2017.05.30 加密货币可能是通往独裁主义的道路

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TECHNOLOGY
Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism
Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power. It could consolidate their control instead.

By Ian Bogost

The door of La Maison Du Bitcoin in Paris (Benoit Tessier / Reuters)
MAY 30, 2017
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All over town, the parking meters are disappearing. Drivers now pay at a central machine, or with an app. It’s so convenient I sometimes forget to pay entirely—and then suffer the much higher price of a parking ticket. The last time that happened, I wondered: Why can’t my car pay for its own parking automatically?

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It’s technically possible. Both my car and my smartphone know my location via GPS. My phone already couples to my car via Bluetooth. An app could prompt me to pay for parking upon arrival.

Or imagine this: My car, which is already mostly a computer, enters an agreement to lease time from a parking lot, which is managed by another computer. It “signs” this contract just by entering the lot and occupying a parking space. In exchange, the car transfers a small amount of Bitcoin, the currency of choice for computers, into the parking lot’s wallet.

With computers handling the entire process, I’d never even be able to forget to pay for parking. The only way to fail would be for my car to run out of Bitcoin, in which case the parking lot has easy recourse: Because my car’s ignition is managed by a computer, the parking lot could just shut my vehicle down.

Scenarios like this are possible when blockchain—the digital transaction record originally invented to validate Bitcoin transactions—gets used for purposes beyond payment. In certain circles, the technology has been hailed for its potential to usher in a new era of services that are less reliant on intermediaries like businesses and nation-states. But its boosters often overlook that the opposite is equally possible: Blockchain could further consolidate the centralized power of corporations and governments instead.

* * *

In his book Radical Technologies, the urban designer Adam Greenfield calls cryptocurrency and blockchain the first technology that’s “just fundamentally difficult for otherwise intelligent and highly capable people to understand.” I was relieved when I read this, because I have been pretending to understand cryptocurrencies—digital money based in code-breaking—for years. Bitcoin is hard to grasp because it’s almost like a technology from an alien civilization. It’s not just another platform or app. Making sense of it first requires deciphering the political assumptions that inspire it.

Bitcoin is an expression of extreme technological libertarianism. This school of thought goes by many names: anarcho-capitalism (or ancap for short), libertarian anarchy, market anarchism. Central to the philosophy is a distrust of states in favor of individuals. Its adherents believe society best facilitates individual will in a free-market economy driven by individual property owners—not governments or corporations—engaging in free trade of that private property.

Imagining the end of both nation-states and corporations is even harder than imagining the end of capitalism itself.
Anarcho-capitalism is far more extreme than Silicon Valley’s usual brand of technological individualism. For one, the tech sector’s libertarianism is corporatist in its bent, and amenable to government, if in a strongly reduced capacity. And Silicon Valley takes a broader approach to the liberating capacity of technology: Facebook hopes to connect people, Google to make information more accessible, Uber to improve transit, and so on.

The ancap worldview only supports sovereign individuals engaging in free-market exchange. Neither states nor corporations are acceptable intermediaries. That leaves a sparsely set table. At it: individuals, the property they own, the contracts into which they enter to exchange that property, and a market to facilitate that exchange. All that’s missing is a means to process exchanges in that market.

Ordinarily, money would be sufficient. But currency troubles market anarchists. The central banks that control the money supply are entities of the state. Financial payment networks like Visa are corporations, which aren’t much better. That’s where Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies enter the picture. They attempt to provide a technological alternative to currency and banking that would avoid tainting the pure individualism of the ancap ideal.

This makes Bitcoin’s design different from other technology-facilitated payment systems, like PayPal or Apple Pay. Those services just provide a more convenient computer interface to bank accounts and payment cards. For anarcho-capitalism to work in earnest, it would need to divorce transactions entirely from the traditional monetary system and the organizations that run it. Central banks and corporations could interfere with transactions. And yet, if individuals alone maintained currency records, money could be used fraudulently, or fabricated from thin air.

