The U.S. government classified encryption as a weapon in the 1980s-90s, arresting hackers for improving privacy. That same cryptography later became Bitcoin, created by Satoshi Nakamoto to challenge central banks' 400-year monopoly on money, continuing a pirate tradition of fighting monopolies from the East India Company to AT&T.
When I was reading about the hackers who in the '80s and the '90s were developing new tools to facilitate communications and enable privacy as part of communications, I found out that some of these hackers were actually operating very much illegally. And the reason why they were operating illegally, particularly in the US, was because cryptography was considered to be a weapon at the time by the US government. It was military encryption was the same as just encryption, right? So if you were, as a developer, as a hacker, if you were trying to make encryption better and you were emailing a buddy of yours who was maybe based in Australia about it, this could have been considered an illegal export It seems insane now. It seems insane in retrospect, but there's still this struggle around how to treat, from a legal perspective, encryption, right? And there's been this recent story around Tornado Cash that very much echoes what happened in the early '90s. So the US government actually cracked down on hackers in 1990, arrested a bunch of them, put them in jail using these regulations around illegal export of weapons. And reading about these people and also interviewing some of them or interviewing people who were working with them at the time, I really got interested into this connection between piracy on the internet and innovation. And around the same time, I realized that some of the building blocks that these hackers had developed around encryption were in slightly different forms, but reused about 15, 20 years later by a mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto to create a new system to exchange value called Bitcoin. And this is how I got into this blockchain space, which I think is very much part of this pirate movement, at least in its early days. There is very much a pirate spirit behind the creation of Bitcoin. And when you think about it, As we discussed earlier about the fact that pirate organizations were very often opposing some kind of monopoly, whether it's the monopoly of the trading companies in the 17th century, the monopoly of the BBC for pirate radio, the monopoly of AT&T for the hackers in the 1970s. I think people who were initially behind Bitcoin were opposing the monopoly of Central banks on the creation of money, and that is very much the the last monopoly to stand behind this notion of state sovereignty. And we've had this monopoly of states on the creation of money and the issuance of money since the early 17th century. It's one of the oldest features of capitalism. It's been very very stable since the the creation of the first central bank in 1611. I think it was the Bank of Amsterdam. We've had that thing that's like a very stable feature of capitalism, and it is a monopoly. And I think cryptocurrency was in its early days promoted by people who believed that that monopoly had to be taken down. I don't think the majority of the industry stakeholders today are in the industry for that, but this was very much an ideal that was present in the early days.
