The right to transact: part 1

Tl;dr, definitions and initial thoughts

Here’s the first chapter (plus the introductory bits) of “The right to transact,” by me, for free, because I care you. Reading is hard. You can listen instead using the little widget thing below.

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The right to transact

© Zelinar XY 2023

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Revelation 13:16-17

Tl;dr

Until a few decades ago, we enjoyed a near-complete freedom to transact when, where and with whom we pleased. Centralized control over the ability to buy and sell was impossible, as was centralized surveillance of individual transactions.

This freedom was a good thing, and now, as a result of rapidly evolving technology, it's disappearing.

The Canadian government has invoked emergency powers to freeze protesters' bank accounts without due process. PayPal has declared its intention to monitor users' speech and fine them for expressing views the company considers objectionable. 

Across the industrialized world, central banks are planning to replace national currencies with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These will enable states to track and, if they wish, block or reverse any monetary transaction, no matter how trivial.

We can't accept this outcome. The freedom to transact needs to be seen as a fundamental right, on par with the freedom of speech. To do otherwise risks forfeiting protections we once took for granted against potentially horrific abuse: the ability to earn money and spend it on daily necessities without seeking the approval of powerful, unaccountable institutions.

Definitions

This essay will make frequent use of a few terms that might not be familiar. They become relevant pretty much immediately, so it's easiest to introduce them right away.

Censorship resistance

Censorship resistance refers to a technology's ability to, well, resist censorship. An encrypted messaging app is a good example: the app's creator – or the government, or whoever – is unable to censor your messages because they can't read them. All they see is encrypted gibberish, so they don't know what to block (or alter) and what to let through.

No messaging app, however, is fully censorship-proof. As a user, you can't be sure that the developers, perhaps at the behest of the state, haven't inserted a cryptographic "back door" into the code, allowing them to read your messages and, by extension, censor them. Hence the circumscribed term: censorship-resistant.

The concept is straightforward enough when it comes to speech. It can sound a bit strange in reference to money, but the idea is the same: to censor a payment is to alter or interfere with it in some way – in practice, to block it. Financial services firms do this, often but not always because governments tell them to. A censorship-resistant payments technology is one that doesn't allow this to happen.

Censorship resistance also implies resistance to forced payments: if someone can transfer your money on your behalf, without your permission (in a word, confiscate it), the relevant payments technology isn't censorship-resistant. This usage might seem a bit odd: when someone forces you to express an idea, we call that compelled speech, not censorship. But going forward I'll assume that the term encompasses this notion. Where more specificity is required, I'll refer to an asset as non-confiscatable.

An example of a censorship-resistant (and non-confiscatable) payments technology is bitcoin. No one can stop you from sending bitcoin, as long as you have the funds. It doesn't matter if you or your recipient is on any number of government lists; it doesn't matter if there's a law barring you or your recipient from using bitcoin; it doesn't matter if there's a law banning bitcoin. The transaction will process. Nor can anyone seize your funds, no matter what institution they work at or what courts have ordered them to do so.

I should note that censorship resistance doesn't necessarily imply privacy. Encrypted chat apps happen to achieve censorship resistance through privacy, but a different solution could in principle allow anyone to read any message, without allowing for censorship.

Bitcoin prevents censorship of payments without providing strong privacy guarantees. All transactions are completely visible to the public. They're associated with apparently random addresses – like

bc1qxhmdufsvnuaaaer4ynz88fspdsxq2h9e9cetdj

– and not names, but that's a long way from true privacy. (Other cryptocurrency protocols provide stronger privacy guarantees, though exactly how strong is always controversial.)

Permissionlessness

Permissionlessness refers to the idea that anyone can participate in a network. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are not permissionless (that is, they're permissioned): more or less anyone can sign up, but your account is available at the company's pleasure. Violate the terms of service, and they'll boot you off the platform. Anger the government somehow, and more often than not, they'll boot you off the platform on the government's behalf.

