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Forerunners: Ideas First
The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists. Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
100 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
April 16, 2018
Fantastic little screed/manifesto on the political myths behind bitcoin. The economism is derived from Hayek and Friedman, but the whole bitcoin cult relies on some pretty wacky Fed conspiracy theories. The claims of bitcoin are not only self-contradicatory (it will be adopted by everyone, but it will overthrow the state. It will be unregulated, but does not need to be trusted, it will go up in value, but it's not meant to be an investment), but really the problem is that the things that bitcoin prophets claim are the problems with money and the state are actually its features. We went off gold for a reason and the federal reserve is not what they think it is. (If I have one complaint about Golumbia's book, its that in his treatment of the fed, he says that the fed is not a regulator, but just does money supply. This is not accurate, but it doesn't really matter in the broad outlines of the argument). I wish the book was longer and more thorough, but it was just what I needed to read. I feel like I'm always having to fight the bitcoin enthusiasts because they seem to not understand banks and money. This book helped me contextualize some of their claims in the right wing ideologies from which they spring and in which I do not believe.
January 29, 2018
Far-right extremism is a political ideology that incorporates neo-Naziism, fascism, xenophobia and racism - ideals which Golumbia asserts in this book are "very literally coded into the [Bitcoin] software itself".
However, the entire book is filled with logical fallacies where the author arbitrarily declares any criticism of central banking or the current monetary system, or any diverging opinion from his deeply misinformed take on "conventional economics" to be, by definition "right wing extremism", "conspiracy theory" or both. He then tangentially connects these numerous fallacious inferences to Bitcoin. (In a 62-page book the phrase “right-wing” occurs 78 times, “extremism” and “extremist” occur 32 and 21 times respectively).
The book contains several, significant factual errors: example Golumbia attempts to demonstrate how use of Bitcoin facilitates criminality by citing it's use in making donations to Wikileaks during the 2010 blockade of their payment providers. Golumbia states rather categorically that "it is a violation of U.S law" to donate to Wikileaks and that is totally and utterly false.
He attempts to debunk the generally observed phenomenon of inflation and it's erosion of purchasing power as "conspiracy theory", by claiming currency units can retain their purchasing power via investment returns - completely confusing nominal returns on assets with purchasing power of currency units.
While the author decries prominent Bitcoin authors such as Andreas Antonopoulos "Mastering Bitcoin" book "includes several substantial economic discussions in which extremist views are proffered, without attribution, as if they are simply commonsense analyses of relatively uncontroversial subjects" - his own book, this one, does exactly this nearly it's entire length.
The book concludes rather abruptly, reiterating that right-wing extremism is coded "very literally into the software" of Bitcoin itself, yet nowhere in the book has Golumbia actually demonstrated any of his claims.
I find this book troubling on two fronts: 1) it was never fact checked, nor I suspect reviewed by anybody with a semblance of economic literacy; and 2) the author is an associate professor at a university. Yikes.
However, the entire book is filled with logical fallacies where the author arbitrarily declares any criticism of central banking or the current monetary system, or any diverging opinion from his deeply misinformed take on "conventional economics" to be, by definition "right wing extremism", "conspiracy theory" or both. He then tangentially connects these numerous fallacious inferences to Bitcoin. (In a 62-page book the phrase “right-wing” occurs 78 times, “extremism” and “extremist” occur 32 and 21 times respectively).
The book contains several, significant factual errors: example Golumbia attempts to demonstrate how use of Bitcoin facilitates criminality by citing it's use in making donations to Wikileaks during the 2010 blockade of their payment providers. Golumbia states rather categorically that "it is a violation of U.S law" to donate to Wikileaks and that is totally and utterly false.
He attempts to debunk the generally observed phenomenon of inflation and it's erosion of purchasing power as "conspiracy theory", by claiming currency units can retain their purchasing power via investment returns - completely confusing nominal returns on assets with purchasing power of currency units.
While the author decries prominent Bitcoin authors such as Andreas Antonopoulos "Mastering Bitcoin" book "includes several substantial economic discussions in which extremist views are proffered, without attribution, as if they are simply commonsense analyses of relatively uncontroversial subjects" - his own book, this one, does exactly this nearly it's entire length.
The book concludes rather abruptly, reiterating that right-wing extremism is coded "very literally into the software" of Bitcoin itself, yet nowhere in the book has Golumbia actually demonstrated any of his claims.
