Bitcoin wallet anonymous

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 Dark Wallet. Like any Bitcoin wallet, Dark Wallet 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, Dark Wallet 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, Dark Wallet’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.”

To publicize Dark Wallet’s fundraising campaign on the site Indiegogo, Wilson created this rather dramatic YouTube video:

Bitcoin has already served as a powerful tool for the so-called “dark web”– the lawless, anonymity-enabled corners of the Internet alluded to in some parts of Wilson’s video. Bitcoin’s most recent moment in the spotlight came with the shutdown of the Silk Road, the Bitcoin-based anonymous online marketplace for illegal drugs that generated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sales in its 2.5 years online; The FBI seized another $28.5 million in stored bitcoins believed to belong to the site’s now-arrested alleged owner 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht just last week.

Bitcoin enabled the Silk Road by acting as a trustworthy form of payment that didn’t require any real names. Though all Bitcoin transactions are publicly visible within the Bitcoin network, they’re only linked to pseudonyms, and users can anonymize the coins further by sending them through a Bitcoin laundry that mixes up users’ bitcoins with those of other users to make them harder to trace; Silk Road automatically mixed the coins of all its users.