Sorry, Bitcoin is still Anarchist
In ten years, Bitcoin has matured from a tinker toy for cypherpunks into a global financial network that services dictators, democrats, revolutionaries, the alt-right, disadvantaged entrepreneurs and financial industry titans. Bitcoin’s user-identity agnosticism leads some pundits to mistakenly conclude that Bitcoin has evolved into an apolitical and domesticated technology such that its anarchist origins are relevant only as historical context for IBM’s tomato tracker.
These enduring misconceptions deserve a brief rebuttal with the hope of preventing other users from interfacing with a technology they misunderstand. Bitcoin is aggressively anarchist, un-domesticable and always will be. (Note: I’m not an anarchist.)
Anarchy is misunderstood.
Apolitical conceptions of Bitcoin are largely the result of an inability to reconcile society’s persistent misunderstanding of anarchy with Bitcoin’s early success. Most definitions of anarchy borrow from the Platonic idea of disorder, chaos, and a generally undesirable social state, which erroneously conflates a political theory with a set of possible social effects. Surely anarchy (a.k.a., chaos) as a protocol (a.k.a., BitCoin) could never scale to a global hundred-billion-dollar network with a 99.98% uptime. To wit, it can.
Anarchy is simply the absence of government (chaos is optional). Bitcoin pioneers this idea within the scope of monetary policy borrowing from nearly three decades of research by academics and cypherpunk practitioners, and an unpayable debt is owed to the crypto-anarchists who nurtured Bitcoin early on. But Bitcoin no longer exclusively interests anarchists, which is a success according to cypherpunks. Bitcoin is for everyone. Even the famous “Chancellor on brink of bailout” headline hints at Bitcoin’s universal utility as a tool for anyone seeking alternatives to legacy financial services and sovereign monies.
Apolitical bitcoiners hijack this inclusivity as evidence of Bitcoin’s intrinsic political neutrality. Critically, inclusivity is a key tenet of anarchism. Users don’t need to wholesale adopt an anarchist political agenda, but an increasingly diverse user base doesn’t support apolitical messaging. It actually highlights this specific virtue of anarchy embodied in a protocol. Put simply, using Bitcoin is monetary anarchist politicking.
Protocols aren’t apolitical.
Too many long-time bitcoiners support an alternate apolitical narrative that suggests Bitcoin is just a protocol. Computer code and technology per se are presumed to be politically neutral. In truth, most new technologies are politically innocuous since most innovation is minor, simple variations on a theme. Government involvement is usually limited to mediating the clash between incumbents and innovators. Rarely is government the incumbent.
Problems with this narrative are two-fold.
First, it suffers from overly reductive and abstract reasoning that ignores Bitcoin’s historical context, its purpose, and the direct socio-economic fallout of bootstrapping a non-sovereign global value transfer network. Bitcoin explicitly targets any central bank’s ability to inflate, depreciate, and otherwise manipulate its currency. How much more political can a thing be that introduces an alternative, experimental system to challenge the established fiat money regime.
Second, Bitcoin is de facto political because money is. Any attempt to compete with or usurp a state’s currency monopoly is nothing if not political. If Bitcoin can become apolitical is an open question though. Maybe a hyperbitcoinized world can purge money of its political entanglements, but probably not. To the extent that disestablishmentarianism didn’t depoliticize religion forever, separating money and state won’t either. Politics is a difficult stain to bleach.
Bitcoin is un-domesticable.
Perhaps the most bizarre non-anarchist narrative frames Bitcoin as something domesticated. Haseeb Qureshi argues: “Bitcoin is not actually a threat to sovereigns. … In fact, Bitcoin might just be the most sovereign-friendly cryptocurrency.” Tyler Bettilyon continues: “Powerful tools always find their way into powerful hands, and pretending to be subversive well after our technology has been co-opted is a bad look.”
Monetary anarchism is “sovereign friendly” only in a world where bureaucrats are eager to stop levying taxes and playing monetary policy, or where one is insulated from the real world that bans Bitcoin’s use, arrests its miners, and creates counterfeits. Regulatory capture also doesn’t make an anarchist protocol regulator-friendly, it only confirms the hard death of old habits. A fundamental misunderstanding of why Bitcoin is and what it tries to be informs a sovereign-friendly conception of Bitcoin.
State-led attacks on Bitcoin don’t stop a handful of enthusiasts from actively encouraging governments to buy Bitcoin though (e.g. Ghana, Barbados). Non-profit organizations like Coin Center also endure the thankless work of educating policymakers about Bitcoin and advocating for cautious, light-touch regulation of other digital assets. Anyone can opt in to Bitcoin, lawmakers included. Anarchy ensures this. But Bitcoin was a new Wild West, certainly still is, and probably always will be. The best anyone can do is adjust their reality to Bitcoin’s existence and expect Bitcoin to not reciprocate.
But Bitcoin has been co-opted! By whom? Using Bitcoin definitely doesn’t qualify, and crediting any of the nearly innumerable copy-cat-coins with such a feat is absurd. Some journalists settle for blaming Bitcoin’s own financial and corporate infrastructure as co-optive, while other critics assume that regulatory approval for certain investment tools tames this unruly anarchism. Sadly, these hot takes succumb to elementary reasoning flaws.
As for infrastructure, every investor, entrepreneur, and developer who approaches Bitcoin should rest easy knowing their efforts are unlikely to have any material long term effect on the protocol’s use and development. Indeed, the only viable business model for building on Bitcoin is to improve existing resources for interfacing with the protocol. This directly affects various user demographics, but not the protocol itself.
Concerning regulatory approval, pro-Bitcoin politics might have an important short-term effect on mainstream adoption. But attentive readers understanding the fallacious inference supporting the idea that a subsequent lack of regulatory support would hurt adoption. Indeed, exploiting political infrastructures to educate future investors (i.e. lawmakers) and ease the transition to anarchic financial systems is quite rational and should continue.
Conclusion
If Bitcoin becomes a universally accepted money, every government’s respective currency monopoly will have ended. High-level narratives about how this experiment should develop change constantly, but any effort to analyze Bitcoin’s successes and failures sans a political and anarchic understanding are futile. Bitcoin is unavoidably political, inherently anarchist, and invulnerable to being co-opted or domesticated. Given this proper understanding, everyone faces four choices: ignore it, attack it, build a knock off, or use it. The last option makes the most sense just in case it catches on.
If you enjoyed this post, tell me. Still not convinced? Recommended reading:
- “The coming digital anarchy”, by Matthew Sparkes
- “Bitcoin Is Evil”, by Paul Krugman
- “Bitcoin: more than just the currency of digital vice”, by Arwa Mahdawi
- “The Bitcoin Ideology”, by Alan Feuer
- “In Praise of Hierarchy”, by Niall Ferguson
- “Bitcoin, the City traders’ anarchic new toy”, Naomi O’Leary
- “Crypto-Anarchists and Cryptoanarchists”, by Mattheus Von Guttenberg