I find this book troubling on two fronts: 1) it was never fact checked, nor I suspect reviewed by anybody with a semblance of economic literacy; and 2) the author is an associate professor at a university. Yikes.
November 16, 2016
Ah! Finally, a decent counterweight to bitcoin euphoria. The author comes at bitcoin from the domain of political theory (one of my first loves) to ruthlessly attack the economic and political underpinnings of bitcoin. Some of the attacks hurled by the author miss the mark, but ultimately the book is a valuable addition to the growing literature. If you are interested in bitcoin AND political theory this is required reading.
July 9, 2017
This was an interesting counterpoint to my real-life experience with Bitcoin / cryptocurrency developers and enthusiasts. I think some of the generalizations here are a bit too sweeping, but this felt fairly well-researched on the internet culture side, if less so with respect to the actual technology. The latter point was the major weakness of this essay, as discussion focused heavily on analysis of economic definitions of inflation / deflation, etc., and hardly at all on what kinds of potential economic benefits programmable money might afford society. Not bad overall though.
January 25, 2019
This book may just be too short, more like an outline of an argument than a fully-developed one. However, it does contain several useful references. It covers the history of cyber-libertarianism briefly and describes some of the far-right conspiracy theories about the federal reserve that undergird bitcoin and blockchain technology. Weird supporters of Russian National Bolsheviks (a form of hybrid left-right authoritarian "3rd positionist" politics) are among the first people thanked in the acknowledgments. However, without further reading it's hard to know what influence any other ideological agenda may have had on the author, or whether this has any impact on the book's accuracy on the subject of anarcho-capitalism.
November 5, 2018
Let me start off by saying that it would be generous to refer to right wingers as such. Post-2016, they should be all deemed as fascists. Why? Given how comfortable even the most ‘moderate’ of the right seems to be with expressing their hatred of the powerless, anyone who supports the policies of genocide must be viewed as complicit. Therefore, I will treat them as fascists in this review (and as I do in my normal political thought).
Ishay Landa warns of taking fascists at their word because at its core, fascism, however nebulous the ideology portrays itself as, is an inherently deceptive political ideology. We see this here with bitcoin enthusiasts: bitcoin fails to meet the definition of what ‘money’ is, as is defined by modern capitalist economics, yet its users insist that bitcoin will take down the capitalist state. According to this book, ‘the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission suggested that it would classify bitcoin as a commodity and not a currency, an formally asserted that classification in a legal settlement in September 2015.’ Yet a lot of bitcoin freaks insist on calling it a ‘Money-Like Informational Commodity’ despite this. There is something here besides mere self-delusion, yet the more we investigate fascist institutions, the less willing the left is willing to accept that fascists do not fucking care about being honest. Yet for what reason?
Perhaps this is an odd way to start off a review but David Golumbia’s short nonfiction book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, gets right to the point to identifying the political and ideological motivations of bitcoin advocates. Written in 2016, it had already identified (former) (lol) SpaceEx CEO Elon Musk, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, literal vampire Peter Thiel and tech giants Google and Facebook as dangerous to the public. These people and/or immortal entities have interests and investments in right wing think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, particularly Google and Facebook.
Understand the implications of this: Google, Facebook, and other tech corporations and magnates want ‘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 alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.’ Perhaps this is why Google and Facebook especially invested in right-wing think tanks with the express interest of sabotaging Obamacare.
So what does this have to do with bitcoin? Aside from the fact that I wouldn’t take financial advice from an enthusiast, the tech industry has a clear ideological motivation. Golumbia states that these cyberlibertarians insist on the inherent evil of government, that government is always bad, but corporations can somehow be kept in check. It is a laughable belief if it weren’t so dangerous; these ‘libertarians,’ or fascists, cyber or otherwise, truly believe that “[…]no matter how much power corporations take, their power can never be ‘evil’ in the way that governmental power inherently is.” This suddenly makes sense when you consider why a lot of these fascists love human waste like Pinochet and Bolsonaro.
Golumbia then goes into the mindset of the average bitcoin enthusiast. Why bitcoin? If you’re excited about capitalism then shouldn’t participation in a capitalist society where we exchange money for goods and services be fucking orgasmic to you? According to these freaks, it’s not good enough. They keep trying to get their money!
