True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge

members of locally governed entities. This trend is accelerating. Encryption makes it easy and even safe to ignore most local laws about what can be done in cyberspace. Most importantly, information can be bought and sold—anonymously, too—and then used in the real world. There is no reason to expect that this capability won’t be a major reason to at least partly move into cyberspace. The World Wide Web is growing at an explosive pace. Combined with cryptographically protected communication and digital cash of some form, this should accelerate the long-awaited colonization of cyberspace.
    But Will It Happen?
    Strong crypto provides new levels of personal privacy, all the more important in an era of increased surveillance, monitoring, and the temptation to demand proofs of identity and permission slips. The power of nation-states will be lessened, tax collection policies will have to be changed, and economic interactions will be based more on personal calculations of right and wrong than on societal mandates. This is the true horror to many, that the individual becomes empowered to make his own decisions about what is right and what is wrong and to then act as he wishes, to join the virtual communities he wishes to, to pay for the services he wishes, and to ignore the will of the democratic herd.
    If strong cryptography and the related ideas discussed here do produce a kind of “crypto singularity,” I don’t believe the other side of that singularity is quite as opaque as, say, the AI and nanotechnology sorts of singularities Vernor Vinge has discussed.
    Strong crypto provides a technological means of ensuring the practical freedom to read and write what one wishes to. (Albeit perhaps not in one’s true name, as the nation-state-democracy will likely still try to control behavior through majority votes on what can be said, not said, read, not read, etc.) And of course if speech is free, so are many classes of economic interaction that are essentially tied to free speech.
    While many may recoil from the ideas discussed here, it is already apparent that others are embracing this world. And that’s enough to make things interesting.
    A Phase Change
    We are in a “race to the fork in the road.” The fork in the road being essentially the point of no return, beyond which things are either pulled strongly to one side or the other, the sides being:
    â€¢ a surveillance state, with restrictions on cryptography, the spending of money, the holding of various items (besides just traditional things like guns and drugs), restrictions on the dissemination of information, and of course controls on lots of other things; and
    â€¢ a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist state, with people using a variety of secure and private channels to interact, exchange information, buy and sell goods and services, and communicate transnationally. The “anarchy” being the same kind of anarchy seen in so many areas of life: reading choices, eating choices, forums in cyberspace, and so on.
    It is difficult to imagine stable states in between. The forces pulling to one side or the other are quite strong. In the language of chaos theory, there are two “attractors.”
    Each major terrorist or criminal “incident”—Oklahoma City, TWA flight 800, pedophile rings on the Net, etc.—jumps us forward toward a totalitarian surveillance state. However, each new anonymous remailer, each new Web site, each new T1 link, etc., moves us forward in the direction of crypto anarchy. Which side will win is unclear at this time, though my hunch is that we passed the point of no return some years ago and are now irreversibly on the road to crypto anarchy.
    The faster and more ubiquitously we can deploy as much strong crypto as possible—remailers, strong crypto, offshore havens, digital money, encrypted Internet links, information markets—the greater the likelihood we’ll win. Once enough