I found this article to be refreshing since there is so much positive hoopla over crypto-currencies, if a bit hyperbolic towards the end. Crypto-currencies and the block-chains that spawned them are quite interesting, especially their ideological history. Bitcoin itself was and is driven by a strong ideologically driven base. That is why you usually find right-winged conspiracy buffs and doctrinaires hovering around Bitcoin, spreading messages to tech aficionados & Silicon Valley types about Jewish banking conspiracies and other such right-wing libertarian lore.
I wrote my own tractate on Bitcoin as a form of spreading extreme right-wing ideas. Below is the relevant part about Bitcoin from an article I wrote on right-wing extremism.
Bitcoin is often touted as a revolutionary software technology utilizing a blockchain data-structure which will eventually replace banks, money, and maybe eliminate the nation-state. It is a good example of how extreme right-wing ideas can hopelessly influence and even indoctrinate well-meaning, intelligent people. The technology’s promoters inveigle their gullible audience with sound-bites about freedom, “invest now and become rich,” and other hollow Silicon Valley talk about “changing the world” and “make the world a better place.”
But when we read closely what Bitcoin promoters say, and when we examine how the software itself works, we find that the system is predicated on economic and political theories that directly emerge from such far-right groups as the John Birch Society and the Cato Institute . These groups mean something very different by words like “democracy” and “freedom” than the rest of us usually do, because — as hard as it may be for others to get their heads around the this — they the consider democratic government itself to be inherently antidemocratic.
The “success” of Bitcoin accomplishing what the promoters claim to the public is not very forthcoming. Its true success, however, is in spreading far-right economic and political views in sectors of the population which have been traditionally resistant to such ideas.
It is far too easy for innocent bystanders to read the rhetoric of “revolution” and “democratization” and “elimination of the middleman” that is ubiquitous in the Bitcoin world and to think that they might want to jump on the Bitcoin express, without realizing at all what the political implications are of doing so. Soon enough they learn a whole story about how the Federal Reserve “prints money” and “steals value from ordinary workers” to give it to “elite bankers,” and how Bitcoin’s controlled supply will stop this, and this may prime them to be more likely to believe these false claims when they hear them on Alex Jones or even Fox News, even though they are no longer connected to Bitcoin. — https://news.vcu.edu/ Article / VCU_professor_discusses_The_Politics_of_Bitcoin_Software_as_RightWing
Those who become ensorcelled by Bitcoin’s promise eventually make their way into intransigent Bitcoin / libertarian communities who actively discourage new participants from doing independent research “outside of self-contained and self-authorizing ‘filter bubbles,’ and so from understanding the world in nuanced and detailed ways.”
The world of Bitcoin bluntly says “government is evil” and “central banking is evil” and “‘we’ can take control back from these institutions with distributed software,” but discourages adherents from investigating how governments function, what central banks do, or even what it means for a nebulous “us” to “take control” away from “centralized institutions,” since in practice this usually means just giving more control to institutions that are less accountable and less transparent than governments. And this is exactly what’s happened with Bitcoin, where Wall Street investors and commercial banks and even large collectives in China (that may or may not be tied to the Chinese government) exert tremendous control over Bitcoin, so that despite the rhetoric of “distribution” and “democratization,” in fact ownership of and power over Bitcoin are in many ways far more concentrated and undemocratic than are the national moneys Bitcoin claims to replace.
It really is such a shame such raw talent and power are wasted on these futile endeavors.
