Crypto is Political

The darkness is here and will sweep over our digital world. It cannot be stopped, since the benefits it brings are too great. All the latent potentialities of humanity that are being pushed down will be allowed to rise up to the top.
- Dark.fi Manifesto

Today, Sunny and I recorded a long podcast with Amir Taaki, Rose O'Leary and Ivan Jelincic of Dark.fi. We went for almost three hours and will put it out in two episodes on Epicenter in the next weeks.

I especially enjoyed discussing the political implications of crypto and privacy with the Dark.fi team. When you look at most websites of blockchain networks today, they talk about speed, scalability and cheap transactions. Who could be threatened by that?

But at its core, crypto is about decentralizing power. It's about putting all the control, where the private keys are. You can manage your own keys and become an equal participant.

Power today is concentrated with governments and a few large corporations. For exercising control they depend on our communications and economic activities being mediated by large corporations. Regulation is used to force corporations  to become vehicles for the exercise of power. When you go peer-to-peer, the structure crumbles. This is what crypto does.

However, if you can see everything that is going on, governments can try to put their regulatory control into the chain and applications directly. Will this happen? It's certainly the aim of efforts like the travel rule, which tries to impose AML/KYC for all crypto transactions.

Dark.fi's thesis is that these efforts will lead to a bifurcation into regulated crypto and the dark unregulated crypto. And I think they are right.