On parle communément de « la » blockchain, cependant il faut préciser qu’il ne s’agit nullement d’une entité mais d’une technologie : il n’y a pas une mais des blockchains. La blockchain¹ identifie des poulets² et des sacs Vuitton³, des objets d’art⁴ et des transactions⁵. On y contractualise des mariages⁶, on y ravive les querelles de l’appropriationnisme⁷, on y fait certifier son diplôme⁸ et même son consentement⁹. « La liste des choses qui n’ont rien à faire sur la blockchain est très longue, et cette dernière est en haut de la liste » comme le dit si bien Eva Galperin¹⁰, directrice de la cybersécurité à l’Electronic Frontier Foundation. Mais qu’est-ce que la blockchain, précisément ? Pour le dire simplement, il s’agit d’une manière d’échanger et d’enregistrer des informations de façon décentralisée, c’est-à-dire sans passer par des institutions tierces qui valideraient ces processus. Et qu’a-t-elle à voir avec l’art ? Eh bien, hormis les applications financières pour lesquelles elle a été créée, et les applications marchandes pour lesquelles certains s’en sont emparés, la blockchain permet notamment d’établir des systèmes de vote et donc de prise de décision collective. Elle est aujourd’hui le paradigme d’une infrastructure spéculative : nous sommes au moment même où elle peut encore être considérée comme un champ totalement ouvert, comme une technologie dont le spectre complet reste à explorer. Beaucoup d’artistes produisent et ont produit des projets à propos des blockchains (des projets descriptifs et explicatifs notamment), d’autres les utilisent pour des usages relativement similaires aux projets non artistiques bien que déviants par rapport à ceux que l’on connaît déjà (des types de cryptomonnaies par exemple), relativement peu encore les explorent à d’autres fins. Et si la Blockchain inspire les artistes, est-elle pour autant applicable à la production artistique ? ** 1 Il y a même des blockchains privées aux côtés des blockchains publiques. Une blockchain publique est totalement ouverte, quiconque peut intégrer son réseau qui dispose, généralement, d’un mécanisme incitatif pour encourager les futurs participants à la rejoindre. La blockchain du Bitcoin, la blockchain originelle, celle à laquelle on fait référence avec un B majuscule, est aujourd’hui encore la plus grande blockchain publique, les transactions qui y sont opérées sont ainsi visibles par tous. 2 En mars 2018, le groupe Carrefour fait les gros titres en annonçant que la traçabilité de ses poulets d’Auvergne est désormais accessible au consommateur via un QR code placé sur l’emballage de chaque volaille, grâce à la première blockchain alimentaire d’Europe. Aujourd’hui Carrefour a rejoint plus de quatre-vingts géants de la distribution alimentaire, parmi lesquels Walmart, Nestlé et Unilever, sur l’IBM Food Trust lancée en octobre 2018. 3 Ian Allison, Louis Vuitton Owner LVMH Is Launching a Blockchain to Track Luxury Goods, Coindesk, 26 mars 2019. 4 https://www.artory.com/; https://blockchainartcollective.com/; https://verisart.com/; https://artid.ch/; etc. 5 C’est la cryptomonnaie Bitcoin, première du genre, qui a rendu célèbre la technologie blockchain sur laquelle elle se fonde, « une technologie qui permet d’envoyer des paiements en ligne directement sans passer par une institution financière » ainsi que l’explique Satoshi Nakamoto dans le whitepaper du Bitcoin publié le 31 octobre 2008 sur une liste de diffusion dédiée à la cryptographie. http://satoshinakamoto.me/whitepaper/ 6 Comme par exemple via https://smartvows.com 7 L’appropriation de l’iconique Pepe la grenouille comme symbole par l’alt-right américaine au moment où Donald Trump entrait en campagne ne fut pas du tout du goût du créateur du placide héros de la BD Boy’s Club. Pour en savoir plus sur Pepe et la petite révolution dans l’histoire de l’art que certains ont tenté de lui faire opérer : Matthew Gault, The Great Meme War II: Amid Lawsuit Threats, the Alt-Right Says Pepe Belongs to Them, Motherboard, 19 sept. 2017. Matthew Gault, Here Are the Letters That Pepe the Frog’s Lawyers Sent to the Alt Right, Motherboard, 18 sept. 2017. 8 https://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-debuts-secure-digital-diploma-using-bitcoin-blockchain-technology-1017 9 Une start up hollandaise de smart contracts pour l’immobilier eut la riche idée de lancer, début 2018, une application de « demande et de vérification du consentement sexuel » avant l’acte, avec enregistrement de l’information sur la blockchain. Largement moquée dans la presse, l’application a depuis été retirée des plateformes de téléchargement pour cause de sujet « adulte » violant les politiques de l’Apple AppStore et du Google Play store. 10 Samantha Cole, Don’t Fuck Anybody Who Wants to Get Your Consent Uploaded to the Blockchain, Motherboard, 16 janvier 2018. Aude Launay, 10.06.2019

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to. Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself. Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy. Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature. We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money. Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down. Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible. For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals. The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace. Onward. Eric Hughes 9 March 1993

THE CYPHERNOMICON

1. Introduction

1.1. copyright
THE CYPHERNOMICON: Cypherpunks FAQ and More, Version 0.666,
1994-09-10, Copyright Timothy C. May. All rights reserved.
See the detailed disclaimer. Use short sections under « fair use » provisions, with appropriate credit, but don’t put your name on my words.

