
"Anyone a mint" means that the artificial distinction between the parts of the "Customer–Shop–Mint" circuit can be removed, with peer-to-peer transfers. As with real cash, peers can exchange digital cash with each other, and there is not necessarily a special status for "shops," or even "mints." One way to look at this is that one-way anonymity between the Customer and the Shop can be supplemented with similar one-way anonymity between the Mint and the Shop: 1-way + 1-way = 2-way. The details of how this is accomplished are important, and should be available soon by searching on the keywords.
6. Implications of Anyone Becoming a Mint
This has profound implications. It means that anyone can mint digital cash (not out of thin air, and various checking or pinging schemes will enforce the authenticity of such minted cash). This means that Alice and Bob, for example, can exchange digital cash securely and anonymously, using Cypherpunks-type anonymous remailers to halt traceability of the traffic. Regulators and even banks have no visibility into these transactions. In fact, these transactions look exactly like encrypted speech. (In computer science terms, we might say that money and speech are both "first class objects," with no artificial distinctions between the functions and objects. Likewise, payers = payees, and buyers = sellers = mints. All first class objects, all essentially indistinguishable.
As noted earlier, the precise form of the various possible financial instruments is unclear. Not suprisingly, markets will decide what forms these instruments take. "The street will find its own uses for technology."
Reputations and "faith" play an important role in all money and banking systems, and will almost certainly play a pivotal role in digital cash systems. It is incorrect to say that "anyone a mint" automatically means that scam artists and thieves can simply mint digital cash, accept cash, and then disappear. For one thing, since the digital cash is untraceably issued and resold, the minter never knows when and how his mint is being "tested" for honesty. Testing agencies will likely buy digital cash, redeem it, and report on which mints or banks were honest. A dishonest mint will not prosper for long. Further, the small denominations (coins) that can be used make it possible to spread digital cash transactions amongst many mints, none of them knowing who their customers are. Honesty is built in at an ontological level rather than at a regulatory level. (There are still fascinating issues to explore here, and no doubt some new types of scams will emerge. Caveat emptor.)
7. Applications at the "Margins"
The focus here will be on the "margins." That is, the margins of legality, acceptability, and perhaps even morality. Not the mundane uses of digital money in ordinary transactions, but on the exciting–and possibly illegal–uses at the margins. These are the areas often pioneered by early adopters, by those motivated by risk-reward trade-offs to adopt new technologies. These are the incentivized users. And this is where the law enforcement and national security communities are also focussing.
Even if nations attempt to control digital cash (and control crypto in general, which will be needed if digital cash is to be controlled), those on the margins are strongly motivated to use crypto and digital cash systems, and are not much scared off by the penalties which might be imposed, especially when the protection against getting caught is basically as strong as the rules of mathematics, not the rules of men. (Unless truly draconian penalties are attached to even casual, innocent use, which will have the effect of felonizing and imprisoning many casual users; even if not applied in "non-serious" cases, such draconian laws are more typical of police states than free societies. As one wag put it, "use a random number, go to jail.")
Some of these "marginal" uses are terrible to consider. Extortion, kidnapping, and even murder contracts become easier to set up. Extortion, for example, becomes almost unstoppable at the usual place: the collection of a payoff and/or the spending of the payoff money. The extortionist makes his threat from the safety of his home PC, using networks of remailers and message pools, and demands payment in untraceable digital cash. What if U.S. banks are forbidden to issue digital cash? Even if most nations and most banks decline to participate in a digital cash scheme, all it really takes is one such bank or mint. The extortionist can demand that blinded digital cash be bought from the one of the few banks that do offer digital cash: the victim is incentivized to cooperate (he can refuse, but...) and will make other arrangements, possibly including travelling to the country in which the bank is located. (Forbidding communication outside national borders, and/or forbidding travel, would of course be problematic to enforce. Not even totalitarian regimes of late have been able to stop such communicaitons, and the U.S. and Western nations have vastly more channels of communication. Messages can easily be made indistinguishable from noise, as in packing 160 MB of data (!) in just the least significant bits of a 2-hour digital audio tape recording. If bales of marijuana cannot be stopped, how can bits be stopped? Bits are ever so much smaller...
