But the deeper you dig into the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the more you realize that Satoshi Nakamoto even implemented some mutually exclusive properties simultaneously: freedom of privacy and property rights.
We first find the “barbed wire” analogy in one of the shortest but most exciting texts of the cypherpunk movement, the aforementioned “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” While the common man had never heard of the internet at the time, the minds of the cypherpunks, who were only forming in the early 1990s, had already painted a clear picture of the information age and its promises and dangers.
With works like “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems To Make Big Brother Obsolete” by David Chaum in 1985, this once-nascent movement set a counterpoint to the tendencies of technology moving toward centralization and control, even if this actual danger was still a long way off.
He not only compared encrypted communication to the invention of the printing press, but chose an analogy that had it all: the invention of barbed wire.
Interestingly, it is clear from the comparison that the imminent surveillance and restriction of the individual goes hand in hand with the invention of barbed wire.
In the U.S., the so-called “frontier,” or the borderland between the settled or “civilized” and the undeveloped areas, had moved farther and farther west.
It was inhospitable, overgrown with wild grasses, sometimes difficult to access and used by cowboys, ranchers or Native Americans, sometimes almost nomadically.
A single and, at first glance, tiny invention changed everything from the nature of agricultural use to the treatment of public lands and even the concept of ownership: the invention of barbed wire.
Native Americans were driven farther and farther off their land because their concept of property was not to draw firm boundaries.
It was an equally underestimated and seemingly small invention, but one that successfully played “wire-cutter.” The ideal of the free “open range” was restored and unlike the gangs that ended up being taken down, mathematics was simply unstoppable.
The mental image is great because it turns the logic on its head.
Today, with Bitcoin, one of the cypherpunks’ visions has arrived in reality.
But despite how unappealing the image of the barbed wire that divided a vacant land into plots may seem to us, Satoshi Nakamoto’s mathematical-economic invention has a few similarities to the disruptive invention of barbed wire in the 19th century.
This is because it is the ingenuity of this invention, cryptographic encryption in conjunction with the timechain, that turns what was initially only a theoretical right to property into a reality.
Transferring these features and processes to a pseudonymous system is indeed unique — barbed wire and wire cutter at the same time.
While critics of the technology bother with superficial analogies like the tulip mania, Bitcoiners know that fundamental philosophical debates underlie all the issues at stake in Bitcoin.