1.2. Foreword
– The Cypherpunks have existed since September, 1992. In that time, a vast amount has been written on cryptography, key escrow, Clipper, the Net, the Information Superhighway, cyber terrorists, and crypto anarchy. We have found ourselves (or placed ourselves) at the center of the storm.
– This FAQ may help to fill in some gaps about what we’re about, what motivates us, and where we’re going. And maybe some useful knowledge on crypto, remailers, anonymity, digital cash, and other interesting things.

>> Read more: cyphernomicon.txt

The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain by Brett Scott

(…) It all starts to sounds quite sci-fi, but organisations such as Ethereum are leading the charge on building ‘decentralised autonomous organisations’14 – hardcoded entities that people can interact with, but that nobody in particular controls. (…)

>> Download Visions of a Techno-Leviathan

The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology by Lana Swartz

(…) Bitcoin is not primarily an alternative to state-backed money but an alternative to private payment intermediaries that seek to control and survey its passage. It affords a cooperativist vision of a money technology and therefore society. (…)

>> Download What was Bitcoin

or ‘how to solve the tyranny of majority created by the one-person-one-vote rule’

by Steven P. Lalley and E. Glen Weyl

>> Download  Quadratic_Voting.pdf

Télécharger mes interrogations parues dans RevueESPACE123

Penny Rafferty, a writer and visual theorist based in Berlin, is one of the co-founders of the blockchain-based micro-economy-in-the-arts platforms Ishtar Gate and The Black Swan DAO. She co-develops the think tank series Artworld DAO’s with Ruth Catlow in coordination with The Serpentine and Futherfield and continues to work as both an auditor and researcher in the tech cultural field. Her theoretical essays and creative texts have been commissioned for Cura, Kaleidoscope Magazine, Keen on, Taz.de NRW Dusseldorf, Flash Art and Elephant Magazine amongst others. She was the in-house critic at STATISTA Berlin, a KW+ZK/U initiative, in 2019.

Ishtar Gate is a prototype for a different form of online interaction with critical material building a more passive approach to what might be generally known as “attention economy,”. Its users are rewarded for participating in this prototypical economy of passivity with Ishtar, a local cryptocurrency token based on the Ethereum ERC20 standard that can eventually be exchanged for goods and services in the real world, be it a coffee or a studio space, within a network of participating Berlin-based institutions.

Ishtar Gate has been conceived by Penny Rafferty and Nascent, a production studio based in Berlin, which focuses on decentralized p2p technology within the framework of STATISTA.

Read more about it here

 

Black Swan is a DAO of local ambition that aims to put the unused resources of Berlin’s institutions, be they budgetary, material, spatial or even social, to the benefit of the city’s artists.
This decentralized and autonomous community that provides a collegial decision-making environment for the allocation of the funds raised is implemented by artists Penny Rafferty, Calum Bowden, Max Hampshire and Paul Seidler, curator Cathrin Mayer and critic Chloe Stead.

Read the proto-white paper: BlackSwan

The Trojan DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a new breed of human organization.
The Trojan DAO is born from immutable, unstoppable, and irrefutable computer code, operated entirely by its members. It is a decentralized structure, an organization where governance and decision making systems are programmed on the Ethereum blockchain, effectively removing the need for a central governing authority.

The Trojan DAO is an art project, it is an experiment to re-imagine the DAO code as an interactive artwork, as a collective performance, that poses the question: Can an art organization exist without managers, employees, bureaucracy or even a formal head office? Can it be run in a decentralized and autonomous way?
The Trojan DAO is launched by a group of artists in Athens, and their collaborators from the blockchain space, as a vehicle for creating collaborative art events and projects, encoding their shared values.

The Trojan DAO functions beyond borders, and it cannot be censored. The Trojan DAO seeks to scale the organizational form of the assembly, where all active participants have a say in how funds from a shared pool are used to achieve shared goals, without there being fixed roles, gatekeepers, committees and expensive bureaucracies.

https://www.trojanfoundation.com/about

https://www.trojanfoundation.com/how-to-participate-1