The piece of information that attributed property was not issued, stamped or held by a third party: it was allodially yours, and fitted inside your mind.

The "sacred guardians of property" took notice. That s*** was a threat to their raison d'être.

In 1995, the US government restricted citizens from exporting cryptographic software without due licenses, classifying such products as a form of munition. The first popular version of an asymmetric key software, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), was "ilegal" outside of America.

In practice, it didn't make much difference. The code had been leaked numerous times, and printed for mass distribution under the protection of the First Amendment.

Some people tattooed an RSA implementation in the 90s, affronting the prohibition to “export munition”.

These early acts of cyber activism were a feat of the cypherpunks. The inventor of PGP would become a notable member of theirs. He'd also mentor figures that'd become key to Bitcoin's development.

The cypherpunks were a peculiar ethnic group, who took great risks to disseminate the technology and ensure that the average individual could have access to tools as powerful as those of the military.

Many people mistake ethnicity for population or race (which the human species has not). An ethnic group is, roughly, a set of people that share a common origin, linguistic and cultural affinities; that may or may not share physical territory.

In retrospective, the cypherpunks seemed to have a clear vision for the future of politics. Remember I said war was the only way to ever lastingly redraw borders?

Theirs was ethereal from start.

🏴 6. Islands in the Web, Free Enclaves & Temporary Autonomous Zones

An influential character in Cypherpunk literature is Hakim Bey². In 1985, Bey published Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).

Temporary Autonomous Zones are the manifestation of pirate culture (semi-nomad, obscure, of ephemeral traces) in the digital realm.

Hakim Bey's TAZs. By Andrew Robinson (CeaseFire).

Bey researched enclaves he dubbed "pirate utopias" throughout history, from medieval assassins to anarchic sufis. For him, "islands in the web" (or "free enclaves") are inevitable symptoms of decadent political regimes in economies that are more and more informatised.

Non-permissioned communication technologies, Bey presumed, would allow for an entire mundi map of autonomous zones.

A TAZ is a place where revolution has indeed taken place, even if briefly, or for a few only. The author doesn't define the concept to avoid imposing it a political dogma.

“In the end, a TAZ is self evident. If the term got used, it'd be comprehended easily… comprehended in action”. — Hakim Bey, 1985

💉 7. People: The Running Blood of Nations

Fundamentally, States are made of people. When people are arranged properly, the State is healthy. When they’re in disorder, the State is unhealthy. Pretty much like organisms and molecules.

In 2019, a semiautonomous island in the East, that happened to conglomerate a good chunk of the planet’s money, erupted in social crisis.

The people of Hong Kong — known for its civilised culture — had their sovereignty subjugated by a neighbouring country, and were not properly protected by those to whom they paid taxes.

First a few thousands came to the streets. Soon, a whole quarter of the population was joining the protests.

Against severe militar oppression, civilians devised their own sign language; communicated over uncensorable mesh networks; and blurred police's sights on public spaces with cheap laser pens distributed en masse.

What social disturb looked like, in 2019 (Hong Kong).

For the first time, images of street cameras being depredated by angry mobs were broadcast all over the world (not through sci-fi thrillers, but actual news). Anti surveillance makeup went from catwalk fetiche to streetwear in a matter of months. Machine-confusing clothes were embraced by celebrities, gradually mining the public surveillance apparatus.

Warfare was on the cusp of being fully digitised.

Online, regardless of geography, anyone had the right be a soldier.

“As cybercommerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cybermoney. This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world’s nation states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual” — Davidson & Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, 1997.

🗺 8. What did it mean "to be a country"?

For a long time, the Treaty of Westphalia established what it meant to be a Sovereign State. It ended 30 years of war in Central Europe, and served a foundational role on the field of International Law.

Two key points. First: the agents of geopolitics shall be the nation-states, rooted in their own sovereignty. Second: regardlessly of any differences among them, their sovereignties shall be equivalent in the face of International Law.

The Treaty of Westphalia was utterly paradoxical. All sovereignties are equal in face of International Law. But if one does something that "International Law" dislikes, "International Law" shall punish it.

Inter-national unrest was controlled, but intra-national civil conflict was on the rise in the 20th and 21st centuries.

“International Law”, in practice, was a bunch of very closely monitored supranational organs like the UN, WTO and IMF.

The funny thing is that philosophy and law had already agreed on a decent definition of State — it was just irrelevant, since all States were still confined within borders, borders were constantly revised by war, and war trumped everything else.

