The Internet of Money: Volume Three by Andreas Antonopoulos

This is the third volume of Andreas Antonopoulos' The Internet of Money series, where his lectures are transcribed.

There was nothing too novel with the third volume in comparison to the ideas presented in the first two volumes, where Antonopoulos introduced ideas like sousveillance (the opposite of surveillance) and the inadequacy of current design metaphors for Bitcoin. There are roughly three topics in the collection.

For Andreas the libertarian/anarchist (not sure where he would fall politically, exactly), money is a form of control. In his view of the world, the banking system is dominated by organizations that control centralized and corrupt networks, who are gatekeepers preventing democratic decision making. Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) protocols become recast by Antonopoulos as mechanisms of control and surveillance. These mechanisms do not prevent money laundering; it makes it the sole prerogative of these financial institutions. Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that takes control back from the banks and other centralized institutions and extends financial inclusion to those currently excluded in the current system. Most people in the world who do not live in the developed world are deemed not worthy of basic financial services by banks; Bitcoin gives them a bank in their pockets.

Antonopoulos discusses his ideas of success for the community. For him, success depends on the extent to which Bitcoin keeps to its principles, which he articulates as "remaining free, open, decentralized, neutral, and censorship-resistant" (p. 26), and not mainstream adoption or market capitalization. Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that facilitates decentralization (peer-to-peer and removal of intermediaries) and disintermediation. The most important aspect of Bitcoin for him is the core architecture and the core values that the architecture conveys; he notes that there may be other cryptocurrencies in the future that are more accepted than Bitcoin. Only by sticking to these core values can Bitcoin advance financial privacy, and by extension, privacy for the individual, which he claims as a human right. Financial privacy is under threat by a "world of totalitarian financial surveillance" (p. 55).

There is a tension between governance and liberty; Antonopoulos explores this tension in the ability to write unstoppable code on Ethereum. Antonopoulos remains optimistic and believes in the goodness of human nature in this debate (like most anarchists and maybe libertarians) and thinks that a framework for unstoppable code will lead to great applications that benefit other people.

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