Similar to extortion are markets for kidnappings (riskier, due to the physical act), and even untraceable markets for murders. For murder contracts, the usual risk is in setting up the hit–asking around is almost a guaranteed way of getting the FBI involved, and advertising in traceable ways is a similar invitation. This risk is largely removed when anonymous contact and payment methods are used. To ensure the job is completed, third party escrow services–anonymous, of course, but with an established cyberspatial reputation–hold the digital cash until completion. Much more has been written on this in various places. Search for my "Cyphernomicon" for more information.
Not all markets made liquid with digital cash are quite so heinous. And , to be fair, social interactions will likely change in a situation of "crypto anarchy." Ameliorations may arise to head off the worst of these potentialities.
8. Information Markets as an Example
One of the most interesting applications is that of "information markets," where information of various kinds is bought and sold. Anonymity offers major protections for both buyers and sellers, in terms of sales which may be illegal or regulated. Some examples: corporate secrets, military secrets, credit data, medical data, banned religious or other material, pornography, etc. (Note: People commonly think in terms of U.S. law, U.S. interests, U.S. secrets, etc. Think beyond U.S. borders. Think of a woman in an Islamic country banned from obtaining birth control information. Think of the German banned from accessing sites carrying Neo-Nazi material. Think of the Singaporan banned from seeing "Playboy" pictures. Dozens of similar examples are easily constructed.)
As an important example, credit information on prospective lendees or renters may be bought from "data havens" which ignore U.S. laws (such as the unconstitutional law which says credit records may only be kept for 8 years, the so-called Fair Credit Reporting Act). As such credit records may be of considerable value in helping to make lending, hiring, or renting decisions, but keeping or accessing such records would violate the FCRA, the use of an untraceable information market is obviously advised. Similar scenarios for lawyer and doctor data bases are obvious: a customer ignores the laws of his local or national jurisdiction and accesses an offshore or cyberspatial data haven via a series of remailers and pays for information with digital cash. (He obviously cannot use his VISA card, and sending cash through the mail is fraught with danger. Ergo, digital cash.)
Such offshore data bases are an example of "regulatory arbitrage." The credit records may be fully legal to compile and sell in, say, Belize. Or images of nude 15-year-olds may be fully legal in, say, Denmark. To the Iraqi censor trying to ban certain items, the U.S. is a place where vast amounts of banned items are readily available. The ability to move data bases around the world leads to "regulatory arbitrage": the siting of items in favorable jurisdictions. The implications of this for money have been with us for a long while, e.g., banking laws, Switzerland, etc.
And modern cryptography allows this regulatory arbitrage to move into cyberspace, as the location or nexus of a market may not be traceable to any particular physical site. BlackNet provides a concrete example, albeit an early one, of this.
9. The BlackNet Experiment
A few years ago I devised a working information market, using PGP for secure communication and digital signatures, chained anonymous remailers for untraceability, and message pools (e.g., alt.anonymous.messages on Usenet) for making contact and sending later messages. My intention was to directly demonstrate the feasibility of such markets, and to explore some of the nuances of such markets. (At no point was BlackNet actually used for espionage, though I did get a few strange offers, including an offer to sell me information on how the CIA was targetting the diplomats of certain African nations in Washington.)
BlackNet allowed fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts. The basic idea was to use a "message pool," a publicly readable place for messages. By using chains of remailers, messages could be untraceably and anonymously deposited in such pools, and then read anonymously by others (because the message pool was broadcast widely, a la Usenet). By including public keys for later communications, two-way communication could be established, all within the message pool. What was missing at the time of this experiment was some form of untraceable payment, i.e., digital cash.
As Paul Leyland so succinctly described the experiment:
(I should add that copies of the BlackNet message circulated widely and even appeared at some national laboratories doing sensitive work. Oak Ridge issued an advisory warning employees to report any contacts with BlackNet!)
10. Espionage as an Information Market
The implications for espionage are profound, and largely unstoppable. Anyone with a home computer and access to the Net can use these methods to communicate securely, anonymously or pseudonymously, and with no fear of detection. "Anyone a spy." Troop movements can be reported, for a fee in digital cash, by anyone with a view of a harbor or train tracks. Military or corporate secrets are saleable by anyone with access to them. Corporate business and technical secrets can be sold safely and untraceably. "Digital dead drops" can be used to post information obtained, far more securely than the old physical dead drops...no more messages left in Coke cans at the bases of trees on remote roads. Aldrich Ames was a piker, maybe the last of his breed.
(There are well-known methods to detect who is selling secrets. "Canary traps" involve seeding disinformation to localize the source. The KGB called this "barium," as it made the source visible. Expect more sophisticated countermeasures to this new ease in selling information.)
