Kyle Drake calls himself a professional cyberpunk. He spends his days on the net, writing computer code and trying to stick it to the man. His latest target: the global banking industry.

But he’s not aiming to take down the financial sector with some sort of illegal hack attack. He wants to beat them at their own game with a little help from the world’s most popular digital currency, Bitcoin — a burgeoning system that runs on thousands of servers across the globe without answering to any central authority. “I think Bitcoin is the most important thing I’m going to work on in my life,” Drake says.

His current project is Coinpunk, an open source Bitcoin wallet that he believes will help free the world from both big banks and powerful payment processors like MasterCard and Visa.

— Kyle Drake ‘I think Bitcoin is the most important thing I’m going to work on in my life’

Typically, when you pay for stuff, you have to put your trust in an awful lot of people. If you use a debit card to buy breakfast at IHOP, you have trust that IHOP won’t misuse your card. At another level, you have to trust a payment processor like Visa and the bank that holds your money. And they often charge merchants exorbitant fees to handle the process.

The beauty of Bitcoin, Drake says, is that you don’t have to trust anyone, and the processing fees are much lower. You can store and send money via the free-to-use online system that’s slowly spreading across the net.

Critics like Paul Graham Raven think this is over optimistic. Bitcoin requires “Fibre and copper, all of which belongs to people who aren’t you; server farms and routers powered by electricity which is generated, in the vast majority of cases, by corporations whose power over the political and economic process is fully evident in the sophistry of climate change denial, lobbying, and ethically dubious resource extraction contract,” he wrote recently.

But infrastructure aside, Drake thinks that Bitcoin could eventually make banks as obsolete as telephone switchboard operators. The problem, he explains, is that the digital wallets that hold your bitcoins often undermine this no-trust-needed setup if they run on someone else’s servers.

Bitcoins are basically addresses on the internet, and you need a private encryption key in order to spend them. A Bitcoin wallet lets you store and easily use your bitcoins, and there are any number of wallets to choose from. The most well known is offered by Coinbase, which just closed a $25 million investment from venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz.

But Drake says that wallets like Coinbase leave a lot to be desired because they run on servers that are outside your control. “Coinbase isn’t really a wallet. It’s more like a bank account,” he says. “Because they control the keys, you have to trust them, just like you have to trust the bank not to steal your money.”

You can also use a wallet that sits on your personal phone or computer. But there are issues here too. Apple recently banned Bitcoin wallet apps from its App Store, and that means if you want to use Bitcoin from your iPhone, you have no choice but to tap into a server somewhere across the net.

Coinpunk lets you house your Bitcoin wallet on your own server that can then be accessed from any other device, including an iPhone. The mobile web interface comes complete with a QR code scanner — the preferred way to handle Bitcoin transactions here in the real world. You can spend bitcoins not only online but with restaurants or shops that accept the digital currency.

If you can bring yourself to trust them, you do have the option of running a Coinpunk server with a local hosting company or in the Amazon cloud. And Coinpunk does offer its own hosting service for those who are willing to trust Drake himself.

Although Drake could turn Coinpunk into a business, as Coinbase has done, he’s hesitant to do so. “If you ask most wallet hosting companies how they’re going to make money, they say ads,” he says. “I’m never going to do advertising, ever.”

He received a grant from the Bitcoin Foundation to build the software, and many others across the Bitcoin community have donated additional bitcoins to the project. Thanks to the rising value of the digital currency, those donations — initially worth just a couple months of living expenses — are now worth about a year’s salary. That has made it possible for him to build Coinpunk without worrying about raising outside capital.

Drake is reluctant to work with investors that might compromising his vision. “We’re used to banks and payment processors making tons of money, so we just assume that’s the way it has to be,” he says. “But the goal of Bitcoin isn’t to make people rich. It’s to eliminate the cost of banks and payment processing.”