Bitcoin, by contrast, can't prevent anyone from participating in the network. No matter what institutions you've fallen afoul of, so long as you have the proper hardware and can access the internet, you are allowed to use bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto himself can't bar you from the network, nor can the largest military and economic powers on earth. You don't need permission.

Decentralization

Decentralization refers to the structure of a network. Facebook and Twitter are centralized. A company runs the network, and a CEO runs the company. Decisions made in the center determine what the network does, who can use it, and how.

Bitcoin is decentralized. No one is in charge. No one can mandate a change to the protocol or kick anyone off the network. No one can freeze or seize a user's funds or block a transaction.

Decentralization is required to achieve permissionlessness, and vice-versa. For there to be rules around who can and can't participate, there must be someone to make and enforce them. Only centralized networks can be permissioned. Similarly, for a network to remain centralized, it must be permissioned. If anyone can join, the centralized hierarchy has no way of maintaining its position. To control a network, you must be able to gatekeep it.

Initial thoughts

Imagine the horror of the first high priest to see [a] Gutenberg press and realize that the knowledge of how to build and use them was already distributed. I strive to inflict this specific type of horror.

Suzuha

A right is a strange thing. We think of rights as inviolable, but of course if that were true, we wouldn't need to call them rights in the first place.

We say that Americans enjoy a right to free speech, but censoring Americans isn't a cosmic impossibility like exceeding the speed of light. Far from it: censorship – of Americans and everyone else – is commonplace. When we invoke the right to free speech, we're saying we'll try exceedingly hard to prevent censorship. But insisting on such a right doesn't conjure fundamental forces in its defense; those forces don't exist.

By the same token, in order to have a right to it, the action in question needs to be vulnerable to outside interference. If it can't be trampled on, it isn't much of a right. What good would it do, for example, to codify a right to think? I don't mean freedom of expression – written, verbal or otherwise – but the freedom simply to hold an opinion in the secrecy and privacy of one's own head.

Certainly there have been attempts to mold people's inner worlds: MKUltra and Pitești Prison come to mind. But to my knowledge, every such attempt has been a wasted effort.

And granted, in certain places and times, people have been afraid to whisper the wrong thing even in their own homes. Hidden recording devices, even one's own children, might inform the authorities. Yet even in such hells, the regime can't stop people from thinking what they please. Propaganda, material inducements and threats of all sorts can help to bend the thoughts of a person or the populace as a whole. But at the end of the day, no one can reliably control the contents of an individual mind.

So why waste time, ink – or heaven forbid, blood – defending the right to think? Unsurprisingly, no one does. Nor would it make much sense to insist on a right to, say, teleport, since no one has yet figured out how to do so.

If people are capable of doing something no matter how exquisitely they're oppressed (like thinking), it's a capability. If they're incapable of doing it even in the most libertarian utopia (like teleporting), it's a fantasy. Rights lie in the finite but sizable space in between: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, speech, assembly, worship, bearing arms, suffrage and the rest are all both easy to perform and easy to impede.

The other quality a right must have is that society considers it permissible and ultimately, if not always intuitively, good. The rationale for letting an obviously guilty criminal walk free after the police conducted an illegal search, or letting a deranged bigot call for a campaign of terror and oppression, might not be immediately obvious to everyone, but the overall social order that results from maintaining these principles is preferable to the alternatives.

Such permissible and (in some sense) good activities don't come and go all that often. When they do, the shift is usually slow, grinding and intensely controversial. American society didn't recognize a right not to be enslaved for nearly a century. Today it does, but codifying the right required a bloody civil war, and enforcing it meaningfully took yet another century. The contest over the right to bear arms has ground on for decades, engendering deep resentment and division, with no rapprochement in sight.

But shifts in the culture aren't the only changes that can bring new activities into the range of conceivable rights. Shifts in technology can do so as well – and much faster. They don't take ordinary people's or governments' capabilities from zero to sixty at a stroke, and each new development has complex, simultaneous and often contradictory effects on all relevant actors' power relative to each other.¹ But they can change the basic calculus around what can or should be considered a fundamental liberty – not over the course of decades, but of years, even months.