Untraceable digital cash will likely play a central role, especially in non-ideological, or "casual," espionage. With real digital cash on the verge of becoming available, such espionage markets will become feasible. Not all of them will be widely advertised, of course. The advantages for spies are incredible. No longer will Aldrich the Spy face risks of contact (dead drops, payments) when contacting Boris the Spymaster. Rather, he can make contact from the safety and anonymity of his home PC, using chained remailers to make his offer in a place read by Boris, then using encrypted messages for later contact. Even the payment can be made safely. "Digital dead drops" will revolutionize espionage, military and corporate. As with "anyone a mint," this makes for an "anyone a spy" situation.
This is a concrete example of an application on the "margins." Arguments that people will not be "interested" in using digital cash must be considered in the light of examples like this. There are, of course, less controversial applications.
11. Can Digital Cash be Banned?
Can digital cash be regulated or restricted? (And in which countries? The discussion here will be more U.S.-centric than other sections have been.) Many issues here, including the power of regulators, the use of foreign accounts (not currently restricted, though taxes must be paid and reporting requirements met), and possible restrictions on speech.
Yes, speech is involved. "Digital Cash = Speech." To use the Eric Hughes phrasing, "to utter a check." Spending money is often a matter of communicating orders to others, to transfer funds, to release funds, etc. In fact, most financial instruments are contracts or orders, not physical specie or banknotes. Money is increasingly just speech.
As Michael Froomkin notes in his position paper, restricting digital cash may impinge on free speech, as it is generally impossible to know before looking if a message is "pure speech" (whatever that is) or has significant digital cash aspects. And note that while money laundering and tax fraud are illegal, the U.S. relies almost exclusively on detection after the crime, as opposed to inspecting private communications for evidence of criminal behavior. For U.S. authorities to begin random inspections of messages, or to ban encryption, would almost certainly mean violations of the First and Fourth and maybe other Amendments.
I expect moves to regulate digital cash, but I doubt they'll be enforceable in any meaningful way. Especially not to the risk-takers likely to be early adopters.
Certainly one predictable move against digital cash will be that unsupported forms will not receive access to the court system. That is , parties in a contract using digital cash will not be able to use the courts to enforce performance on contracts (just as participants in illegal markets, such as gambling or prostitution, cannot use the courts). This lack of access to the courts has not stopped a wide range of activities, and digital cash should only slightly be disadvantaged by this lack. Importantly, some of the robust features of digital cash make court remedies less important.
12. No Middle Ground
There really is no middle ground between digital cash being essentially unfettered and being completely regulated (i.e., no longer being anonymous). As with cryptography, where a cipher is either breakable or unbreakable, digital cash is either traceable or is not. The "in between" region is small, and constantly moving. The two extremes are "attractors," pulling the outcome to one side or the other.
A potential regulator must either take the word of users (and anonymous remailers make even this problematic) or inspect messages regularly or randomly to ensure compliance. Even inspected messages may carry other messages, via so-called covert channels.
It is conceivable that a combination of random inspection of packets on the Net, combined with draconian penalties for using apparently unauthorized crypto, could push use of digital cash out of the mainstream for the foreseeable future. I would argue that this solution is not "middle ground," but is, rather, what one might have expected in Stalinist Russia or in Orwell's "1984."
The "brittleness" (all or nothing) of cryptography means that the real choice is between a total state and crypto anarchy. There is no "compromise" on the horizon, no middle ground acceptable to both sides. Hopes for some compromise on strength of crypto algorithms, on backdoors in ciphers, or in regulation of digital cash appear to be based on naive understandings of the mathematics involved.
13. Effects on Taxation
The application described here, that of information markets, especially black markets and illicit markets, has historically been an incentive for alternate payment and banking schemes. Participants in such markets are aware of the risks they're taking, and typically cannot report their incomes to tax and other authorities (nor do they want to, of course, and tax evasion is often the least of their concerns).
And of course many businesses want above-board transactions, for their own tax deductions, reporting requirement compliance, etc. The notion that large numbers of people will be paid in "untraceable salaries" is far-fetched...at least for the next decade or two.
The effects on taxation are unclear, but my hunch is that the effects will take a while (decades) to be felt in a major way. Most economic transactions are not the "margin" examples alluded to here (or are at the margins but are already largely untaxed, as in underground economies, black markets, smuggling, criminal activities, etc.). Certainly Joe Sixpack will not be "moving into cyberspace" anytime soon.
