31 October 2013 | By Andy Greenberg | forbes.com
Bitcoin may be the world’s first decentralized, stateless digital currency. But in the eyes of at least one group of anarchists, the Bitcoin community has been getting a little too cozy with the establishment. And they want to bring the cryptocurrency back to its anti-regulatory roots.
On Thursday a group of libertarian Bitcoin developers calling themselves Unsystem launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to code a new Bitcoin “wallet” they’re calling DarkWallet. Like any Bitcoin wallet, DarkWallet will store a user’s Bitcoins and interact with the Bitcoin network, allowing the owner to spend and receive the currency. But unlike other wallets, DarkWallet is designed specifically to preserve and even enhance the properties of Bitcoin that make it a potentially anonymous, tough-to-trace coin of the Internet underground.
“If Bitcoin represents anything to us, it’s the ability to forbid the government,” says Cody Wilson, DarkWallet’s project manager. (If Wilson’s name sounds familiar, he’s also the creator of the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun, another project designed to show how technology can undermine government regulation.) “DarkWallet is your way of locking out the State, flipping the channel to one beyond observation.”
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