Take speech. The state (and church and others) have censored people's expression since the earliest days of human civilization. The first Chinese emperor burned books and buried scholars alive, sparing just one, exquisitely authoritarian, school of thought. Destroying books and murdering those who write them, of course, remains a popular expedient with governments to this day.

In recent centuries, however, the balance of power between would-be scholars and would-be book burners has shifted several times. The invention of the printing press represented a massive fillip to free expression and an equally massive handicap to those who would stifle it. Not only was producing books and pamphlets orders of magnitude cheaper, and hunting them down to burn them orders of magnitude more expensive, but the production of cheap, varied reading material in itself helped to promote mass literacy – in vernacular languages no less – which compounded the difficulties involved in controlling what the masses read.

On the other hand, governments were quick to discover the charms of mass-produced propaganda, not to mention a number of small-bore but effective tactics of suppression, like taxing paper and ink, or more recently, being a publication's biggest ad buyer. Nor was it any harder than it had ever been to organize networks of informants to root out heresy among their friends and neighbors.

After the printing press, there followed trains, telegraphs, photography, telephones. These are taken for utter granted today, but singly and in combination, they altered perceptions of time, space and knowledge as – in all likelihood – nothing had since the advent of the written word.² From there, of course, the production of brain-kneading novelties only accelerated: radios, cars, planes, televisions, computers, cryptography, the internet, social media – each with its own intricate impact on the balance of power.

Today powerful corporations run enormous social networks. (They're also rich, but not to the same degree they're powerful.) Governments control these to varying extents, ranging from almost totally, as China does WeChat, to imperfectly if at all, as the U.S. does Facebook and Twitter.³ Regardless of the degree of government control, state surveillance of these platforms is pervasive. The platforms' own surveillance, incentivized by their ad-based business models, approaches perfection.

Ordinary people would appear to be at a complete disadvantage in this context, and arguably they are, but at the same time they use these platforms to rapidly spin up campaigns to pressure and even topple governments, not to mention the damage they can inflict on businesses and – for some twisted reason – random individuals.

Meanwhile, cryptography has allowed for the development of chat apps that thwart government surveillance, except of course when the government has exploited the app or been gifted a backdoor. (Also, by their own admission, states "kill people based on metadata.") Similar technology may soon yield decentralized, private, censorship-resistant social networks, upsetting the power dynamic yet again.

Complex as this situation is, it's still possible to apply the First Amendment to it and defend the right to free expression. It's become popular to argue otherwise, and these arguments are wrong. But I have to admit, today's panoply of censorship-resistant and -enabling gadgets, and the games of cat and mouse that emerge from it, are a far cry from the 18th century – when the world was surely complicated, but slower, smaller, and wholly analog.

Phil Zimmerman, describing his rationale for creating the privacy-preserving cryptographic protocol PGP, addressed the impact of technological innovation on the freedom of speech:

"Two hundred years ago, all conversations were private. If someone else was within earshot, you could just go out behind the barn and have your conversation there. No one could listen in without your knowledge. The right to a private conversation was a natural right, not just in a philosophical sense, but in a law-of-physics sense, given the technology of the time."

Today, feeling confident that your conversation is private takes much more effort – to the extent it's achievable at all. But the philosophers and statesmen of the 18th century had no idea how far we would come – or fall – in subsequent centuries. They formulated a right to free expression because Gutenberg's printing press, the opening salvo in this long technological contest, had shifted the balance of power and ignited debates about the limits, merits and evils of censorship.

Today we should be having a similar debate. And we should be having it at a much faster pace than our Enlightenment forebears had theirs, because we don't have the luxury of generations in which to mull the matter over.

Technological change has taken transacting – sending and receiving money – from the realm of pure capability, something that's basically impossible to suppress, to that of a contested, imminently trammelable right. Where once it resembled free thought, today it's more like free speech.

A state of near-total liberty, which only a few of us ever thought to notice, is rapidly slipping away. If we continue on our present trajectory, a basic freedom, a fundamentally good thing that's key to human flourishing, will disappear – quite possibly without serious debate.