However, the usual denunciation of cyberspace transactions, along the lines of "You can't eat cyberspace," misses the key point. In an information economy, with many degrees of freedom for foreign travel, consulting arrangements, purchase and sale of art and other valuables, etc., many mechanisms can be found to transfer (or launder) money into the real world. And there's no reason the money can't be in various offshore accounts, available for foreign trips, purchase of goods, etc. The digital spy who sold chip fabrication secrets for a million dollars may not be bothered by having his million in several European bank accounts, accessible to him on trips to Europe or for when he becomes a "perpetual tourist."
(And to the extent "anyone a mint" becomes more ubiquitous, much of this digital cash may be deliberately left in cyberspace form, being used to buy information and services directly with digital cash; the amount of digital cash which needs to be laundered into traditional money and reported on tax returns may be a small fraction of the total. Many interesting issues to explore here.)
14. Crypto Armageddon: The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse
U.S. law enforcement and national security personnel are already sounding the alarm about strong cryptography in general and untraceable digital cash in particular. Scare tactics are the norm in certain circles. The director of FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is warning of money laundering with digital cash, and David Aaron, Louis Freeh, and others are even floating trial balloons about domestic restrictions on strong crypto. "The Bad Guys will use crypto." What I call the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are being invoked: nuclear terrorists, child pornographers, money launderers, and drug dealers.
(Ironically, often these Horsemen are government agents, or ex-agents. Arms deals to repressive regimes, drug smuggling by nominal drug enforcement agents, bribery, etc. The smuggling of nuclear material out of the former U.S.S.R. is apparently in the hands of the Russian Mafia and their allies, assorted former (or even current) agents of the GRU and KGB. Examples of smuggling, dealing, and child porn rings can be found in similar milieus elsewhere. Note that all of these folks will have access to strong cryptographic technologies, and, in any case, will not likely be scared off by laws against strong crypto or digital cash! Governments even give themselves the right to create fictitious identities for their agents, their friends, and those who help in prosecutions, as the tens of thousands of persons in the Witness Security Program can attest to.)
And just who are these Bad Guys, anyway? The Appendix lists a bunch of Enemies of the People in various regimes at various times. Everyone from revolutionaries to religious heretics have been persecuted; basically, every government known to man has used laws and restrictions on liberties to attack its enemies and to stay in power. You may be surprised to find yourself on the list at all, let alone in several contexts. These are the people and groups which the hundreds of nations currently extant, and the countless past regimes, kingdoms, satrapies, and fiefdoms have oppressed, surveilled, wiretapped, raided at midnight, and shorn of privacy and freedom. Any "global agreement" on crypto, any "Crypto World Order," even if led by the U.S., must be analyzed and attacked in terms of who is targeted. The freedom fighter in the jungles of Burma, using PGP on her laptop, is as affected by a ban on crypto use as a man in Saudi Arabia prevented from anonymously connecting to a banned Web site. Is this what we want?
To be sure, strong crypto, anonymous remailers, message pools, data havens, and digital cash will of course be used by some to hide crimes. It would be disingenuous to claim otherwise. But so are locked doors, closed curtains, whispers, and coded signals used to hide criminal activities. And yet in free societies we do not allow random searches, bans on strong locks, or insist that curtains have a special "law enforcement transparency mode" to assist in the "legitimate needs of law enforcement." The Founding Fathers of the United States of America certainly did not envision that the goal of catching criminals, heretics, dissidents, or even revolutionaries would justify searches of homes and papers without a specific, court-ordered reason; this is what the Fourth Amendment specifically ensures. (And the First Amendment rather explicitly makes it clear that the U.S. government cannot dictate the form speech may take, and encrypted speech is just another language.)
In fact, and importantly for the legality of digital cash, free societies place few if any restrictions on buying things with cash. The few restrictions in the U.S. involve guns, explosives, and a few other such restricted items. And sometimes age credentials must be produced. In general, economic transactions do not require identities of those involved, and shops and merchants are not required to collect or report identities to the government. Not even for tax purposes (which can be handled at the merchant level without knowing the identity of the payer). Even the catch-all "regulate commerce" clause would not seem to be sufficient to compel identities to be disclosed in all economic transactions.