And finally we arrive at the heart of the lunacy. Chicago boy darling Milton Friedman helped popularize Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. He wanted to abolish the Fed, “if it did exist” (these people are so fucking stupid how did they win) and established an absolutely ridiculous theory on inflation that defies all economic reasoning on how the phenomenon actually occurs. Most economists believe there are multiple causes to inflation and dismiss his wild stupidity but Friedman’s theory remains fringe, with growing popularity among the cyberfascists. Perhaps this is intentional: “In a famous 2007 summary of Freidman’s life and work, Paul Krugman wrote that ‘some of the things Friedman said about ‘money’ and monetary policy—unlike what he said about consumption and inflation—appear to have been misleading, and perhaps deliberately so.’” So, what is his theory? Friedman really thinks inflation is all about how much money is in circulation at any given time. The more money, the more inflation, the worse everyone is. As someone who lives in Brazil, I have to say that this is….not correct. Governments may try to print money to try and curb inflation but it isn’t usually the cause of it; those are very complicated, as one can imagine.
Who else loves this sort of conspiracy theory? Surely they’re all respectable gentlemen like Mr. Friedman, who graciously made my compatriots in Chile scream?
“The proximate source for current Federal Reserve conspiracy theories is found in the writings of Eustace Mullins, one of the most prominent and extreme conspiracy theorists in the United States in the twentieth century, and author of the 1952 book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Mullins, a Holocaust denier and vitriolic anti-Semite, learned of the Federal Reserve during one of his visits to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., where Pound was placed in lieu of criminal prosecution for treason due to his fascist World War II radio broadcasts. Mullins (1993, 6) calls him a ‘political prisoner.’”
Ah…I see.
The London Connection is an incredibly antisemitic book, as you’d imagine, and bitcoin enthusiasts actually spew this bullshit nearly verbatim. Not all of them have read this book, mind you. But Golumbia makes it very clear that one cannot separate your Fed theories from its antisemitic origins. Many bitcoin fans also love David Icke and Alex Jones and it seems that those with fringe beliefs on how society should work in favor of the powerful tend to lean towards those two figures especially.
Another rather insidious form of extremism that bitcoin fans help propagate is ‘computationalism’, and if you have been around for Gamergate or Comicsgate you will be well aware of what this is. Computationalism is the (erroneous, stupid) belief that computer-related fields are superior to others. Anyone who studies the humanities is wasting their time. Things like math and computer science and physics are far more important than literature and sociology and art. This has actually been around since even before the usenet days but bitcoin attracts and converts people into this bullshit. Oddly there is no ‘financialism’ or ‘economism’ in these spaces, and that’s a real shame, because these people have no idea how money works, at all (my god these people WON).
So, you may be asking, how does bitcoin actually work? As you know, anyone can buy stupid shit online using sites like PayPal, for example, which connects you and a shop or another person to each other’s PayPal wallets, which are in turn connected to a bank. It’s fairly straight forward. With bitcoin, all purchases are pseudonymous because the transactions themselves are recorded and open to the public but your name and information isn’t. That part is all encrypted. Bitcoin is hosted on various computers all over the world which is why a lot of people even on the left think it’s a great idea. It’s decentralized so if one computer goes down, there’s a backup elsewhere. Now we get to the infamous blockchain, which is the ledger on which bitcoin relies. All transactions take place through the ledger, which is publically shared. New transactions are verified by the computers on the bitcoin hosting network, and if you successfully verify a (completed) transaction you get a bitcoin! Just kidding you get like .00000000000000000000000000000000001 of a bitcoin. This whole process literally adds as much as one million transatlantic flights per year, or as much as 28 million US households use in a year, or as much as the entire country of Morocco uses in a year, but I’m sure it’s all worth it.
The number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million because its founders are fucking morons who don’t understand economics. They really think that a bitcoin cap is going to prevent inflation. Just read this passage here:
“Bitcoin’s price decline from upward of US$1,000 in late 2013 to US$200 in mid-2015 represents something like 500 percent inflation in eighteen months, in the strictest economic terms, despite the supply of Bitcoin increasing only by about 10 percent over that time period (“Controlled Supply”). In other words, and very literally, a product I could buy for 1 BTC in late 2013 would have cost me 5 BTC in mid-2015. One could scarcely ask for a more textbook example of not just inflation but hyperinflation: the fast and brutal destruction of value for those who hold the instrument.”