We need to recognize, articulate and defend the right to transact.

Within recent memory – say 1993, that is 30 years before I write this sentence – nearly all small transactions were conducted in cash, an anonymous medium that provides no visibility to the state or anyone else who might be interested. Medium to large payments were made via check, a paper document that lets a bank or two in on the secret. (A sizable minority of checks were and are cleared through the Federal Reserve system, but if that process ever facilitated any sort of organized surveillance, I'm unaware of it.)

Credit cards were common enough, but only a few decades old, and they were rarely used for small transactions. They were seen as a way for the at-least-moderately affluent to avoid carrying cash – cash being the default, and muggings for cash being a concern.

No one used payment apps. No one used any apps.

The beginnings of a financial surveillance apparatus did exist. Credit rating firms had long histories, predating the introduction of credit cards. And the first decades of the battle against organized crime and drug trafficking had begun to turn the tax authorities – with banks as their deputies – into watchdogs, interested as much in determining the sources of funds as the taxes owed on them.

By and large, however, people transacted freely. Unless you were subject to a law enforcement manhunt, your small, everyday purchases received practically zero scrutiny. Cash's role as the medium of quotidian commerce was secure, unquestioned and undiscussed.

Several factors doomed this state of transactional liberty, among which three stand out: the introduction of the consumer internet and the resulting digitization of the economy; the 9/11 terror attacks and the state's response, particularly the Patriot Act; and the explosion of consumer debt.

But I'm not really concerned with the history that brought us to this juncture. I only want to indicate how massive a shift has taken place.

Today, a large and still-growing proportion of economic activity happens online. Even ostensibly in-person transactions rely increasingly on credit cards and payment apps. The degree and efficiency of surveillance over individuals' most granular economic activity is staggering, if difficult to characterize precisely, since it's conducted by states and private firms with no incentive to flaunt their spying. It could be that, at present, the whole enterprise is fragmented and barely useful as an analytical tool. I would believe this, if provided with evidence, but I'll default to not underestimating the adversary.

In any case, the present state of affairs is less important than the direction we're moving in. Near-complete datasets of billions of people's transactions exist alongside near-complete records of their travel – not just from X city to Y city on a certain date, but where they walk and drive, within a radius measured in feet, down to the second. Not forgetting internet browsing history, social media posting, even health metrics. It's simply a matter of putting the data to use.

Given past form and obvious incentives, we can expect governments and other powerful actors to harness this data in pursuit of near-complete visibility into people's most intimate lives, allowing for an unprecedented degree of control over individuals and groups. Judging by Edward Snowden's revelations, the U.S. government embarked on this journey some time ago,⁴ but China's government appears to be even further along, and that regime may set the tone for the 21st century.

The topic of dragnet surveillance and the authoritarian social control it enables is huge and complex. Frankly I'm intimidated, so for the moment I'll concern myself with just one aspect of this larger picture: the ability to transact. Money. In an age of digital totalitarianism, practically every basic freedom is under threat, and I don't intend to try weaving together the freedom to travel, the ability to share and access information, the right to privacy, the right to due process, the right to vote, the right to bear arms, free expression, bodily autonomy and any number of other, intricately related, issues.

To the extent possible, I want to focus on the freedom to transact because it receives far less attention than anything else in the foregoing list, and because the associated technology is changing at rates only a small number of people truly understand.

The generation that heads the world's most powerful governments and financial institutions grew up before Gutenberg, as far as payments technology is concerned. Their assumptions were formed in an era of slow, analog, opaque processes that despots could make little use of. Intimidating and stifling people by interfering with their ability to make and receive payments rarely occurred to anyone, because it was almost never practical. People used paper money, gold, and credit. Records were physical and scattered, to the extent they existed outside of people's heads at all.

