IPIM – VALIJAS Y ARTÍCULOS DE MARROQUINERÍA

In a paper titled Systematising Decentralisation and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments by a number of computer and information security scientists (Troncoso et al., 2017), Bitcoin is analysed alongside, in particular, file-sharing system BitTorrent and anonymous relay network Tor as part of such longer history of decentralised systems. The paper assesses the application of decentralisation in systems, systematically reviewing different technologies since a 2001-edited volume titled Peer-to-Peer – The Power of Disruptive Technologies (Oram, 2001) which marked one of the first coherent overviews, narrative and reflections on decentralised systems at the time by many of the people building and maintaining these. Decentralisation, when traced through this particular history of peer-to- peer systems, is understood primarily and initially a strategy for circumvention, censorship- resistance and systemic resilience. The paper gives an important insight into the particular sensibilities around decentralisation as operationalised in and for peer-to-peer networks that resonate with and clarifies what otherwise might be considered curious lines of reasoning in subsequent projects like Ethereum – such as the necessity of systems beyond human control. Much of this history tends to be overlooked and is rarely explicitly discussed by both critics as well as proponents of blockchain systems, but are key to understanding the particular ideas and operationalisation of decentralisation in blockchain.

From their systematic review of decentralised systems design since 2001, Troncoso, Isaakidis, Danezis and Halpin define decentralisation as a subset of distributed systems that has the particular characteristic of having multiple or preferably no ‘authorities’ (Troncoso et.al. 2017). Distributed systems are resilient by having no single point of failure, meaning they can withstand unexpected faults, breakdowns or accidents, but the motivations for decentralised systems go further and are concerned with questions of censorship-resistance and transparency, considered to be features that are distinct to systems with ‘no authority’. Importantly, the concept of authority as understood in and for decentralised network systems is any aspect of the system that would provide someone/something full control and oversight of the network. The paper therefore argues for analysing any given protocol’s ‘authority topology’ in addition to network and infrastructure topologies. This distinction between ‘distributed’ and ‘decentralised’ is a way to differentiate between internet platforms and infrastructures such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, which employ distributed architectures but with particular commercial and governance structures that can determine the development of the platforms, and that governments would be able to pressure into for

example handing over specific information. Decentralised systems are in contrast intended to be out of the reach of any such authorities. The appeal and importance of such systems’ designs can be explained more clearly through further examples of the intentions of pre- Bitcoin decentralised systems.

Since the late ‘80s and ‘90s there had been a string of other attempts at creating online cash, including DigiCash, founded by cryptographer David Chaum (Chaum, 1998), b-money, bitgold and E-Gold.878889 The early histories of these projects are, in many ways, prequels to Bitcoin, initiated on the basis of a concern for third party involvement in digital payments and looking to develop payment systems that would be untraceable by banks and governments. Chaum in particular was concerned with questions of privacy in online payments, keenly aware that commerce on the internet was likely to expand rapidly, and that this would bring with it a number of privacy problems. Douglas Jackson, the entrepreneur who founded E-Gold, was more concerned with critique of central bank issuance of money and providing a platform for non-state controlled and borderless transactions. DigiCash eventually went bankrupt and E- Gold was shut down in 2009 when, the founder was arrested by the FBI and was charged with money laundering and conspiracy, seemingly despite attempts at cooperating with the law.90

These experience and a growing politics of anti-authoritarian politics applied more generally amongst communities adopting peer-to-peer strategies. Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks were frustrating music, film and other intellectual property-based industries but also facing severe legal cases; information leaks by amorphous hacker/hacktivist groups were undermining corporate and government control of information (Coleman, 2009, 2014) and decentralised networks of servers and websites were facilitating independent news outlets, challenging monopolies of news and knowledge.9192 One of the lessons that was gathered from these experiences was to not provide any single point of failure – whether server or person – that a government or any other authority or attacker might target in order to take down the whole system. Similarly, when the music sharing platform Napster was shut down on the basis of copyright infringement, BitTorrent became the decentralised answer, a file- sharing system that would enable people to share bits of files from many different sources in ways that were difficult to trace and therefore difficult to prosecute (Oram, 2001; Troncoso et al., 2017). Decentralisation was rapidly becoming a strategy that was very much part of

87 See http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt 88 See https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html 89

See for example https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-29/e-gold-founder-launches-new-gold-backed- currency

90

See https://www.wired.com/2009/06/e-gold/ 91

cf. Napster, The Piratebay, the story of Aaron Swartz; (Terranova, 2004) Libraryoftheworld; Terranova, 2010. 92

These groups included the Indymedia network using the Internet to take independent control of information, but which since has transforming into the plethora of blogs and self-publishing platforms and news distribution sites, and eventually into what we call social media today.

‘network culture’ more generally (Terranova, 2004; Coleman, 2009, 2014), a pragmatic systems architecture and organisational principle used for circumventing legal and political authorities.

The concept of authority and decentralisation began to be understood in terms that were specific to these experiences. Decentralisation implied systems in which no single element would be trusted; it implied ‘disintermediating’ third parties or anyone/anything that might be an authority or targeted by one. An ‘authority’ in the meantime would be any aspect of the system that would make it vulnerable to shutdown, so ‘decentralisation’ implied a system that is censorship-resistant and resilient to shutdown by having multiple or no authorities, such that the system would not be vulnerable to any single authority. Arrests and harsh sentencing solidified a more general anti-authoritarian politics, while the ability to keep systems running regardless lent a political fascination and affiliation with decentralised systems as able to withstand attacks by government and corporate actors (Coleman, 2009, 2014). Decentralised architectures proved effective as a means to protect the systems themselves from authorities, but in the meantime, those using it would still be arrested, prosecuted or face other kinds of consequences. This pre-history is very effective for understanding the particular meanings of concepts used in the blockchain space, and the experiences informing the particular sensibilities at play. It is also very helpful for explaining some of the main issues with blockchain, namely its peculiar characteristic of drawing interest and attention on the basis of its architecture itself, rather than its immediate usefulness (what Golumbia interprets as an excess of ideology (Golumbia, 2015)); a tendency to affiliate primarily with the interests and conditions of the systems design assuming these to extend to those using it; and the strange quirks that come from generalising the idea of trust and trustlessness from network security to a political proposition in its own right (see Chapter 4). In the following, I attempt to more explicitly articulate key concepts and their meaning within a blockchain context – a blockchain

sensibility, so to speak.