To solve these problems, Bitcoin is backed by mathematics instead of state governments. The Bitcoin “blockchain” is a shared, digital record of all the transactions (or “blocks”) that have ever been exchanged. Every transaction contains a cryptographic record of the previous succession (the “chain”) of exchanges. Each one can thus be mathematically verified to be valid. The community of Bitcoin users does the work of verification. To incentivize the onerous work of cryptographically verifying each transaction in the chain that precedes it, the protocol awards a bounty—in Bitcoin of course—to the first user to validate a new transaction on the network. This is the process known as “mining”—a confusing and aspirational name for what amounts to computational accounting.

There’s a lot more detail that I am omitting. But the key to Bitcoin is that the network distributes copies of one common record of all Bitcoin transactions, against which individuals verify new exchanges. This record is the blockchain, which is sometimes also called the “distributed ledger”—a much more elucidating name. This is the missing element that’s supposed to allow the hypothetical anarcho-capitalist techno-utopia to flourish.

* * *

At least, that’s the theory. In practice, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies don’t really meet the ancap ideal. Perhaps it’s an impossible goal; imagining the end of both nation-states and corporations is even harder than imagining the end of capitalism itself. Greenfield speculates in his book that Bitcoin was never meant to be a store of value, like state-backed currency, but only a medium for exchange “between parties who would presumably continue to hold the bulk of their assets in some other currency.”

Anarcho-capitalism might seem fringe and unfamiliar to most people, but at least it helps explain the rationale behind cryptocurrency and blockchain. Unfortunately, those topics become even more confusing when Bitcoin and its kin get used in ways incompatible with their original inspiration—which turns out to be most of the time.

As a medium for exchange, Bitcoin is relatively limited. Some retailers, many tech-oriented, accept the currency for purchases, but it remains best known as a means to buy black-market goods on darknet exchanges like Silk Road. (The fact that such uses were illicit in the first place, the anarcho-capitalist would point out, is precisely the reason individual freedom-fighters should demand a decentralized market unbeholden to governments.)

But Bitcoin’s success has accidentally undermined its viability. Each Bitcoin transaction adds more encrypted data to the blockchain, requiring increasingly more computer power to verify (and to earn the associated commission). More computing power means more energy cost to run and cool the machines, which requires more capital and physical infrastructure to support. Those rising costs inspire centralization. Adam Greenfield tells me that two Chinese giants can control over half of the global Bitcoin mining operations. If they collaborate, a majority-control of the blockchain could allow them to manipulate it. That’s precisely the risk a decentralized currency was meant to avoid.

More often, Bitcoin has been used as a financial instrument instead of a currency. From tulips to tech start-ups, market capitalism is flexible enough to turn anything into a tradable security or futures commodity. Bitcoin hype has made it appealing for speculators certain to transfer their gains back into more stable state currencies, although its volatility makes it a difficult case either as a store of value or a medium of exchange.

The same hype driving cryptocurrency speculation has also attracted banks, governments, and corporations—exactly the authorities it was designed to circumvent. Financial services firms have taken an interest in cryptocurrency. Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has called for the Fed to leverage blockchain. Canada has been experimenting with a blockchain-backed version of its national currency, called CAD-Coin. Future cryptocurrencies operated by banks or governments might enjoy more productive use than Bitcoin.

But those futures also undermine cryptocurrency’s ancap aspirations. Corporations and governments re-centralize control, for one. But also, they undermine the discretion and anonymity that accompanies free trade in the ancap fantasy. When the local or central bank manages the cryptocurrency platform, it also gets a record of every transaction that takes place in that economy. One doesn’t need to be an anarchist to surmise potential downsides of that situation. Picture China mandating state cryptocurrency, tying the country’s proposed social credit system to that ledger. Or imagine if the North Carolina State legislature decided to issue all food stamp vouchers in crypto form to better manage their future use.

* * *

Even if Bitcoin’s utility and value might decline, the distributed ledger offers potential uses beyond simple currency exchange. In theory, any internet-connected device could participate in verified, distributed transactions.