For an in-depth understanding of how bitcoin isn’t money and how even if it were it sucks at it, the beginning of chapter 5 is an essential read (the whole book is but I’d start with that). But what you need to know for the purposes of this review, it’s not currency and bitcoin fanatics claim it’ll topple states or whatever. But as the above citation shows, it is far too volatile as a currency to do so. You need currency to be stable in order to purchase groceries or pay rent; we think of infamous scenarios of inflation such as the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe from 1990 onwards. Hell, even in Brazil, my relatives here in Brazil have nightmare stories from the 90s of how not only were their salaries totally devalued from one paycheck to the next, but grocery stories had to keep adjusting prices the entire day to account for inflation. This was one of the situations that the Plano Real intended to fix but I personally remember my mom sending US$25 to her mother in 1998 or thereabouts because apparently the BRL was 4-1 (like it is today so you should send me all your money). The point is that bitcoin is a bad currency and it’s bad money.
I haven’t addressed the whole gold standard thing at all because I don’t think it needs to be said especially if you’re someone who already agrees that bitcoin is an idiotic fantasy but for the sake of being thorough, all currencies are based on something. A gold based currency is going to be subject to the same bullshit that a ‘faith’ based one like the US dollar is supposedly based on (nothing in economics is based on faith you idiot libertarians, it’s based on the US’s hegemonic power over the planet if you must know). Under capitalism there is no inflation-proof currency, stop trying to look for one, it doesn’t exist.
The bitcoin community does vary a bit but what unites them is their use of bitcoin to spread the ideology of bitcoin, which is a fundamentally libertarian, borderline fascist worldview in which all government actions are illegitimate and violent. This is why you can observe many on the left who support bitcoin; there’s good reason to despise capitalist governments (in fact more to hate than anything else), but these people often ignore the danger that corporations, unchecked or otherwise, pose to humanity. They place unfound trust in a technology too unstable to serve as money yet insist that said tech will bring down the very governments they despise, the governments they require to repress social movements in order for their libertarian dreams to come true. These people, be they the useful idiots on the left or the demonic fascist spawn of the right, are fucking amoral and evil, but above all, their ideology is inconsistent and stupid, just fucking stupid. It doesn’t make sense, and the beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to make sense. None of it has to make sense.
As I write this, the fascist Bolsonaro is now president-elect of Brazil and already the (center-right) PMDB-run government under Temer has revealed its true excitement for the fascism to come as it proposes dozens of fascist laws in congress. Fascism is intrinsically connected to capital. We can say that Temer is Bolsonaro-lite as much as we can say that Bolsonaro is Temer on steroids. Not that I don’t prefer living under a center-right government than a full-on dictatorship, but I prefer socialism overall. And this is why this review is so negative, so bleak, so angry, because that hope is gone. It’s nonexistent.
Golumbia wrote this book in 2016, and had certainly researched it long before then, and it was all right in front of us. Fascism was always there, always hiding behind the so-called libertarians, always smiling and telling us they lost their houses gambling on bitcoin. The point wasn’t that they lost money and how funny it was but that somehow, they recruited people with a combination of get-rich-quick schemes, antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, and a well-timed anti government movement. They were always there, because bitcoin is such an inherently silly or interesting thing to examine, depending who you are, and the more you dig into it….you might be sucked into the culture. And that’s how you get recruited. That’s how fascists recruit online. Exposure. It’s fine that their ideas are fucking stupid, that they don’t work. But you HAVE heard of them, haven’t you?
Ishay Landa warns of taking fascists at their word because at its core, fascism, however nebulous the ideology portrays itself as, is an inherently deceptive political ideology. We see this here with bitcoin enthusiasts: bitcoin fails to meet the definition of what ‘money’ is, as is defined by modern capitalist economics, yet its users insist that bitcoin will take down the capitalist state. According to this book, ‘the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission suggested that it would classify bitcoin as a commodity and not a currency, an formally asserted that classification in a legal settlement in September 2015.’ Yet a lot of bitcoin freaks insist on calling it a ‘Money-Like Informational Commodity’ despite this. There is something here besides mere self-delusion, yet the more we investigate fascist institutions, the less willing the left is willing to accept that fascists do not fucking care about being honest. Yet for what reason?
Perhaps this is an odd way to start off a review but David Golumbia’s short nonfiction book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, gets right to the point to identifying the political and ideological motivations of bitcoin advocates. Written in 2016, it had already identified (former) (lol) SpaceEx CEO Elon Musk, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, literal vampire Peter Thiel and tech giants Google and Facebook as dangerous to the public. These people and/or immortal entities have interests and investments in right wing think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, particularly Google and Facebook.
