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Cody Wilson's idea that technology can and should be used to democratize power is what led to the somewhat terrifying specter of fully functional guns we can print in our living rooms. Over the last few months, Wilson has turned his anarchic gaze to Bitcoin, with Dark Wallet, an anonymous virtual wallet designed to return cryptocurrency to its cypherpunk roots.

Dark Wallet is an open-source browser plug-in designed to be easy for average consumers to use. Like other Bitcoin wallets, it lets users store, send, and receive coins, but it adds extra protections to make sure those transactions are secure, anonymous, and difficult to trace.

It safeguards these protections with a combination of encryption and a 'CoinJoin' protocol that mixes users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger—a similar concept to routing web traffic through Tor's onion network to make it hard to track.

Dark Wallet addresses Bitcoin purists's fear that virtual currency is being usurped by the establishment, stymied by government regulations, and swallowed up by the capitalist ecosystem. Motherboard's UK editor Vicki Turk talked to Wilson about the project at last year's Bitcoin Expo in London, where he explained that Dark Wallet is a way to fight back against “what Bitcoin has been allowed to become."

Wilson wants to drive the virtual currency deeper into the underbelly of the web where it's free from the clutches of government regulations and law enforcement. The value of cryptocurrency isn't as a marketing ploy or to shave a few bucks off transaction fees, he argues; it's a political statement—a radical and revolutionary tool.

"Bitcoin is the next battleground in the fight against supranational political domination, " states the Indiegogo campaign page, which reached its $50, 000 funding goal in December. "Digital anonymity and freedom of financial speech are some of the last tools left in the dwindling garrisons of Liberty."

But, that's Wilson talking, and his ideals, though certainly shared by some, exist in the more radical periphery of the hacker mindset. If you parse Satoshi Nakamoto's online comments from when he first created the Bitcoin protocol, you can tell he certainly meant for it to a subversive political tool, but not explicitly as an anarchist weapon; his philosophy appears to be a bit less extreme than Wilson's.