Greenfield offers a simple example: the German startup Slock.it, which “gives connected objects an identity, the ability to receive payments, enter into complex agreements and transact without intermediary.” The simplest Slock.it device is a physical padlock that is connected to the internet. Networked locks are nothing new, thanks to the internet of things. But a blockchain-backed connected lock offers some additional capabilities. A distributed-ledger lock could enter into a “smart contract,” an agreement whose terms are implemented directly in code. If attached to an AirBnB rental, such a lock could be programmed to automatically release when a smartphone belonging to a pre-paid renter approaches. Likewise, it could be programmed to cease to unlatch after that tenant’s contract had terminated—or perhaps it could cut off the power or internet service if a sensor inside the property determined that its occupants were cavorting too loudly, or rifling through unauthorized cabinets.

Kik, a startup that makes a messaging app popular among teens, offers a more recent example of distributed-ledger tech in action. The company recently announced plans to introduce its own cryptocurrency, called Kin. Kik will automatically dole out Kin as rewards for developers who build apps on its platform, like stickers or chat bots. Kik’s CEO, Ted Livingston, presented the move as nothing short of emancipation from the oppression of ad-driven content platforms like Facebook and YouTube: “a cryptocurrency for an open future.”

Kin is built atop a platform called Ethereum, which is based on the same distributed ledger as Bitcoin. But Ethereum uses that technology to express a different aspect of the ancap model: contracts. For libertarians, contracts exist to facilitate market exchange, so smart contracts are always backed by currency (Ether, in Ethereum’s case). If Bitcoin is digital money for people, Ether is digital money for computers. It decides how to spend itself via software automation.

Why tout a private, distributed-ledger currency as an agent of liberation when it amounts to a complicated, software-backed, company-town store? One answer: It could give the workers a stake in the company store. In the world of cryptocurrency, this is known as an ICO or Initial Coin Offering. ICOs incentivize the use of an unproven platform, like Kik’s, by distributing an initial batch of cryptocurrency to early adopters. In theory, that value will increase if the platform becomes popular, creating a valuable base investment for its initial users.

In the extremist libertarian aspiration, smart contracts would allow anonymous actors to trade anything whatsoever in an untraceable way, via unregulatable markets. Instead, actual smart contracts, ICOs, and distributed ledger-backed devices mostly offer new ways to interface with the private technology industry. For example, in Brooklyn, a solar microgrid startup called Transactive sells clean energy to a community via Ethereum. And Toyota just announced a partnership with MIT to develop distributed ledger-based infrastructure for future autonomous vehicle services.

On that front, the anarcho-liberatarians share something in common with the plain-vanilla technolibertarians: a belief in the wisdom and righteousness of a fully computational universe. My hypothetical smart-contract parking meter, Toyota’s future blockchain-backed rideshare system, Slock.it’s blockchain lock, Kik’s Kin, Transactive’s solar grid—all are just technology companies enjoying the capitalization and publicity spoils of the latest hot trend. They might become more than that, of course. But in order to do so, something terrifying has to happen first.

* * *

Consider an off-the-cuff example of smart contracts from an Ethereum advocate:

An individual wants to purchase a home from another person. Traditionally there are multiple third parties involved in the exchange including lawyers and escrow agents which makes the process unnecessarily slow and expensive. With Ethereum, a piece of code could automatically transfer the home ownership to the buyer and the funds to the seller after a deal is agreed upon without needing a third party to execute on their behalf.

It sounds so easy. Who needs real-estate agents, closing attorneys, assessors, mortgage brokers, title insurers, municipal tax authorities, and all the rest? Just transfer some Ether after the computers shake hands.

But absent a global ancap revolution, those intermediaries are unlikely to disappear. Consider what would be required for distributed-ledger scenarios like this one become reality. Smart contracts require computational intermediation everywhere. Non-computational devices like parking lots and door locks and property deeds must become connected to computers. People would have to become willing to use machines that enter into decentralized contracts with other machines absent intermediary protection of government, law, banking, and other legacy infrastructures.