The declaratory theory of the State, as it was called, concluded States should become an agent in International Law if they had:

a defined territory;

a permanent population;

a functional form of governance;

the ability to enter relationships with other States.

According to it, the sovereignty of a State in-depended from the recognition from other States.

"[Countries are] no more than a product of people's imagination" — president of Liberland, a semiautonomous island between Croatia and Serbia, 2018

👑 9. Bitcoin as a Sovereign State

Bitcoin obviously attended to all 4 requisites of the declaratory theory of the State. This was crystal clear for firstcomers, who took possession of most of the virtual land parcels available at the time.

Reason yourself, from first principles:

To have a defined territory: 21M was always the uncrossable frontier— within it, bitcoin may be moved freely. The historical registry — or map — of Bitcoin is manifested physically in digital memory, whose actual location is irrelevant. Bitcoin's territory is a rare case of one that does not conflict with borders of neighbouring countries.

21M was always the uncrossable frontier— within it, bitcoin may be moved freely. The historical registry — or map — of Bitcoin is manifested physically in digital memory, whose actual location is irrelevant. Bitcoin's territory is a rare case of one that does not conflict with borders of neighbouring countries. To have a permanent population: there was never an official census, but never an official doubt on a permanent population (hodlers) too.

there was never an official census, but never an official doubt on a permanent population (hodlers) too. To have a functional government: Nakamoto consensus and the social contract.

Nakamoto consensus and the social contract. To be able to enter relationships with other States: nobody ever impeded other States from trying to mine or engage in Bitcoinomics.

Bitcoin's theoretical sovereignty may have been a tough pill to swallow, but empirical evidence left no room for doubt. At some point, The State of Bitcoin outlived all the countries that existed when it was conceived.

Bitcoin overlaid on the old world map: a snapshot of 2019.

Asymmetric cryptography ended up reconfiguring the social contract that defined human societies for thousands of years: individuals need a government to guarantee the protection of property, and the government needs them to finance its survival.

⚖ 10. The Great Migration

In 2009, few hundreds of people had any property on Bitcoin. In 2010, small thousands. In 2011, the first million. In 2020, the first billion.

The pioneers were traffickers, criminals and opportunist adventurers. No different from the vanguardists of the Great Navigations, centuries before. These traits didn't matter — in the end, history only took note of the gold they found.

The second wave of immigrants — again, like in old-time colonialism — was necessity-driven, rather than curiosity-led. Political dissidents, exiled activists and populations deprived of rights drove an exodus of wealth out of nation-states. There was no way of formally moving their property to parallel law-systems, hence informally they did so.

Take the case of the gipsies — one of the largest ethnicities to never have its own country. They saw people like the knights of the Military Order of Malta — whose ties to Catholicism had granted them so-called sovereignty since the early Crusades — and wondered why the hell these types had been gifted some of the most beautiful islands in Europe.

One of these groups of folks was "sovereign", the other wasn't. Can you guess which is which?

The gipsies had property (and were ostentatiously proud of it). They had widespread socioeconomical relationships, a unique moral ruleset, strong culture, identity. What separated them from sovereignty?

When gipsies started moving all they had (money, contracts, history) to Bitcoin, few noticed. Living on the margins, their taxes were barely accounted for; their commerce, hardly heard of; their means, fair from well known.

Attention was drawn only as a handful of gipsy families rose the ranks of the wealthiest in Europe. Having mastered the crop of rare mushrooms in Romanian pastures, they built a Bitcoin empire selling hallucinogenics, pharmaceutical raw material and spices to half of the Northern Hemisphere.

Other peripheral populations followed suit. Long-forgotten, latent secessionist movements that had survived globalisation found in crypto a way to ressurge.

Mundi Map according to all the world’s separatisms in the 2010s.

The people of Catalunya, Veneto, Lombardia, Basque Country, Flandres, Corsega, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Palestina, Chechenia, Tibet, Daguestan, Curdistan and Rojava all had valuable skills they eventually learned to leverage on Bitcoin.

Governments proactively curbed individuals from migrating wealth away from their purview, but when a good portion of a given community was earning a living on Bitcoin, capital controls became a frugal exercise.

Tax faults were used as an excuse for state-sponsored attacks on marginalised bitcoiner communities. Those who shared a common ethnicity got closer together in defense. Most dissidents already had DIY guns and entry-level military equipment. After the 2nd and 3rd wave of attacks, they started to build fences and traps around their settlements. After the 4th and 5th, they begun to hire mercenaries and private cybersecurity contractors.