Orwell, in his portrait of the bleakest totalitarian hell, doesn't think to introduce a means of exchange that tracks its users' actions and integrates them with data gleaned from the telescreens, or is only able to be spent in accordance with Big Brother's will. Perhaps Orwell wouldn't have used the idea if it had occurred to him, but almost certainly it didn't. How would it have? These capabilities are an extremely recent innovation.

To revisit the analogy with speech, there was a time when the printed word was regarded with unconcern, even by tyrants. Charlemagne was certainly no fan of free expression: he waged decades of highly destructive war against the Saxons for refusing to profess his religion. But he could not have been too worked up over books as a means of ideological contagion. According to the Annals of Lorsch, the emperor requested a copy of a history of the papacy from Pope Adrian I in 774. The book, which to be clear, had already been written, took a year to be hand-copied and transported over the Alps.

That was the velocity at which the two most powerful men in western Europe, the heirs of Peter the apostle and Caesar Augustus, could transmit information. Both would have been flummoxed by our anxiety over the instantaneous, global spread of heresy – sorry, misinformation – via light pulsing through massive cables at the bottom of the sea.

Twelve centuries later, people's grasp of current and emerging technological capabilities is so unevenly distributed that we walk the earth simultaneously with Charlemagnes, Morses, Daguerres, Bells, Diffies and Berners-Lees.⁵ Some of us, including the most powerful among us, don't consider how control of digital payment rails could pose a threat to anyone; others are launching us into a future so new and strange that vanishingly few people understand the risks and opportunities. Likely they themselves don't understand.

We won't have centuries to figure out the implications of credit cards – to say nothing of fully programmable money under centralized bureaucratic control in the form of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

CBDCs are one of the main concerns of this essay, and I'll go into borderline-excessive detail about them later on, but briefly: they are digital currency issued directly by central banks. Take Europe as an example. The European Central Bank issues the euro, and for the most part, euros are already digital; physical coins and bills make up a fraction of the total value of the currency. But the "digital euro," or whatever it ends up being called, will mark a sharp departure from how the euro works today.

As a CBDC, it will incorporate a complete record of every transaction in which it's used. This record will be available to bureaucrats and, by extension, politicians and law enforcement. Today, your bank knows when you spend euros deposited with them, or receive them to your account. But the central bank and the rest of the EU government don't know. They likely have some idea – perhaps more than you think – but their picture is necessarily incomplete.

With a CBDC, the state will receive a complete, real-time stream of all transaction data. Following the elimination of cash – a goal closely associated with the introduction of CBDCs – there will be no legal way to transact outside of this government panopticon.

The state will also be able to control CBDC transactions: freeze your account, confiscate your funds, prevent you from sending money to or receiving it from certain parties – whoever the state deems unfit. The rules governing how money works could in principle be arbitrarily complex and liable to change at any time.

Banks can act this way today, and sometimes they do – often enough, when they do, it's at the behest of the state. But with a CBDC, the government will be able to intervene directly – no need to go through private-sector intermediaries who might make a fuss. Arbitrary limitations on the freedom to transact and summary seizures of funds might of course be illegal, but the question could quickly become academic. When violating the law at scale becomes so easy, the government might be hard to convince to do otherwise, especially when it can instantly revoke its critics' ability to buy food.

For the moment, CBDCs are more idea than reality. But world leaders are openly discussing their development and introduction. China is already testing a prototype at scale. The Bahamas has deployed one nationwide, the only country to do so – although almost no one uses it. In Europe and the U.S., bureaucratic and legislative wheels are turning. Journalists are being primed.

The same Turing completeness that lets you build a website that can look like anything and do anything with any data you give it, will determine the degree to which currency can be configured, manipulated and controlled. Drain the account of a single dissident; confiscate $200 from every resident of Los Angeles; give $50 to anyone who voted a certain way – hell, anyone born in July. The possibilities are endless.

Of course nothing is (entirely) new under the sun. Authorities have been seizing and doling out assets for millennia: the story of the Knights Templar comes to mind as a dramatic and well-known pre-modern example of punitive confiscation. But if Philip IV of France could seize the bodies and assets of 100-something individuals, he could never have dreamed of issuing an order that would render all the coinage in an entire district worthless instantly.