The problems with those old institutions are many. In a widely shared tale of voter suppression in the 2016 election, Eddie Lee Holloway Jr., a 58-year-old Wisconsin man, couldn’t vote because the state’s new voter-ID law demanded that he show proper identification. But an error on his birth certificate prevented him from getting a new ID. In a future run by the distributed ledger, a single copy of Holloway’s identification would be securely stored on the blockchain, easily verifiable when needed. For the tech evangelist, it offers a rational solution that would solve social ills by means of impartial technology. (On that note, blockchain-based digital IDs have also been proposed for refugees.)

People adopted technology in sufficient numbers to allow industry, and the culture that follows it, to conclude that the market had decided what was best.
It sure sounds good. But the scenario only works if the entire system of contemporary life becomes sufficiently interconnected to make it possible. All the departments of public health and the DMVs and the voter registration venues—not to mention the parking spaces and the automobiles and the power grids and all the rest—would have to cohere around a common understanding, so that the machines could execute smart contracts on their behalf. This would require a complete reinvention of public and private life.


A different reinvention is more likely. Instead of defanging governments and big corporations, the distributed ledger offers those domains enormous incentive to consolidate their power and influence. For people like Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr, who’s African American, that might mean even greater exclusion, as the very institutions that locked him out of the voting booth might suppress his transformation into a digital-ledger citizen in the first place.

Or if not, other traumas might yet face citizens like Holloway in a society run by blockchain. A mandated DNA-test could accompany citizens’ blockchainification, allowing their ethnic origins and medical predispositions to become attached to an identity record. Financial assets would also be connected, thanks to an underlying cryptocurrency account through which they make debits and credits. Not to mention all the personal insights already consolidated by services like Facebook.

Businesses might subscribe to this data. Thanks to distributed ledger, it could be used to prevent their automated doors from opening for people whom a smart-contract risk-assessment service rates below a threshold of desirability. Left outside, privately-contracted security robots might deploy ledger-backed ID scanners to sweep loiterers from private property. Once delivered and booked into jails, smart courts could automate sentences based on an automated assessment of future crime potential.


And that’s just America. Imagine how a mature authoritarian state would fare under the rule of blockchain. Is this starting to feel like a Black Mirror episode yet? For Adam Greenfield, the anti-authoritarian left has profoundly misunderstood the corner into which such an ambitious aspiration paints society. “I believe distributed ledger enables the kind of central control they’ve never in their worst nightmares contemplated,” he tells me. The irony would be tragic if it weren’t also so frightening. The invitation to transform distributed-ledger systems into the ultimate tool of corporate and authoritarian control might be too great a temptation for human nature to forgo.

* * *

If this sounds familiar, it’s because contemporary culture has been here before. The existing, comparatively modest surveillance and control technologies in use by Google, Facebook, and their ilk—whose impact on governance we now know all too well—proliferated on the assumption that technology could make life better and more efficient. Nobody chose this life, exactly. People adopted technology in sufficient numbers to allow industry, and the culture that follows it, to conclude that the market had decided what was best.

Likewise, Bitcoin’s triumph hinges mostly on the financial success of speculators who never had any intention of using it as currency, and who appear to have strip-mined it into oblivion in the process. Similarly, blockchain’s future seems tied to the short-term vision of investors and entrepreneurs willing to speculate on a hypothetical, distributed utopia without hedging against the consolidated autocracy it seems equally likely to realize. “This is what happens,” Greenfield says, “when very bright people outsmart themselves.”

Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Director of the Program in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His latest book is Play Anything.




