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December 10 - December 13, 2021
To those of us who were watching Bitcoin with an eye toward politics and economics, though, something far more striking than Bitcoin’s explosive rise in value became apparent:
a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right.
The core cyberlibertarian belief that “governments should not regulate the internet” really makes sense only if it is true that government exists to curtail rather than to promote human freedom. Yet in most non-rightist political theory, government exists in no small part to promote human freedom.
The association between racist populism and conspiratorial opposition to the Federal Reserve is no accident: they have been intertwined at least since the Fed was created.
many “privacy advocates” focus so much of their energy on what governments are apparently doing and so little on what corporations are provably doing.
the conspiracy theories associated with Bitcoin are among the most deeply entrenched, pervasive, politically charged, yet disproven of all the ongoing lines of political discourse in the United States and Europe.
its developers believe that the total number of coins in circulation has an impact on the value of the currency. This is an economic rather than a computer science argument, and it is one with which few economists agree.
the typically right-wing insistence that eliminating regulations will somehow eliminate the behavior that the regulations exist specifically to prevent.
the lack of regulation of Bitcoin means that hoarders (as of December 2013, half of all Bitcoins were owned by approximately 927 people, with such proletarian heroes as the Winklevoss twins of Facebook infamy among them; see Wile 2013) can use all sorts of sophisticated trading methods to manipulate the market.
One might say without exaggeration that the last thing the world needs is the granting to capital of even more power, independent of democratic oversight, than it has already taken for itself.
simply having one more option among many others to pay for things seems anything but revolutionary.
This is not to say that Bitcoin and the blockchain can never be used for non-rightist purposes, and even less that everyone in the blockchain communities is on the right.
