Bitcoin has seen tremendous growth in the past 15 years since its inception, and this has been accompanied by many massive shifts in the culture of the overall ecosystem, as well as the smaller individual communities that make it up. This is clearly to be expected as the network has grown from a small thing in a corner of the internet to a global phenomenon that is now a serious political issue around the world.
Bitcoin is no longer a little thing in the corner, a toy that only a few lonely nerds can master, it is a global economic asset and a monetary network that moves billions of dollars around the world every day. Things have obviously changed in the process of this growth, but I think that this shift has had significant negative consequences.
There has always been a clear liberal or right-wing leaning towards Bitcoin. Some of the early adopters and communities that formed around Bitcoin were based on the liberal philosophy, which makes sense when you look at it from a theoretical perspective. Liberalism is ostensibly about the individual asserting and preserving their freedom and autonomy in their lives. But this was not the only group of people, or the only philosophy, that existed early in Bitcoin’s history.
Many people came to Bitcoin through left-leaning movements like Occupy Wall Street, a large-scale protest movement born in response to the same Great Financial Crisis that gave birth to Bitcoin itself. They also saw the need to remove banks from the global economy in the wake of the disastrous consequences of reckless and irresponsible gambling with ordinary people’s savings and investments in the course of running the economy. They also saw the need to remove control of that economy from the hands of governments that selectively deregulated it to allow that gambling to happen in the first place.
Both groups came here for the same reasons: disintermediation. Removing the giant banks and governments as co-intermediaries in everyone’s financial transactions, hell, the operation of the global economy as a whole. But in the collective cultural mind, libertarianism, the right wing of the political spectrum, has become most widely associated with Bitcoin.
The problem here is that most of them do not actually adhere to the beliefs they profess.
Bitcoin was designed to be an open, disintermediated system that anyone could benefit from. I’m not talking technologically, as anyone reading this article is well aware that Bitcoin requires technological constraints in order to maintain the decentralization that gives it its value in the first place, and that giving up those constraints would be a death knell. I’m talking philosophically.
On a technical level, scaling Bitcoin to be accessible to as many people as possible is an ongoing challenge, and will be for the foreseeable future, if not forever. These are the limitations imposed by the nature of the technology.
On a human and personal level, Bitcoin imposes no restrictions. It is a voluntary, open consensus system, the nature and function of which are entirely determined by this voluntary consensus resulting from the voluntary interactions of all its users and participants. Many self-proclaimed libertarians seem to be deeply offended and stressed by this.
The actions of a large part of the active community, at least online, are completely antithetical to the principles of liberalism. Freedom, liberty, and voluntary interaction. Many right-wing or liberal Bitcoin supporters promote the exact opposite, bullying, intimidating, and pushing people to adopt their worldview.
Their actions speak to conformity and pressure to act a certain way or believe certain things, rather than respecting individual choices and beliefs that differ from their own. They attempt to instill the idea that being a Bitcoiner, or participating in Bitcoin at all, is equivalent to holding to their beliefs and worldview. They constantly engage in smear campaigns, in many cases bordering on or expressing harassment, to try to enforce this equivalence between their worldview and “being a Bitcoiner.”
While I don’t think this is the dominant attitude among people in the space, it is certainly prevalent in some sub-communities, and it is certainly the dominant attitude perceived in public spaces on online platforms. It is in stark contrast to the beliefs held by liberals, individual freedom, respect, and self-determination in how people want to live their lives.
The only place I see widespread evidence that people’s actions, rather than their words, reflect such beliefs is (and I’m sure this is ironic to some readers) on the left. Progressive, left-wing Bitcoiners seem to be the only people willing to engage in any meaningful way with people who think or view the world in radically different ways without resorting to shaming or pressuring people to adopt their particular worldview. They are the people who are working to open up a path of adoption for people with different perspectives, backgrounds, and needs, and are trying to ensure that Bitcoin can help as many people as possible.
In contrast, right-leaning Bitcoin supporters tend to shame, attack, and discourage people who hold different worldviews than themselves. They often ridicule attempts to address these people’s needs or problems with Bitcoin. A common refrain or reaction is “Bitcoin isn’t for everyone.” Or “Poor people will never actually use Bitcoin.” This embodies an “I have what I have, so pull the ladder behind me” attitude about things.
Such claims often take the form of a position based on technical arguments, but the vast majority of people who make such claims do not actually come up with a coherent technical reasoning to support their “forget these people” argument. They appeal to fear and uncertainty to support their arguments, rather than raising coherent and clear technical concerns.
Many of these people embrace and wrap themselves in fantasies about being powerful, rich, and influential. They tell themselves that they deserve their place in the world because they were “smart enough” to buy Bitcoin early, and that others who weren’t “smart enough” don’t deserve it. It’s like a glorification of becoming the people Bitcoin was supposed to remove from all of our lives.
Yes, there are technical limitations to Bitcoin. And yes, this likely means that third parties will never be completely removed from our lives, but that doesn’t mean that this is something to be praised or encouraged. It’s something to enjoy thinking that you yourself could be that intermediary, or wave your hand and magically say “the market will solve this problem” while pretending that governments don’t exist, always searching for new private entities to subjugate and turn into authorized followers who control our financial transactions and our lives.
Talk of government intervention in markets is another area where right-wing Bitcoiners concede on principle. They excuse, or even outright encourage, the creep of influence into services and products in this space, while simultaneously attacking anything that tries to escape the reach of law enforcement or regulation. It’s a case of cognitive dissonance, where they appeal to the entire market to prevent “poor” Bitcoiners from being abused and exploited in the same way that the financial system is being exploited, while pretending that the mere existence of Bitcoin will prevent the government from forcing large private players to act as enforcement agents for this abuse.
Whenever collective custody solutions, such as cryptocurrencies or other Lightning-based systems, are discussed that can be run in a cost-effective manner but are not highly centralized (at least in terms of scale) in places like Africa, they are ridiculed. They are portrayed as scams waiting to happen, or completely unworkable solutions, while critics walk around as if Bitcoin will win by magic. As if there aren’t problems to solve to make it more widely available in a scalable way to provide a way for more people to use it without those risks.
I got mine, so go to hell.
Bitcoin liberals have largely missed the point for which it was originally designed: to disintermediate people’s financial lives. They promote Wall Street influence, political exploitation, and the increasing institutionalization of the entire system as progress.
“We’ll have our seat at the table now, don’t spoil the game!”
They no longer care about uplifting people as a whole, or ensuring that everyone has the freedom to experiment and live their lives the way they want, and build their societies the way they want, on the basis of a neutral, unmediated system. They crow about conformity, homogeneity, and submission to their worldview. They see Bitcoin as a means of subjugating the world to their beliefs, their will, and their way of life. Most people no longer see it as a framework for diverse experimentation and differentiation.
Progressives, leftists, and those who have entered the space through the likes of Occupy Wall Street, still seem to care about making Bitcoin the best it can be for everyone. It’s time to acknowledge this, and to get rid of the parasitic pressures that push people to conform.
For geeks who will understand the reference, infinite variety in infinite combinations. This is what Bitcoin should be.