技术
加密货币可能是通往独裁主义的道路
极端自由主义者建立区块链是为了分散政府和企业的权力。它可能反而会巩固他们的控制。

作者：Ian Bogost

巴黎La Maison Du Bitcoin的大门 (Benoit Tessier / Reuters)
2017年5月30日
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全城的停车计时器都在消失。司机们现在在一个中央机器上付款，或者用一个应用程序。它是如此方便，我有时会完全忘记付款--然后承受高得多的停车罚单的价格。上次发生这种情况时，我想知道。为什么我的车不能自动支付自己的停车费？

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这在技术上是可行的。我的车和我的智能手机都通过GPS知道我的位置。我的手机已经通过蓝牙与我的汽车联接。一个应用程序可以提示我在到达时支付停车费。

或者想象一下这个。我的车，主要是一台电脑，从一个由另一台电脑管理的停车场签订了一个租赁时间的协议。它只是通过进入停车场并占据一个停车位就 "签署 "了这份合同。作为交换，汽车将少量的比特币（计算机的首选货币）转入停车场的钱包。

有了计算机处理整个过程，我甚至永远不可能忘记支付停车费。唯一的失败方式是我的车用完了比特币，在这种情况下，停车场可以很容易地追偿。因为我的车的点火装置是由电脑管理的，停车场可以直接关闭我的车。

当区块链--最初为验证比特币交易而发明的数字交易记录--被用于支付以外的目的时，这样的场景就有可能发生。在某些圈子里，这项技术被誉为有可能开创一个新的服务时代，不那么依赖企业和民族国家等中介机构。但其推动者往往忽略了相反的可能性。区块链可能会进一步巩固企业和政府的中心化权力，而不是。

* * *

城市设计师亚当-格林菲尔德（Adam Greenfield）在他的《激进技术》一书中称加密货币和区块链是第一个 "从根本上难以让其他聪明和能力强的人理解的技术"。当我读到这句话时，我松了一口气，因为多年来我一直在假装理解加密货币--基于破译代码的数字货币。比特币之所以难以掌握，是因为它几乎是一种来自外星文明的技术。它不只是另一个平台或应用程序。理解它首先需要破译激发它的政治假设。

比特币是极端技术自由主义的一种表现。这个学派有很多名字：无政府资本主义（或简称ancap），自由主义无政府状态，市场无政府主义。该哲学的核心是不信任国家而支持个人。它的追随者认为，在由个人财产所有者--而不是政府或公司--参与私人财产的自由贸易所驱动的自由市场经济中，社会能最好地促进个人意愿。

想象民族国家和公司的终结，甚至比想象资本主义本身的终结更难。
无政府资本主义比硅谷通常的技术个人主义品牌要极端得多。首先，科技界的自由主义在其倾向上是公司主义的，并且可以接受政府，即使是在一个强烈的减少的能力中。而且，硅谷对技术的解放能力采取了一种更广泛的做法。脸书希望将人们联系起来，谷歌希望使信息更容易获得，优步希望改善交通状况，等等。

ancap世界观只支持从事自由市场交换的主权个人。国家和公司都不是可接受的中介。这就留下了一张稀疏的桌子。个人，他们拥有的财产，他们为交换财产而签订的合同，以及促进这种交换的市场。剩下的就是在市场上处理交易的手段。

通常情况下，货币就足够了。但货币给市场无政府主义者带来麻烦。控制货币供应的中央银行是国家的实体。像Visa这样的金融支付网络是公司，并没有好多少。这就是比特币和其他加密货币进入画面的地方。他们试图为货币和银行业务提供一种技术上的替代，避免玷污祖国理想的纯粹个人主义。

这使得比特币的设计有别于其他技术推动的支付系统，如贝宝或苹果支付。那些服务只是为银行账户和支付卡提供了一个更方便的计算机接口。为了让无政府资本主义真正发挥作用，它需要将交易完全从传统的货币体系和运行它的组织中剥离出来。中央银行和公司可能会干预交易。然而，如果仅靠个人来维持货币记录，货币可能被欺诈性地使用，或者凭空捏造。

为了解决这些问题，比特币是由数学而不是国家政府支持的。比特币的 "区块链 "是所有曾经交换过的交易（或 "区块"）的共享、数字记录。每笔交易都包含了之前连续的交易（"链"）的加密记录。因此，每笔交易都可以在数学上被验证为有效。比特币用户的社区进行验证工作。为了激励加密验证链上每一笔交易的繁重工作，该协议向第一个在网络上验证新交易的用户颁发奖金，当然是用比特币。这就是所谓的 "挖矿 "过程--一个令人困惑的、令人向往的名字，相当于计算会计。

