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.

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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.)