This is a piece I've been wanting to write for a long time, but I have a lot of complex ideas around it and didn't want to bog you, the reader, down in directionless babbling.
But when that title popped into my head not one hour ago, it clicked as the perfect analogy to express these ideas clearly and concisely. So, without further ado, here they are.
Woz and Jobs
Just some quick background for those who may not already be familiar. We all know Steve Jobs was the co-founder and previous CEO of Apple. He was famously an excellent ideas man and salesman.
Lesser known, but equally important, is Steve Wozniak. The other co-founder of Apple along with Jobs, he kept out of the spotlight and only agreed to found the company with Jobs on the condition that he could stick to engineering while Jobs handled the business side. He didn't want attention, fame, or power. He was a genius engineer and he only wanted to do what he loved.
With this in the mind, let's introduce our Woz...
Satoshi Nakamoto
Unless this post happens to go crazy viral outside the Bitcoin community for whatever reason, I don't think I need to give too much of a history lesson on this bit.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, famously said of their creation:
It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than with words though.
But Satoshi - whoever he/she/they were - was not totally silent on the political-economic implications either.
In the first public internet post introducing Bitcoin to the world, some such motivations were explained:
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
This, paired with the hex encoded headline hidden in the Bitcoin genesis block - The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks - leaves little doubt that the creation and release of Bitcoin so soon after the 2008 financial disaster was no mere coincidence.
However, despite Satoshi's frequent presence online before disappearing forever, the posts didn't spend much time philosophising. Instead most were focused on ideas for new features, troubleshooting, and technical discussions regarding the implementation and why certain design choices were made, and so on.
After all, Satoshi wanted the creation to speak for itself rather than be seen as a figurehead or a leader of a movement:
If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
But while ideas are bulletproof, they rarely move the masses on their own. A movement, a form of a protest, a show of force against the establishment on the other hand, is very attractive.
Enter our Jobs...
Ross Ulbricht
In 2011, another psudonymous internet character going by the name Dread Pirate Roberts introduced the world to Silk Road.
Just as Bitcoin was the first ever successful attempt at digital cash, Silk Road was the first ever successful attempt at a darknet market.
Silk Road was only accessible through Tor and all payments were made in Bitcoin. It was the addition of Bitcoin that made the experiment a success where previous attempts at Tor markets had failed attempting to use conventional fiat payment methods.
But unlike Satoshi, DPR was not one to shy away from being vocal in his economic and political views:
Silk Road is about something much bigger than thumbing your nose at the man and getting your drugs anyway. It's about taking back our liberty and our dignity and demanding justice.
Indeed, unlike Satoshi, DPR was distinguished primarily by devotion to his vocal ideals, a devotion so deep it drove him to risk his own freedom to demonstrate their value to the world.
If Satoshi was better with code than words, DPR was the opposite. He was the Jobs to Satoshi's Woz.
So outspoken was DPR that Forbes even published a long list of choice quotes from his account on the Silk Road forum, almost every single one critical of the state, police, regulations, and other forms of authority, and full of praise for the advancement of individual freedom.
He even explicitly shared his support for the founding principles of Bitcoin in very similar terms to Satoshi:
The Federal Reserve system relies on the force of government to maintain its monopoly power on the issuance of money. This is how all central banks maintain their control. Without the state's involvement, people would be free to use whatever currency they like. Historically this was gold. If the founders of the fed tried to do what they did w/o the Federal Reserve Act legislation, and later the Brenton Woods agreement, they would have failed miserably. No one would have bought into their system.
In fact, this is the beauty of libertarianism. The people are free to choose what system they want. No need for one size fits all government solutions. If you want to use a debt based inflationary monetary system, go right ahead, doesn't affect me so long as you don't try to force me to use it as well.
As well as espousing the virtues of libertian free markets, he spoke frequently about agorism:
Anything you do that is outside the control of the state is agorist, so in some sense we are all agorists whether we know it or not. Some people just take those actions because of the personal gain they can obtain, which is perfectly fine, but some do it as a conscientious objection and act of rebellion against the state as well.
I'm out to turn unconscious agorists into conscious active ones. :)
What's agorism? To quote Sam Edward Konkin III, the philosopher who coined it:
The goal of agorism is the agora. The society of the open marketplace as near to untainted by theft, assault, and fraud as can be humanly attained is as close to a free society as can be achieved. And a free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others' values by violence and coercion.
Agorism arguably goes a step beyond anarcho-capitalism as it encourages people to actively create alternatives to state controlled systems themselves as a form of direct action and non-violent protest rather than attempt to influence politics through the democratic process.