还有很多细节是我省略的。但比特币的关键是，网络分发所有比特币交易的共同记录的副本，个人根据该记录验证新的交易。这个记录就是区块链，有时也被称为 "分布式账本"--一个更清晰的名字。这就是缺失的元素，它应该允许假设的无政府资本主义技术乌托邦蓬勃发展。

* * *

至少，这就是理论。在实践中，比特币和其他加密货币并没有真正满足无政府主义的理想。也许这是一个不可能实现的目标；想象民族国家和公司的终结，甚至比想象资本主义本身的终结更难。格林菲尔德在他的书中推测，比特币从来就不是为了像国家支持的货币那样成为一种价值储存，而只是一种交换媒介，"在那些大概会继续以其他货币持有大部分资产的各方之间"。

无政府资本主义对大多数人来说可能显得边缘化和不熟悉，但至少它有助于解释加密货币和区块链背后的原理。不幸的是，当比特币和它的同类产品被用于与它们最初的灵感不相容的方式时，这些话题变得更加令人困惑--事实证明大多数时候都是如此。

作为一种交换媒介，比特币的作用相对有限。一些零售商，许多以技术为导向的零售商，接受这种货币进行购买，但它仍然是在丝绸之路等暗网交易所购买黑市商品的最佳手段。(无政府资本主义者会指出，这种使用首先是非法的，这正是个人自由斗士应该要求一个不受政府约束的去中心化市场的原因）。

但比特币的成功却意外地破坏了它的可行性。每笔比特币交易都会在区块链上增加更多的加密数据，需要越来越多的计算机能力来验证（并获得相关的佣金）。更多的计算能力意味着运行和冷却机器的能源成本更高，这需要更多的资本和物理基础设施来支持。这些不断上升的成本激发了集中化。亚当-格林菲尔德告诉我，两个中国巨头可以控制全球一半以上的比特币采矿业务。如果他们合作，对区块链的多数控制可以让他们操纵它。这正是去中心化货币所要避免的风险。

更多时候，比特币被当作一种金融工具而不是货币。从郁金香到科技初创企业，市场资本主义足够灵活，可以把任何东西变成可交易的证券或期货商品。比特币的炒作使得它对投机者很有吸引力，他们肯定会把收益转回更稳定的国家货币中，尽管它的波动性使得它无论是作为价值储存还是作为交易媒介都很困难。

推动加密货币投机的同样的炒作也吸引了银行、政府和企业--这正是它旨在规避的当局。金融服务公司已经对加密货币产生了兴趣。美联储主席珍妮特-耶伦已经呼吁美联储利用区块链。加拿大一直在试验由区块链支持的国家货币版本，称为CAD-Coin。未来由银行或政府运营的加密货币可能会比比特币享有更多的生产用途。

但这些期货也会破坏加密货币的祖先愿望。公司和政府重新集中了控制权，这是其一。但同时，它们也破坏了伴随着自由贸易的祖先幻想的自由决定权和匿名性。当地方或中央银行管理加密货币平台时，它也得到了在该经济体中发生的每一笔交易的记录。人们不需要成为无政府主义者就能推测出这种情况的潜在弊端。想象一下，中国强制推行国家加密货币，将该国拟议的社会信用体系与该分类账挂钩。或者想象一下，如果北卡罗来纳州立法机构决定以加密货币形式发行所有食品券，以更好地管理其未来的使用。