That's the sort of fearsome miracle central banks might be able to carry out in a few years: update a database row, tweak a configuration, perhaps for the really tough cases, write a few lines of code, et voilà.

As Matt Odell, a bitcoin investor and entrepreneur, has written, the preferred interface for this kind of thing is likely to be an AI chat bot, which "seems ideal for weaponizing massive surveillance databases way more efficiently than current search tools." (He provides an example input: "close the bank accounts of anyone who went to the anti government protest in Paris last week.")

By combining streams of near-perfect surveillance, the state will be able to view an individual's physical movements, reading material, expressions of opinion, social interactions and monetary transactions as a unified whole. They will have the ability to instantaneously throttle or halt the economic activity of individual dissidents and entire social groups.

In the U.S., this outcome still lies somewhere over the horizon – how far is anyone's guess – and may even be avoided to some appreciable degree. In China, this reality has already begun to take shape.

Beginning in April 2022, banks in the central Chinese province of Henan suspended cash withdrawals, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without access to their savings. The following month, hundreds of protesters traveled to Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, to demand the return of their money. When they planned to repeat the protest that June, however, many found themselves unable to leave their homes. The government had falsely diagnosed them with covid, flipping the health codes on the would-be protesters' phones to red. Under the draconian lockdown regime in place in China at that time, this was the equivalent of placing them under house arrest.

The mechanism for social control in this case wasn't a CBDC – though China has been actively testing one in a growing number of provinces since 2020 – but it's easy enough to see the template behind these actions: centralized institutions (according to protesters, the banks are connected to political power brokers) seize people's assets, then prevent their victims from causing trouble by restricting their movements.

Both steps could be accomplished more efficiently using a CBDC: you can go protest in Zhengzhou, no problem, as long as you don't need to pay for transportation or fuel or food.

Fortunately, even as new technologies are enabling sinister authoritarianism, they are providing a means of escape. A parallel financial system built on cryptocurrency protocols has begun to take shape. This system has defied censorship or control by even the most determined and powerful global actors, and it's only becoming stronger and more resilient. (Its relationship to surveillance is complex, simplifying it at times, frustrating at others, but it effectively thwarts attempts at censorship.)

Proponents of the emerging crypto financial system often stress the minimization of trust: you don't control your crypto assets when a custodian has promised to hold them for you, or the courts have vowed to protect them, or the architects of the system have assured you its source code is safe and benign. You control your crypto assets when, and only when, you're the only one in control of the cryptographic keys, and the software encoding the system is open for you and all the world to scrutinize, tinker with and attack.

This is all perfectly true. And it goes some way towards accomplishing a laudable goal: obviating the whole discussion of "rights," at least as far as money is concerned. Bankers, payment processors, politicians and bureaucrats will respect the sanctity of your rights, right up until the moment they don't. Ethereum, bitcoin and their ilk are machines. You can see the code they run on, and those are the rules. They are indifferent to moral panics, social engineering, dot plots and managerial maneuvering.

This description does not, of course, apply equally well to all cryptocurrencies, some of which are very much centralized. At the time of writing, though, protocols such as bitcoin and ethereum are credibly decentralized, neutral and censorship-resistant. Nor am I aware of a technology outside of cryptocurrency that accomplishes anything comparable.

If the technology exists to escape the slide into financial tyranny, then why write a polemic about the right to transact? Will invoking a slogan protect our freedoms better than building decentralized, censorship-resistant systems? Wouldn't my time be better spent implementing the latest research into, say, zero-knowledge proofs – or the nearest thing my skill set allows?

Don't cypherpunks write code?

My answer is that our technological arsenal is critical, but not enough on its own. We need social consensus on what the technology means and what ends it serves. Do elliptic curves care about our ideologies? Of course not. The shapes rotate on, elegant, indifferent, unstoppable. E pur si muove. But without an ideological, moral, political – in short, a memetic – component, we can't make the case for adopting these technologies at scale. We can't develop arguments to prevent them from being defanged, backdoored, persecuted, or regulated into docility.