As explained in this article:
Under agorism, individuals would abandon the pursuit of traditional politics. Instead, they would attempt to build libertarian institutions to serve as alternatives to the current political economy. To resist the state, many agorists would engage in black and grey market activity.
The reasons the founder of Silk Road held an affinity for this ideology should be self-evident, and although Satoshi didn't discuss specific personal political affiliations, the creation of a decentralised currency outside of any single entity's control, motivated by a distrust of central and private banks, certainly appears to align with this line of thought. Indeed, in his writings on agorism, Konkin explicitly advocated for creation of alternative currencies.
Unfortunately, unlike Satoshi, DPR wasn't able to step away into anonymity. His true identity was revealed as Ross Ulbricht when the FBI grabbed him in a highly suspect case full of blatant corruption, evidence tampering, and false allegations where a biased judge slapped him with a disproportionate sentence.
The drug war is an acute symptom of a deeper problem, and that problem is the state.
Despite the fact the extreme sentence was clearly intended as a deterrent to others considering similar enterprises, many new markets popped up to replace Silk Road in virtually no time and continue to run to this day, often under the same ideology that motivated Ross.
Bitcoin and Silk Road as a realisation of the cypherpunk vision
The Cypherpunk Manifesto, published way back in 1993, laid out a world where individual freedom was achieved through use of cryptography, privacy, and, yes, digital money, by the means of software self-identified cypherpunks would create in order to bring this world into being through distributed systems without a central authority:
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.
I can only wonder how many of those people bought Bitcoin early, and indeed how many may have spent some on Silk Road.
It's no surprise that the Bitcoin community remains dominated by people whose views can be broadly categorised into various forms of libertarianism. People who distrust the state and believe in free markets and individual liberty.
Bitcoin and Silk Road share this underlying appeal to the libertarian mindset. Bitcoin created the means to form free markets outside the control of the state, and Silk Road used Bitcoin to put the idea into practice while expressing the underlying libertarian principles very explicitly.
In the words of Ross:
The same principles that have allowed Silk Road to flourish can and do work anywhere human beings come together. The only difference is that the State is unable to get its thieving murderous mitts on it.
On the issue of drug use
While I'm aware this remains a divisive issue even among the predominantly libertarian Bitcoin community, I encourage you to not allow your personal views on drug use to be a factor in how you view Silk Road. It was not created with the express intent of allowing drug sales; instead it created a free market with the primary rule being that no product intended to harm a third party was permitted. Naturally, this created an ideal economic climate for trade in a good that is prohibited by the state (unless you're an alcohol, tobacco, or pharma company - they have lobbies), highly in demand, and intended to be consumed by the user with the only risk being to themselves.
Most dangers of drugs are in actuality the result of prohibition, as exemplified by countries such as Portugal where personal use of all drugs is decriminalised and overdose rates are among the lowest in the world, and inversely the increased dangers of alcohol and surrounding criminal trade that arose from America attempting to ban it.
As such, a marketplace that brought the drugs market more on par with trade in any other good by allowing them to be purchased on a website with a reputation system and a forum allowed for greater safety through the principles of harm reduction.
Regardless of your own moral views on drug use, if you believe in free markets and free people, those are the values to keep in mind when thinking about Silk Road even if you don't partake yourself.
Consider also that just because the state allows one substance and prohibits another, this doesn't mean the former is safer than the latter. Cannabis, shrooms, and LSD are illegal while oxycodone, tobacco, and alcohol continue to be sold legally by state sanctioned corporations that spend huge sums to buy politicians:
A 2020 study found that, from 1999 to 2018, the pharmaceutical industry and health product industry together spent $4.7 billion lobbying the United States federal government, an average of $233 million per year.
No wonder Purdue got away with falsely claiming to doctors and patients that less than 1% of people who took OxyContin got addicted. But despite the many deaths they caused with their deliberately deceptive marketing that encouraged prescription of extremely high doses, the Sacklers will never see a jail cell, unlike Ross Ulbricht who committed the crime of allowing drugs - mostly cannabis - to be sold without bribes being paid to the state.
What will the future bring?
Already we are seeing advancements in decentralised marketplaces driven primarily by new technologies growing rapidly in the Bitcoin community such as Nostr.
With Nostr being anonymous if you use your keys only through Tor, and popular open source relays such as Nostream already supporting Tor, and the Bitcoin Lightning network providing instant payments with enhanced privacy, it's only a matter of time before this combination revolutionises the way we trade freely outside the restrictions of the state, no matter what we choose to buy and sell.
Beyond that, who knows? Technology, thankfully, moves at the speed of light while the bureaucratic state apparatus moves at the speed of a snail.
That's all folks!
I'm not going to ask you to zap me if you found this one interesting. Instead I encourage you to send those sats to the Free Ross campaign.
PV.