Bitcoin Goes to War – The New Republic

Whether theyre discussing refugees attempting to take their money across a dangerous border or supporting unruly truckers occupying a key bridge between the U.S. and Canada, coiners have increasingly come to see their holdingsespecially bitcoin, the ur-cryptoas an essential tool for securing their own freedom. Last year much of the talk around cryptos value was as a hedge against rising inflation. Now its something much more: a last backstop against governments depriving citizens of the one right that matters: the right to transact. For some libertarian-minded coiners, the right to freely trade crypto takes precedence over opposing a Russian invasion of a sovereign nation. In the most fundamentalist corners of crypto, the individual is sovereign, and the state has no authority to limit what a person can do with their assets, digital or otherwise.

While crypto culture is far from monolithic, recent political upheavals have made some coiners more certain that traditional forms of governance cant be relied upon, that they can only count on themselves. Not your keys not your coins, goes one common crypto meme, meaning that coiners must self-custody their own coins, without handing over their private keys (passwords, essentially) to exchanges or other third parties. In the arch-individualist world of crypto, trustless is a bywordin the sense of eliminating even the need for trustwith the hard certainty of code and so-called smart contracts replacing the messiness, and autonomy, of human intermediaries and traditional, regulated financial institutions.

In the eyes of crypto observers like David Golumbia, the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, recent events have revealed the illiberal politics and self-interest at the heart of crypto. All forms of libertarianism use the rhetoric of freedom and democracy to cloak the raw pursuit of personal power, wrote Golumbia in an email. Critics of political libertarianism have long pointed out that quite a few of its leading figures ([Friedrich] Hayek, [Ludwig von] Mises, Milton Friedman) ended up supporting right-wing dictators, most notably Pinochet. Others note that the elevation of what libertarians call economic freedom at the expense of all other values and rights very quickly leads to dictatorial politics.

Under this ideological framework, a war that tears apart the democratic fabric of society is a validation of coiners beliefs. It reinforces the commonly voiced idea that contemporary political systems cannot possibly guarantee the financial liberty thats supposedly the precondition for all other rights. Whats most troubling, then, is not just the primacy that some coiners place on the freedom to transact above other, more pro-social rights. Its that they have given up on politics entirely and will switch sides in a war based on how it affects their wallets. When nation-states are invaded and economies teeter toward collapse, they find a moment of opportunity, a time to invoke another core crypto mantra: This is bullish.

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Bitcoin Goes to War - The New Republic