* * *

即使比特币的效用和价值可能会下降，但分布式账本提供了超越简单货币交换的潜在用途。从理论上讲，任何与互联网连接的设备都可以参与经过验证的分布式交易。

格林菲尔德提供了一个简单的例子：德国创业公司Slock.it，它 "给连接的物体一个身份，有能力接受付款，签订复杂的协议，并在没有中间人的情况下进行交易"。最简单的Slock.it设备是一个连接到互联网的物理挂锁。由于物联网的出现，联网的锁并不新鲜。但由区块链支持的联网锁提供了一些额外的功能。分布式账本的锁可以签订 "智能合约"，这是一种协议，其条款可以直接在代码中执行。如果连接到AirBnB的租房上，这样的锁可以被编程为当属于预付租金者的智能手机接近时自动释放。同样，它也可以被设定为在该租户的合同终止后停止解锁，或者，如果房产内的传感器确定其居住者过于吵闹，或翻阅未经授权的柜子，它可以切断电源或互联网服务。

Kik是一家生产深受青少年欢迎的信息应用的初创公司，它提供了一个分布式账本技术的最新实例。该公司最近宣布，计划推出自己的加密货币，名为Kin。Kik将自动发放Kin，作为对在其平台上建立应用（如贴纸或聊天机器人）的开发者的奖励。Kik的首席执行官泰德-利文斯顿(Ted Livingston)表示，此举无异于从Facebook和YouTube等广告驱动的内容平台的压迫下获得解放。"一个开放的未来的加密货币"。

Kin建立在一个名为以太坊的平台之上，该平台基于与比特币相同的分布式账本。但以太坊使用该技术来表达祖国模式的另一个方面：合同。对于自由主义者来说，合同的存在是为了促进市场交换，所以智能合同总是由货币（以太币，在以太坊的情况下）来支持。如果说比特币是人们的数字货币，那么以太币就是计算机的数字货币。它通过软件自动化来决定如何花费自己。

为什么要把一个私有的、分布式账本的货币吹捧为解放的媒介，而它却相当于一个复杂的、由软件支持的、公司的商店？答案之一。它可以让工人在公司的商店中拥有股份。在加密货币的世界里，这被称为ICO或初始硬币发行。ICO通过向早期采用者分发最初一批加密货币，激励人们使用一个未经验证的平台，比如Kik的平台。理论上，如果该平台变得流行，该价值将增加，为其初始用户创造一个有价值的基础投资。

在极端的自由主义愿望中，智能合约将允许匿名的行为者以不可追踪的方式，通过不可监管的市场交易任何东西。相反，实际的智能合约、ICO和分布式账本支持的设备大多提供了与私人技术产业对接的新方式。例如，在布鲁克林，一家名为Transactive的太阳能微电网创业公司通过以太坊向社区出售清洁能源。而丰田刚刚宣布与麻省理工学院合作，为未来的自动驾驶汽车服务开发基于分布式账本的基础设施。

在这方面，无政府自由主义者与普通的技术自由主义者有一些共同点：相信一个完全计算的宇宙的智慧和正义性。我假设的智能合同停车表、丰田未来的区块链支持的乘车系统、Slock.it的区块链锁、Kik的Kin、Transactive的太阳能电网--所有这些都只是技术公司在享受最新热门趋势的资本化和宣传战利品。当然，它们可能会成为更多的东西。但为了做到这一点，必须先发生一些可怕的事情。

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考虑一个来自以太坊倡导者的智能合约的脱口而出的例子。

一个人想从另一个人那里购买一套房子。传统上，有多个第三方参与交易，包括律师和托管机构，这使得这个过程变得不必要的缓慢和昂贵。有了以太坊，在达成交易后，一段代码可以自动将房屋所有权转让给买方，并将资金转让给卖方，而不需要第三方代表他们执行。

这听起来很容易。谁需要房地产经纪人、结案律师、评估师、抵押贷款经纪人、产权保险人、市政税务机关以及其他所有的人？只要在电脑握手后转移一些以太币即可。

但是，如果没有一场全球性的资产革命，这些中介机构是不可能消失的。考虑一下像这样的分布式账本场景成为现实需要什么。智能合约需要到处都有计算的中介。像停车场、门锁和财产契约这样的非计算设备必须与计算机连接。人们必须变得愿意使用与其他机器签订去中心化合约的机器，而没有政府、法律、银行和其他传统基础设施的中介保护。