Understand the implications of this: Google, Facebook, and other tech corporations and magnates want ‘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 alienated from the public to adequately represent the public interest against their domineering monopolistic power.’ Perhaps this is why Google and Facebook especially invested in right-wing think tanks with the express interest of sabotaging Obamacare.
So what does this have to do with bitcoin? Aside from the fact that I wouldn’t take financial advice from an enthusiast, the tech industry has a clear ideological motivation. Golumbia states that these cyberlibertarians insist on the inherent evil of government, that government is always bad, but corporations can somehow be kept in check. It is a laughable belief if it weren’t so dangerous; these ‘libertarians,’ or fascists, cyber or otherwise, truly believe that “[…]no matter how much power corporations take, their power can never be ‘evil’ in the way that governmental power inherently is.” This suddenly makes sense when you consider why a lot of these fascists love human waste like Pinochet and Bolsonaro.
Golumbia then goes into the mindset of the average bitcoin enthusiast. Why bitcoin? If you’re excited about capitalism then shouldn’t participation in a capitalist society where we exchange money for goods and services be fucking orgasmic to you? According to these freaks, it’s not good enough. They keep trying to get their money!
And finally we arrive at the heart of the lunacy. Chicago boy darling Milton Friedman helped popularize Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. He wanted to abolish the Fed, “if it did exist” (these people are so fucking stupid how did they win) and established an absolutely ridiculous theory on inflation that defies all economic reasoning on how the phenomenon actually occurs. Most economists believe there are multiple causes to inflation and dismiss his wild stupidity but Friedman’s theory remains fringe, with growing popularity among the cyberfascists. Perhaps this is intentional: “In a famous 2007 summary of Freidman’s life and work, Paul Krugman wrote that ‘some of the things Friedman said about ‘money’ and monetary policy—unlike what he said about consumption and inflation—appear to have been misleading, and perhaps deliberately so.’” So, what is his theory? Friedman really thinks inflation is all about how much money is in circulation at any given time. The more money, the more inflation, the worse everyone is. As someone who lives in Brazil, I have to say that this is….not correct. Governments may try to print money to try and curb inflation but it isn’t usually the cause of it; those are very complicated, as one can imagine.
Who else loves this sort of conspiracy theory? Surely they’re all respectable gentlemen like Mr. Friedman, who graciously made my compatriots in Chile scream?
“The proximate source for current Federal Reserve conspiracy theories is found in the writings of Eustace Mullins, one of the most prominent and extreme conspiracy theorists in the United States in the twentieth century, and author of the 1952 book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Mullins, a Holocaust denier and vitriolic anti-Semite, learned of the Federal Reserve during one of his visits to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., where Pound was placed in lieu of criminal prosecution for treason due to his fascist World War II radio broadcasts. Mullins (1993, 6) calls him a ‘political prisoner.’”
Ah…I see.
The London Connection is an incredibly antisemitic book, as you’d imagine, and bitcoin enthusiasts actually spew this bullshit nearly verbatim. Not all of them have read this book, mind you. But Golumbia makes it very clear that one cannot separate your Fed theories from its antisemitic origins. Many bitcoin fans also love David Icke and Alex Jones and it seems that those with fringe beliefs on how society should work in favor of the powerful tend to lean towards those two figures especially.
Another rather insidious form of extremism that bitcoin fans help propagate is ‘computationalism’, and if you have been around for Gamergate or Comicsgate you will be well aware of what this is. Computationalism is the (erroneous, stupid) belief that computer-related fields are superior to others. Anyone who studies the humanities is wasting their time. Things like math and computer science and physics are far more important than literature and sociology and art. This has actually been around since even before the usenet days but bitcoin attracts and converts people into this bullshit. Oddly there is no ‘financialism’ or ‘economism’ in these spaces, and that’s a real shame, because these people have no idea how money works, at all (my god these people WON).
