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January 25 - February 13, 2021
Google—like Facebook, like Koch Industries—wants a government that’s strong enough to enforce its dominant private power over the economy and citizens and protect its wealth, but too broken and too alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.
We might say that right-wing politics sides emotionally and practically with power—it identifies with power, and via this identification works to ensure that nobody interferes with the concentration and exercise of power.
Rather than a balance of powers and regular elections to curb the inherent possibility of abuse of power, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists accept, often without appearing even to realize it, the far-right, libertarian/anarcho-capitalist definition of government that extends from the German social theorist Max Weber
Despite our abhorrence of real tyranny, then, the right wing uses the words “liberty” and “tyranny” to solicit and activate populist energy against exactly those democratically enacted structures and programs among whose main purposes is to curtail the tyrannical abuse of individual liberty by concentrated economic power (Puddington 2013 describes this dynamic with regard to uses of the word “tyranny” by the Tea Party). The effect is to make such concentrations of power even more possible and even less subject to oversight, and this is very much the direction in which Bitcoin heads.
As they are currently configured, Bitcoin and the blockchain technology on which it rests satisfy needs that make sense only in the context of right-wing politics; those of us who do not share those politics must, therefore, view Bitcoin and the blockchain with both skepticism and a clear eye for the political terms and concepts invoked in the discourse surrounding them.
According to Welch and the JBS, the main tool of these “Insiders” was “progressive legislation”; on this view all social welfare programs, such as worker’s compensation and Medicare, “made possible, of course, by idealists with only the noblest of intentions,” were “rot introduced in the name of progress.” The goal of such measures was to “reduce the responsibilities and rights of individual citizens, while steadily increasing the quantity, the reach, and the potential tyranny of governments.” And chief among the tools to accomplish these goals were “such decisively important measures as . . .
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A far more reasonable form of comparison would be to ask whether the average laborer needs to work more or fewer hours to purchase a like good in two different circumstances—for example a quart of milk or a pound of flour. This is why economists calculate such statistics not in raw numbers but in inflation-adjusted terms: the point is that all prices in an economy tend to adjust with inflation, including labor.
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. Berlet and Lyons (2000, 194) trace these origins back even further, at least to the demonetization of silver in 1873, supposedly orchestrated by a “cabal of English, Jewish, and Wall Street bankers”; in some ways it goes back to the founding of the republic (see, e.g., Brands 2006; Michaels 1988).
The implication is that this lack of technical expertise disqualifies the critic from speaking on the topic at all. Of course, no such parallel expertise is granted to fields like economics and finance, despite their own highly technical nature. This selective evaluation of individuals based on a self-nominated set of meaningful and not-meaningful criteria fits uncomfortably well with the tendencies toward producerism, anti-elitism, and anti-intellectualism that critics like Berlet (e.g., 2009, 26) see as endemic in contemporary right-wing movements.
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. Whatever minor kernel of truth they contain (roughly, that very rich and politically powerful people exercise far more influence over the rest of us than we would like to believe) is almost entirely obscured by the projection of a shadowy, absolutely powerful, fundamentally evil racial or religious Other who is actually responsible for many major world historical events.
Absent an awareness of that context, Bitcoin serves, like much right-wing rhetoric, to spread and firmly root a politics part of whose method is to obscure its material and social functions.
but since the addresses are encrypted, nothing more about the identity of the wallet holder is necessarily available. Bitcoin is therefore considered pseudonymous (Beigel 2015): it is not fully anonymous, since every transaction is recorded, but determining the true identities of those involved in the transactions requires more information than is directly available in the network.
Ironically, Nakamoto seems not to have realized that his belief that Bitcoin would be immune to “debasement” was based on a flawed monetarist definition of inflation, or that Bitcoin itself could fuel credit bubbles and fractional reserve banking.
They shift responsibility for lawbreaking and antisocial behavior to some nebulous but determinate “others” whose bad acts are to be steered around by technical means
short, they subscribe to an extreme version of “might makes right,” and the only equality they are interested in is the ability of each person to empower himself fully against the claims of others.
The irony is not in that usage; it is in the typically right-wing insistence that eliminating regulations will somehow eliminate the behavior that the regulations exist specifically to prevent.
Exactly because Bitcoin lacks any relationship to bodies that need the currency to exist in relationship to mechanisms of international exchange, or of state-internal matters like taxes, Bitcoin on its own floats free of any anchor to ordinary valuing processes.
if states were to go away and if entire economies existed in Bitcoin, then it could become money; but it is simultaneously said to be Bitcoin that will cause states to wither away and that will produce those economies.
Despite the fact that this is seen by many Bitcoin promoters as a “positive” change in value, a change is a change regardless of direction. An instrument that grows to 400 percent of its original value (from US$200 to US$1,000) in under a year can and will lose 80 percent of its value in a similar time period.
Bitcoin advocates make repeated reference to the superiority of gold-backed money, despite the fact that governments fixed even the price of gold at many moments in history to tame volatility, and in the face of current stories about gold and silver prices being part of the Libor price-fixing scandal.
the majority of expert economic theory simply defines money as currency that is issued by a sovereign government. This theory is known as “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) or “neochartalism” and has its roots in economics going back at least to John Maynard Keynes, whose views have perpetually been a major target for every sort of attack from right-wing thinkers.
But there is no way around the fact that Bitcoin advocates have no mechanism except fiat by which to declare their currency to be money. The point of the “fiat” label is to distinguish currencies with “intrinsic value” from those without it because these otherwise nearly worthless tokens have been declared to be of value by (someone’s) fiat.
But because the value of Bitcoin cannot be modulated except by market transactions, it cannot separate its asset from currency functions. This makes it too volatile to use as a store of value, despite the fact that advocates recommend it for its superior stability.
Precisely because it is outside of legal regulatory structures, Bitcoin is particularly prone to the kinds of hoarding, dumping, derivation, and manipulation that characterize all instruments that lack central bank control and regulatory oversight by bodies like the SEC.
absolutely free markets produce extreme boom-and-bust cycles.
Practically, it shows that the problems with currencies actually aren’t formal, or mechanical, or algorithmic, despite what Bitcoin propagandists want us to believe. They are social and political problems that can only be solved by political mechanisms. That is why, despite the rhetoric of Bitcoin advocates, today most national currencies are far more stable than Bitcoin will ever or can ever be.
as some better economically informed commentators consistently point out, Bitcoin functions much more like a speculative investment than a currency (Worstall 2013; Yermack 2014), although what one is investing in, beyond Bitcoin itself, is not at all clear.
a smart contract is a mechanism involving digital assets and two or more parties, where some or all of the parties put assets in and assets are automatically redistributed among those parties according to a formula based on certain data that is not known at the time the contract is initiated”
what these structures offer is an even further intensification of the power of capital to escape legal and democratic oversight.
