The ideological background of bitcoin: the unintended, but predicted, convenience of anonymity for criminal activities

Abstract

Bitcoin, the first cr yptocurrency and the first known application of Blockchain, is closely related to the countercultural movement called Cypherpunks. The activism of Cypher-punks, as stated in their manifesto, was – and still is – directed to developing tools to pro-vide a virtual environment where privacy is protected. To them, privacy is not secrecy; privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. Bitcoin is a direct outcome of this aspiration, as Satoshi Nakamoto – while developing Bitcoin – committed his ef-forts to produce an innovative software that reflected this ambition and was successful at developing one that, at once: (i) sheltered privacy through pseudo-anonymity, (ii) pro-vided an unchangeable public ledger of all transactions completed with Bitcoin and (iii) challenged the state-centric monetar y policy and the traditional banking system through a decentralized network of operating nodes functioning as validators of the information carried in the public ledger. In this article, through the establishment of relations between the Cypherpunk ideology and Bitcoin, the central argument is that the convenience of using Bitcoin in criminal activities is, originally, an unintended effect of the ideology that supported the development of cr yptocurrencies but, more likely, a collateral risk the cre-ator was willing to take.