这些旧机构的问题有很多。在2016年的选举中，有一个广为流传的压制选民的故事，58岁的威斯康星州男子Eddie Lee Holloway Jr.无法投票，因为该州的新选民身份法要求他出示适当的身份证明。但他的出生证明上的一个错误使他无法获得新的身份证。在一个由分布式账本运行的未来，霍洛威的一份身份证明将被安全地存储在区块链上，在需要的时候可以轻松验证。对于技术布道者来说，它提供了一个理性的解决方案，通过公正的技术手段解决社会弊端。(关于这一点，基于区块链的数字身份证也被提议用于难民)。

人们以足够的数量采用技术，让工业界以及追随它的文化得出结论：市场已经决定了什么是最好的。
这听起来确实不错。但是，只有当当代生活的整个系统变得足够相互关联，使之成为可能时，这种情景才会奏效。所有的公共卫生部门、车管所和选民登记场所--更不用说停车位、汽车、电网和其他所有的东西--都必须围绕着一个共同的理解，以便机器能够代表他们执行智能合约。这将需要对公共和私人生活进行彻底重塑。


一个不同的重塑更有可能。分布式账本非但没有使政府和大公司陷入困境，反而为这些领域提供了巩固其权力和影响力的巨大动力。对于像小埃迪-李-霍洛威这样的非裔美国人来说，这可能意味着更大的排斥，因为把他关在投票亭外的机构可能首先会压制他转变为数字账本公民。

如果不是这样，在一个由区块链管理的社会中，像霍洛威这样的公民还可能面临其他的创伤。强制的DNA测试可以伴随着公民的区块链化，让他们的民族血统和医学倾向成为身份记录的一部分。金融资产也将被连接起来，这要归功于一个基础的加密货币账户，他们通过该账户进行借贷。更不用说像Facebook这样的服务已经整合的所有个人洞察力。

企业可能会订阅这些数据。由于分布式账本，它可以被用来阻止他们的自动门为那些被智能合同风险评估服务评为低于可取性阈值的人打开。留在外面，私人承包的安全机器人可能会部署由账本支持的身份扫描器，将游荡者从私人财产中扫除。一旦被送入监狱，智能法庭可以根据对未来犯罪潜力的自动评估自动判刑。


而这还只是美国。想象一下，在区块链的统治下，一个成熟的专制国家将如何发展。这是不是开始感觉像《黑镜》的剧情了？在亚当-格林菲尔德看来，反权威主义的左派对这种雄心勃勃的愿望给社会带来的困境有深刻的误解。"他告诉我："我相信分布式账本能够实现他们在最糟糕的噩梦中从未考虑过的那种中央控制。这种讽刺如果不是如此令人恐惧，那就是悲剧了。将分布式账本系统转变为企业和专制控制的最终工具，这对人类的本性来说可能是一个巨大的诱惑，让人无法放弃。

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如果这听起来很熟悉，那是因为当代文化曾经来过这里。谷歌、脸书和它们的同类产品所使用的现有的、相对温和的监视和控制技术--它们对治理的影响我们现在都很清楚--是在技术可以使生活更美好、更有效的假设下发展起来的。确切地说，没有人选择这种生活。人们采用了足够多的技术，让工业界和追随它的文化得出结论：市场已经决定了什么是最好的。

同样，比特币的胜利主要取决于投机者的财务成功，他们从未打算将其作为货币使用，并且在这个过程中似乎已经将其剥落到遗忘的状态。同样，区块链的未来似乎与投资者和企业家的短期愿景联系在一起，他们愿意投机于一个假想的、分布式的乌托邦，而不对冲它似乎同样可能实现的综合专制。"这就是发生的事情，"格林菲尔德说，"当非常聪明的人比自己聪明时。"

伊恩-博格斯特是《大西洋》杂志的特约作家，也是圣路易斯华盛顿大学电影和媒体研究项目的主任。他的最新著作是《任意发挥》。