We need an intellectual arsenal to fight the already-very-much-underway backlash by that sadly large cohort in every place and time that wants to be coerced.

Nor can even the most sublimely implemented blockchain hold the violence of the state at bay, at least not directly: they may never be able to block or reverse a single transaction, but they can send men with guns to your house and put you in a cage. They may even take your private keys in the process. A pervasive cultural sense that people have a right to transact helps reduce that risk. A law or constitutional amendment would be even better – while clearly recognizing that all of it would be meaningless absent the power of the protocols themselves.

But in all seriousness, if you're reading this and think your time is better spent building freedom-preserving cryptography – I agree. Put this down and get back to it. Please hurry.

Only a handful of people are likely to be raising that objection, though, and in any case, they're already sold on the arguments I care about. We share a fundamental commitment to the freedom to transact, they're just purists. (Or as they might put it, I'm a tourist.)

Other, much larger groups of people will have different and more fundamental hesitations about the wisdom or usefulness of this "right to transact." In the rest of this essay, I'll attempt to address those as best I can. For now, here's the short version.

First: the freedom to transact we enjoyed until very recently was a good thing. It deserves to be regarded as a fundamental right, on par with the freedom of speech. Doing so involves significant risks and tradeoffs, but the downsides are much exaggerated. Due process has downsides. Protections against unreasonable search and seizure have downsides. We accept them for good reason, and those who would erode these rights are usually concerned not so much with safety, fairness, justice and the rest, as they are with imposing control over a cowed populace. This is the case with the right to transact.

Second: this right, so long enjoyed in practice without being discussed, because it seemed natural and was hardly ever threatened, is now rapidly disappearing. This is a harmful process that should be stopped and reversed as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Or if not, if abolishing the freedom to transact is somehow a good thing, the people who think so need to make their case. Taking away a freedom that has so thoroughly pervaded our lives should involve the democratic process. It shouldn't occur in silence as the result of a thousand small decisions by private firms and bureaucrats. Pass a law. (Or better yet, come and take it.)

Third: we currently possess technologies that, properly deployed, maintained and adopted, will substantially restore and protect the right to transact. We should reject attempts, however well-intentioned, to muddy the waters about what cryptocurrency represents at this moment in history. Its drawbacks and growing pains, while real, are more than acceptable in the face of the alternative, which is to embrace our slide into perfect surveillance and financial unfreedom. There is no third option that pleases crypto's critics while preserving even a modicum of the freedom previous generations enjoyed.

Starting with number one then:

1. Speaking of relevant actors, the situation is hardly ever as simple as tyrannical government versus the people. "The people" is inevitably divided into shifting, nebulous, overlapping factions. Worse, the pattern is fractal: no amount of zooming in will show you where the bright dividing lines between factions lie. Ideologies, loyalties and identities are as likely to be tangled and incoherent within a single person's head, particularly over a few years, as they are within a larger community. Government, being in large part made up of "the people," reproduces this complexity. So do industry, media, civil society, the military, organized crime, big men, old families, unions and religious institutions, any one or combination of which could be more relevant to a given power struggle than the government per se. So when I fall back on references to "the state" and "ordinary people" or similar phrases, it's a shorthand.

2. For a brilliant discussion of the profound effects even half-forgotten inventions like the telegraph had on humans' relationship with the worlds of things and ideas, see Gleick.

3. After I wrote this section, stories came to light that demonstrate a much closer relationship between U.S. social media companies and the government than even my deeply cynical assumptions led me to expect. I've left this sentence as an artifact of my naïveté and because the control remains imperfect. I'll discuss the details of these revelations later on.

4. By the way, I recommend his blog post on central bank digital currencies.

5. Samuel Morse (1791-1872), one of the inventors of the telegraph; Louis Daguerre (1787-1851), one of the pioneers of photography; Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone; Whitfield Diffie (b. 1944), one of the inventors of public-key cryptography; and Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955), inventor of the World Wide Web.