‘Privacy has become a taboo,’ says crypto anarchist project DarkFi

The first critique of centralized authority was introduced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1848, a few years after publishing his now-classic book What is Property?, calling for the abolition of property and the state. As per Proudhon’s view, without economic change, any political change would be limited. 

His work is at the heart of anarchism, “a political theory that is skeptical of the justification of authority and power,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Almost two centuries later, Proudhon’s thoughts about economics and power still echo in society, with encryption tools paving the way for parts of the ideal society envisioned in his theory.

Cryptocurrencies may be far from its original political principles, but projects reviving cypherpunk values are still thriving. DarkFi is one example. A a multi-chain layer-1 protocol for anonymous applications and smart contracts powered by zero-knowledge proofs.

DarkFi, however, “is not a corporate startup. It’s a democratic economic experiment, an operating system for society,” claims its manifesto. Crypto anarchy, according to DarkFi, “is the tactic of using cryptography to create a space of freedom which cannot be penetrated by power and capital monopolies with coercive force.”

DarkFi’s manifesto also states that:

“The old model of technology is anti-political because it removes ownership from people and places it into the hands of monopoly. The old model encourages passivity and indifference by design, reducing people to consumers.”

Behind the project is a team of anarchist coders, including Amir Taak, an early Bitcoin developer who led the Dark Wallet project before it went dark in 2015, when he vanished from the crypto scene to fight in Syria against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), while trying to introduce the local community to Bitcoin.

A group of pseudonymous DarkFi developers spoke with Cointelegraph in an interview about the project testnet and how the crypto industry is evolving among privacy challenges, bad actors, government oversight and politics. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Cointelegraph (CT): What is DarkFi and what problems does it address in the crypto space?

DarkiFi (DF): DarkFi is a community and a movement trying to create user-empowering systems, enabling an individual to preserve fundamental human rights, like the right to privacy, freedom of speech, and the right to interact with each other without intermediaries. Some…