Even in Russia, China, and other totalitarian regimes, or formerly so, people bought things with cash. Why, ipso facto, should digital cash not receive similar treatment? (And not to belabor the point, but even non-cash payments are not automatically reported to the government. Yes, records of credit card and check transactions may exist and be subject to subpoena, but there is no automatic requirement that anonymity be nixed, nor do merchants have to verify identities (or even have the payer be the same as the purchaser). And so on. Requiring extensive "identity escrow" would be a major shift away from the last few hundred, or thousand, years of support for anonymous transactions.)
15. The Price of Digital Cash
True digital cash–the fully untraceable form–will allow some new channels for criminal activity. Privacy has its price. The ability of people to plot crimes and commit crimes behind closed doors is obvious, and yet we don't demand secret cameras in homes, apartments, and hotel rooms.
Cash is currently allowed in most countries in nearly all transactions. No identification is required to buy most items, with some exceptions (guns, explosives, certain chemicals, and a few other specifically mentioned items). While there may be no specific mention of privacy in the U.S. Constitution, many would argue that the First and Fourth Amendments make private economic transactions not subject to government intrusion.
16. Conclusions
Untraceable digital cash is here. It will become easier to use and more established in the next several years. It is indistinguishable from speech, so any laws intended to control it will almost certainly impinge on speech in general. While scare tactics may work to drive average users away from using digital cash, those operating on the margins have the most to gain and lose and will likely not be dissuaded by such laws. Not only have criminals rarely been dissuaded by tax and banking laws, but here the chances of getting caught are nearly zero. Boom markets in information of all kinds can be expected. Crypto anarchy has its benefits as well as its problems.
It's going to be an exciting world.
Where to Find More Information:
A longer version of this paper is due to appear in "True Names : And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier," by Vernor Vinge, due in 1997. An earlier version of most of these ideas is contained the paper "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities," 1995, available on the Web in a couple of locations. URLs are transitory. Search engines are the best way to find articles and sites containing information. Search on the various keywords here. A very large (1.3 MB) encyclopedic FAQ, the Cyphernomicon, was sent out by me in 1994. It's getting dated, but it contains a lot of discussion of these issues. Likewise, searches on BlackNet, "crypto anarchy," and "Cypherpunks" should return many hits. Use Boolean narrowing filters to make the number of hits more manageable.
Appendix: Who are those Bad Guys, anyway?
Depending on which nation one is in, which regime is in power, and other factors, here are some of the enemies of the people the laws against strong crypto and the banning of digital cash are intended to crush:
Enemies of the People, the opposition party, the Resistance, friends of the Bad Guys, family members of the Bad Guys, conspirators, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, heretics, schismatics, heathens, leftists, rightists, poets, authors, Turks, Armenians, Scharansky, Solzhenitsyn, refuseniks, Chinese dissidents, students in front of tanks, Branch Davidians, Scientologists, Jesus, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, African National Congress, UNITA, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, colonial rebels, patriots, Tories, Basque separatists, Algerian separatists, secessionists, abolitionists, John Brown, draft opponents, communists, godless jew commies, fellow travellers, traitors, capitalists, imperialist lackeys, capitalist roaders, anarchists, monarchists, Charlie Chaplin, Galileo, Joan of Arc,, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, civil rights workers, Students for a Democratic Society, Weathermen, Margaret Sanger, birth control activists, abortionists, anti-abortionists, Michael Milken, Robert Vesco, Marc Rich, Nixon's Enemies, Hoover's enemies, Clinton's enemies, Craig Livingstone's high school enemies, Republicans, Democrats, labor organizers, corporate troublemakers, whistleblowers, smut peddlers, pornographers, readers of "Playboy," viewers of images of women whose faces are uncovered, Amateur Action, Jock Sturges, violators of the CDA, alt.fan.karla-homulka readers, Internet Casino customers, Scientologists, Rosicrucians, royalists, Jacobins, Hemlock Society activists, Jimmy Hoffa, John L. Lewis, Cesar Chavez, opponents of United Fruit, land reformers, Simon Bolivar, Robin Hood, Dennis Banks, American Indian Movement, Jack Anderson, Daniel Ellsberg, peace activists, Father Berrigan, Mormons, Joseph Smith, missionaries, Greenpeace, Animal Liberation Front, gypsies, diplomats, U.N. ambassadors, Randy Weaver, David Koresh, Ayotollah Khomeini, John Gotti, Papists, Ulstermen, IRA, Shining Path, militia members, tax protestors, Hindus, Sikhs, Lech Walesa, Polish labor movement, freedom fighters, revolutionaries, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and "suspects".