Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/August 18

Today in 2008 the domain bitcoin.org was registered, the first trace in the obscure early history of the successful cryptocurrency. Prying financial exchange out of government control by technical means is a cryptoanarchist dream. It has gained wider acceptance after its first significant use to circumvent the financial blockade against Wikileaks in 2011. Besides the environmental problem of wasting electricity on the scale of a medium-sized country just to prove that it has indeed been wasted, its adoption for the purpose of laundering money from child pornography and human trafficking, which have since led to enormous increases in value, represents another dark side. The gigantic financial stakes have sparked a new interest in the critical importance of open source principles for the safety of computer code.