Technology is the biggest force of change in the human history. And technology by its very nature is useable by any human, free of borders and other forms of discrimination. Of course politicians have tried to bring back control by inventing copyrights and 'intellectual property'.

But some technologies are different, they are radical technologies of freedom. They are open and permissionless by design, they are p2p and decentralised. They are censorship resistant and evade any attempts to control them. What makes them unique is that these technologies can only provide freedom since nobody is ever in charge. They give everyone on earth new options that become irreversible from the moment of their invention. And most of those technologies have changed the world.

The obvious candidate is the internet, which would justify a huge analysis on its own. Instead I will look at three technologies build upon the internet and how they have or could change the world. These are BitTorrent, TOR and bitcoin.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent enables p2p sharing over the internet using a decentralised network. While it is useful for many 'legal' applications, it gained mass adoption to share music and videos for free.

Before the age of file-sharing the distribution of media was highly centralised, expensive and inefficient. Most of the media was either sold or rented in physical form. This was at a time where digital formats did already exist and were ready to be adopted, but the industry was happy with the outdated system that made them huge profits. There was nobody thinking about reinventing the market. The TV would send movies at fixed times and alternatively you could leave your house to get a dvd.

Then BitTorrent arrived and disrupted the entire space. Getting whatever you want to watch at home anytime and for free. That was so much better than what the establishment had to offer. They claimed it would be the end of quality media and made sure anyone knew that downloading is illegal. But nobody cared. The only obstacle was the technological knowledge required to participate and that was dropping quickly.

Nowadays BitTorrent is not that widely used anymore. Still it has transformed the media landscape forever. The establishment had to realise that all their attacks on BitTorrent did not lead anywhere. It was either evolve or die. To save themselves they invented streaming services to become almost as good as BitTorrent, but legal. Nowadays for the cost of a single rented movie back then you get one month off netflix. For most people that is the price they are willing to pay to stay on the better side of the law. But all the media providers know that BitTorrent is still there and they can only get away with so much until people just quit and get their media for free.

TOR

TOR is a p2p network that makes it possible to act on the web with a much greater level of anonymity. It routes the traffic through a network of decentralised nodes where each node only knows the next destination but neither the origin nor the destination, cryptographically secured. TOR also enables the hosting of the darkweb that cannot be accessed from the outside.

TOR offers this level of anonymity to everyone, the criminal, the revolutionary, the businessman or any ordinary user. TOR has so far failed to achieve mass adoption and most people surf the web publicly. But this is not a fundamental problem. Because whenever you want to surf anonymously you can use it, not matter what others do. The only problem is that the low volumes of TOR users make the participants stick out and look suspicious. Many websites do not allow registration from the known TOR-endnodes and in one case a user was arrested after positing an online-threat, because he was the only TOR user in that time within his region which gave the police a crucial lead.

But overall TOR has achieved its goal to provide anonymity to everyone. And even when most people choose not to use it, as long as I can use it that is sufficient. My privacy does not require the privacy of others.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a p2p payment network that finds a decentralised consensus among participants with opposite interests. It allows anyone to pay anyone without regulation or control. It moves money between countries and at the same time offers a solid level of privacy.

Adoption is still low and there are many possible futures. It might reach mass adoption and replace most of the currencies that we see today. But it might also end up similar to BitTorrent or TOR, which both have failed to gain mass adoption in the long run, but still affect the current world in important ways.

Possibly the current financial markets will evolve massively and start to serve the world much better, making bitcoin unneeded. I have no idea how they could do that, especially since bitcoin is perfectly legal, but who knows. In some ways bitcoin is already having a constraining influence. Negative interest rates will likely never see the light of the day, because you cannot have them in bitcoin and everyone can exist the broken fiat system at their own will.

Bitcoin may also end up similar to TOR. Maybe most people are happy taking the risk of fiat currency. But if I don't want to do that, I have the option to leave. As long as bitcoin has a minimal support, it offers an alternative that is open to everyone. I can make my choice and you can make yours.