Have you ever been in an abusive relationship? All you can do is get the hell out, because convincing your abuser hardly if ever works out tends to be just a lost cause. They are a predator you prys on your despair. Getting them to relinquish and power is not within their repertoire, no matter how much you plead, or cry. You are left with no other choice but to run.
Yet leaving isn't easy. You have to jump through certain hoops, be willing to face certain emotional challenges, and even possibly have nothing left to your name. This is not a winning strategy, even if your abuser won't be able to track you down, or doesn't even bother to try; you remain destitute and miserable in your new situation.
So you wait and get your hands on funds, find people who can help, and you learn to live a certain level of operational security. You then are forced to use the acting skills that any abuse survivor has developed and deemed necessary to survive in the outside world. Now that you are basically equipped yo break free and take ownership back of your life, you do it.
This is a coercive situation. You are left with only two options: voice and exit. Voice means agitating for a change from within. Voice is bargaining, lobbying, or plain begging. Exit, on the hand, means leaving to do your own thing. Exit means building alternatives, however, there is a third underlying component and that is loyalty. This constraints people choosing to exit when voice is futile.
With savvy, chutzpah, and help, many abuse survivors are able to emerge and reclaim normal levels of autonomy and independence. Yet some coercive entities even more tenacious than a motivated abuser, a better resourced than any individual. Let's view your adversary having a monopoly on violence in a given territory, and the war chest to back it up.
In the physical world that we know as "the real world," we often refer to it is as the "meatspace." In the meatspace, it's nigh impossible to actually have a meaningful exit from state control. The land has all been parceled out, and good luck overthrowing your local zoning board if you try with force you are a terrorist if you try legally someone is going to have to lose. Seasteading is an interesting thought, but could you really find a meaningful existence living in the ocean?. Emigration? Its funny people throw hissy fits when it's to immigration in the United States, do you really think any other country has vastly different views to people trying to easily come and live within their borders?
Here's the optimistic part. We're lucky enough that meatspace isn't the only venue for human flourishing. Online you are able to opt out of patrolled spaces. Don't you like the content-moderation policies of Twitter or Facebook? Start a Mastodon or Telegram room. Kryptonium offers a similar solution by allowing P2P chat, yet focuses on keeping the messages that you are sending out into the void impossible to decipher.
We have blockchain technology to further step in and take these content-moderation free services to the next level. While there is no overseeing eye, the user's privacy remains at the forefront of every P2P text sent between them. By using blockchain technology Kryptonium allows the conversation to become impossible to trance, and decypher threw its complicated RingCT system.
This area of privacy has been constantly pushed and pulled and even argued in high profile court cases. Cody Wilson, who pursued exit by making home gunsmithing easier with his own Ghost Gunner machines, while simultaneously fighting the State Department in court until they conceded his right to freely distribute weapons blueprints on the internet. This case has even gone on to rules each citizen of the United States is legally allowed to own a maximum of two ghost guns. Wilson's victory in this matter is not just a free speech win, but a demonstration of a divide between voice-centric activism and building alternatives: "I barely put a million bucks into this and I got you the Second Amendment forever," he told the Daily Wire in an interview, referring to his legal battle.
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto develops this idea even further, with the idea that coders don't actually care if you approve of what software they are writing accord to Eric Hughes. "We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down." he added, "Even laws against cryptography each only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctable spread over the whole, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible." What Eric Hughes described back in 1993 has become a stark reality that we are enjoying today.
Krytponium is just one of many privacy currencies out there who understand the importance of the anonymous transaction system that has to be built and built correctly. We have seen how even with Bitcoin that this system started out flawed, but as time has progressed we have developed newer and better ways to keep the user safe, anonymous, and their actions private. Many nations are playing the role of the abusers and trying to threaten would be investors, entrepreneurs, people who just want a non-corrupt system to place their earnings into.
Encryption offers an asymmetric advantage to defenders; that is, those with a secret to conceal. This one of the core ideas behind what governments see when they take a look at blockchain technology that allows communication over its software. It's easy and cheap to protect any given bit of information, but it becomes rather tricky and expensive to extract that same information without access to the private key. This is basically the core of how Kryptonium's RingCTs work, and throw the private key into a pool of thousands, alongside thousands and thousands of doors to open. This process makes it near impossible to crack, find out what was said, what contract was signed, or even how many tokens were exchanged in one transaction. The better your opsec, the closer you are to untouchable; by virtue of being unfindable.
SEC director of corporate finance William Hinman tacitly ceded a key point when it came to cryptocurrency. He said that even a cryptocurrency with an initial release that constituted a securities offering could eventually become decentralized enough to outrun the Howey Test.
Bitcoin was in the clear, Hinman explained, and he added: "Putting aside the fundraising that accompanied the creation of Ether, based on my understanding of the present state of Ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions. And, as with Bitcoin, applying the disclosure regime of the federal securities laws to the current transaction in Ether would seem to add little value."
This is not a total victory for the cryptocurrency world, as it is only the viewpoints of one bureaucrat's opinion albeit one in a high seat of power within the SEC. This comes with the idea that even if the SEC decided to pursue enforcement against the creators of Ethereum, attempting to destroy it would be futile. By its very core nature it would not be halted, but only have its momentum damaged.
Encryption is a tool of autonomy and consent; its application to money reduces the degree to which governments can arbitrarily compel economic obedience, or even detect the absence of compliance. We are standing on the very edge of the crypto revolution that many have talked about for years. Technology has now only just caught up to where we have fantastic developers behind so many projects that it will eventually become too large for any one government to stop. One day soon, you will soon be able to opt into a monetary policy of your choice rather than bowing to whatever level of inflation your local governments have set in place. Kryptonium has set the ball rolling on a few real-world solutions to help bring the realm of cryptocurrency hidden away on a hard drive, and into your wallet with a simple debit card.