The Crypto Psyop
Just as there was a social obfuscation mechanism that surrounds the hype around blockchain in relation to bitcoin in my previous article linked here, the same mistake is made with people’s conception of what a “crypto” is, most likely because it simply sounds “lit”!
There is another psyop that is floating around in the cryptosphere. It is called “crypto”. Just because a currency is relegated to the virtual digital component DOES NOT mean that it is a “crypto”. If we actually examine the linguistic idiom of what “crypto” is, it comes from the the term ‘cryptography“. And what is the basis of cryptography?
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third/unintended parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography. What made Bitcoin a “crypto”, “the first crypto” was how it applied the execution of this scientific method towards the world of economics, in a paradigm of the increased massive all-pervasive surveillance state and the all-pervasive dominant minority dictating how money is to be obtained, influenced its interests, value, and even cap on how much people can own of it.
Thus, cryptography applied to currency economics now means that people have an alternative, to freely transact, become enriched, without the scrutiny and governance of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks by authorities of any kind that seek to hamper or profit from that transaction (in the way that western union, paypal, or other banking cartel type endeavors always do).
However, at the beginning era of Bitcoin, it was not entirely engineered with the aim of anonymity in total, rather it was engineered on the basis of what we call more accurately, pseudonymity. This had to be the case for the sake of engineering a public ledger, known commonly to live on what is called “the blockchain”, which is essentially just an open distributed set of nodes that act as servers that record the ledger for the entire financial system of bitcoin, trustless, immutable, and virtually unhackable, as it would need the require computing might of all countries of the world combined to perform a 51% attack on the network, which will not likely happen.
However, with the development of various tools in the realm of ipsec, devsec, and other issues like chain analysis, these tools and methods aim to study the patterns and movements that seek to de-pseudonymize the inherent pseudonymity that bitcoin once had, which then compelled other developers to create coin mixers, etc, and now the samourai wallat which adds back the layers of pseudonymity once more.
Where the psyop lies at is in this current fad of labelling all new digital currencies as “crypto”. If a currency is inherently engineered to be monitored by the powers that be, then that thing cannot be called a “crypto”, for it does not fulfill the properties of cryptography whatsoever. This is the new fad to call these novelty things as “crypto” as even the term itself helps to initialize something that is hype and cutting edge, but is utterly scientifically inaccurate.
Thus this post aims to mitigate the misnomer that government developed or banking industry-developed “tokens” or “digital assets” CANNOT be called “crypto” because by the very nature of how these totalitarian institutions operate, there is nothing cryptographic about any product that they will create which is made with the express intentions of ensuring their power, influence, and relevancy, as well as control of the users who use their products. The whole point of cryptography applied in economics is to counter, if not, neutralize, the identification and surveillance tied to who is making transactions and to who those transactions are made, and rightly so, as it is nobody’s business to know who you transact with, or why.