Crypto-anarchism is a political ideology that advocates the use of cryptography and other technologies to protect individual privacy, freedom, and autonomy from state interference. Crypto-anarchists believe that by encrypting their communications and transactions, we can create a decentralized and voluntary society that is immune to censorship, surveillance, and taxation. The term crypto-anarchism was coined by Timothy C. May in his 1988 "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", where he declared: "Crypto Anarchy is the cyberspatial realization of anarchism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to make the economic arrangements they wish, consensually." May was one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement, a group of activists and hackers who promoted the use of cryptography and digital currencies to challenge the authority of governments and corporations. The cypherpunks were influenced by libertarian and anarchist thinkers such as Murray Rothbard, David
A Tokambrian Explosion is unfolding before our very eyes.
The NFT craze has captured the public’s attention & finally put tokenization in the mainstream spotlight. As a counter-economic operator, this moment is long overdue. Once again, it seems the agorists were the first to the table. Indeed, readers of The New Libertarian blog & listeners of The Agora podcast, have been aware of the inevitability of the Tokambrian Explosion since 2018-2019.Although the public is finally becoming familiar with tokenization, few have grasped it’s disruptive potential.
Non-Fungible Tokens
NFT is short for non-fungible token. A token is a digital representation of ownership that exists on a blockchain ledger. For all intents and purposes, it behaves as any other cryptocurrency does. Fungibility refers to the property of having interchangeable & indistinguishable parts. Since one gram of gold is like every other gram of gold, we say that it’s fungible. On the other hand, each diamond is unique & distinct, and thus isn’t fungible.
Likewise, tokens may be fungible or not, with both variants presenting their own set of valuable counter-economic use cases.
As the agorists predicted, the tokenization of assets has made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to own a piece of a Picasso, & to trade that property title in a decentralized, permissionless fashion - frustrating tax collectors worldwide. As the market for these assets widens from a small crowd of elites gathered at Sotheby’s, to everyone, everywhere - the increased liquidity drives up demand, accounting for the seemingly astronomical prices tokenized art has been fetching.
This has turned the “starving artist” into a well-paid entrepreneur. No longer do they have to toil in their wage-slave jobs to make ends meet; a hellish place where income taxes are extracted from workers in an automatic, machine-like fashion by the political class.
It’s important to understand that the disruption caused by NFTs will not be limited to art. It'll spread throughout every asset class, like an unstoppable wildfire, until there’s nothing left to be tokenized. The chair you're sitting on, the device you’re using to read this article, the shirt on your back - will all be tokenized. Because, why not? Why not make an existing asset more liquid & thus more valuable?
Another fun, counter-economic use case for NFTs which we’ve been teasing at Agoristics for some time now are raffles, drawings & pools. We're intent on creating a political death pool, where 100 non-fungible tokens, each linked to an elderly politician - Joe Biden, the Ayatollah, Queen Elizabeth, etc. - are minted & sold. The first politician to croak will trigger a smart contract payout for the lucky token holder. (The cause for this project’s delay is that it’s proven more difficult to get around the onerous raffle laws than previously expected, but alas, we hope to launch later this year!)
Fungible Tokens
Perhaps the greatest counter-economic use case for tokenization lies in the fungible class. This is particularly the case with regards to financial instruments like securities. Bob Greifeld, the former chairman of Nasdaq & author of Market Movers, believes that within 5 years, every stock & bond trading on Wall Street will be tokenized.
Bitcoin Cash’s Simple Ledger Protocol is currently my favorite token platform for a number of reasons.
First, it’s simple & easy to use. Anyone - & I mean anyone - can create their own token in a matter of minutes by heading over to mint.bitcoin.com. I personally minted KonkinCoin for this article I wrote a while back, as well as UnlooseTheGoose for a special episode the gaggle & I recorded recently on tokenization. Check that episode out here. Also, SLP support has already been built into much of the BCH infrastructure, such as the popular bitcoin.com wallet, meaning users don’t need to take any additional steps in order to securely send, receive & store their tokens.
We agorists agree - but we also take it one step further. Tokenized financial instruments will be traded on decentralized exchanges in an unregulated, permissionless fashion. If for no other reason, this will happen because entrepreneurs seeking capital to expand their firms will have a financial incentive NOT to comply with the SEC’s burdensome registration process or to pay a FINRA registered broker’s artificially inflated salary. Thus, the tokenization of securities will disintermediate FINRA much the same way that Bitcoin has disintermediated the Federal Reserve. For more on the agorist use of tokenized securities to bring down the cockroaches infesting the SEC, see this article.
Friends, the current NFT craze is no craze at all, but should rather be seen as a harbinger of what’s to come. Much like the first glimpses of the internet or the automobile caused a stir in their day, so too have NFTs caused a stir in ours, but this is only the beginning.
The blockchains with the strongest tokenization platforms & healthiest token ecosystems will likely be the first to achieve mass adoption. The additional transactions created by tokens are likely to increase the currency’s velocity & thus help to stabilize it, & in a snowball-like effect, this will in turn attract more users & transactions, and so on.
Simple Ledger Protocol
First, it’s simple & easy to use. Anyone - & I mean anyone - can create their own token in a matter of minutes by heading over to mint.bitcoin.com. I personally minted KonkinCoin for this article I wrote a while back, as well as UnlooseTheGoose for a special episode the gaggle & I recorded recently on tokenization. Check that episode out here. Also, SLP support has already been built into much of the BCH infrastructure, such as the popular bitcoin.com wallet, meaning users don’t need to take any additional steps in order to securely send, receive & store their tokens.
A second reason to be bullish on SLP is that it offers a better user experience than most other protocols. Currently, the majority of tokens utilize Ethereum’s ERC-20 platform, but are plagued by high gas fees. SLP solves this by enabling tokens to be sent & received almost instantaneously at a negligible cost.
How to Begin?
There are a ton of resources out there for those interested in learning how to begin. For starters, check out this recent article by Jamie Redman. Next, check out this playlist of podcast episodes which cover the various aspects of tokenization, or previous TNL articles; A Blueprint For Stopping the SEC, Tokenizing Konkin and Technological Agorism. Finally, be sure to join the SLP Telegram chat.
Feel free to leave questions or comments below. I’m curious: Are you as bullish on the Tokambrian Explosion as I am?
Thank you for such an informative blog post! Figure out the tokenized art
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