So, you may be asking, how does bitcoin actually work? As you know, anyone can buy stupid shit online using sites like PayPal, for example, which connects you and a shop or another person to each other’s PayPal wallets, which are in turn connected to a bank. It’s fairly straight forward. With bitcoin, all purchases are pseudonymous because the transactions themselves are recorded and open to the public but your name and information isn’t. That part is all encrypted. Bitcoin is hosted on various computers all over the world which is why a lot of people even on the left think it’s a great idea. It’s decentralized so if one computer goes down, there’s a backup elsewhere. Now we get to the infamous blockchain, which is the ledger on which bitcoin relies. All transactions take place through the ledger, which is publically shared. New transactions are verified by the computers on the bitcoin hosting network, and if you successfully verify a (completed) transaction you get a bitcoin! Just kidding you get like .00000000000000000000000000000000001 of a bitcoin. This whole process literally adds as much as one million transatlantic flights per year, or as much as 28 million US households use in a year, or as much as the entire country of Morocco uses in a year, but I’m sure it’s all worth it.
The number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million because its founders are fucking morons who don’t understand economics. They really think that a bitcoin cap is going to prevent inflation. Just read this passage here:
“Bitcoin’s price decline from upward of US$1,000 in late 2013 to US$200 in mid-2015 represents something like 500 percent inflation in eighteen months, in the strictest economic terms, despite the supply of Bitcoin increasing only by about 10 percent over that time period (“Controlled Supply”). In other words, and very literally, a product I could buy for 1 BTC in late 2013 would have cost me 5 BTC in mid-2015. One could scarcely ask for a more textbook example of not just inflation but hyperinflation: the fast and brutal destruction of value for those who hold the instrument.”
For an in-depth understanding of how bitcoin isn’t money and how even if it were it sucks at it, the beginning of chapter 5 is an essential read (the whole book is but I’d start with that). But what you need to know for the purposes of this review, it’s not currency and bitcoin fanatics claim it’ll topple states or whatever. But as the above citation shows, it is far too volatile as a currency to do so. You need currency to be stable in order to purchase groceries or pay rent; we think of infamous scenarios of inflation such as the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe from 1990 onwards. Hell, even in Brazil, my relatives here in Brazil have nightmare stories from the 90s of how not only were their salaries totally devalued from one paycheck to the next, but grocery stories had to keep adjusting prices the entire day to account for inflation. This was one of the situations that the Plano Real intended to fix but I personally remember my mom sending US$25 to her mother in 1998 or thereabouts because apparently the BRL was 4-1 (like it is today so you should send me all your money). The point is that bitcoin is a bad currency and it’s bad money.
I haven’t addressed the whole gold standard thing at all because I don’t think it needs to be said especially if you’re someone who already agrees that bitcoin is an idiotic fantasy but for the sake of being thorough, all currencies are based on something. A gold based currency is going to be subject to the same bullshit that a ‘faith’ based one like the US dollar is supposedly based on (nothing in economics is based on faith you idiot libertarians, it’s based on the US’s hegemonic power over the planet if you must know). Under capitalism there is no inflation-proof currency, stop trying to look for one, it doesn’t exist.
The bitcoin community does vary a bit but what unites them is their use of bitcoin to spread the ideology of bitcoin, which is a fundamentally libertarian, borderline fascist worldview in which all government actions are illegitimate and violent. This is why you can observe many on the left who support bitcoin; there’s good reason to despise capitalist governments (in fact more to hate than anything else), but these people often ignore the danger that corporations, unchecked or otherwise, pose to humanity. They place unfound trust in a technology too unstable to serve as money yet insist that said tech will bring down the very governments they despise, the governments they require to repress social movements in order for their libertarian dreams to come true. These people, be they the useful idiots on the left or the demonic fascist spawn of the right, are fucking amoral and evil, but above all, their ideology is inconsistent and stupid, just fucking stupid. It doesn’t make sense, and the beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to make sense. None of it has to make sense.
As I write this, the fascist Bolsonaro is now president-elect of Brazil and already the (center-right) PMDB-run government under Temer has revealed its true excitement for the fascism to come as it proposes dozens of fascist laws in congress. Fascism is intrinsically connected to capital. We can say that Temer is Bolsonaro-lite as much as we can say that Bolsonaro is Temer on steroids. Not that I don’t prefer living under a center-right government than a full-on dictatorship, but I prefer socialism overall. And this is why this review is so negative, so bleak, so angry, because that hope is gone. It’s nonexistent.
Golumbia wrote this book in 2016, and had certainly researched it long before then, and it was all right in front of us. Fascism was always there, always hiding behind the so-called libertarians, always smiling and telling us they lost their houses gambling on bitcoin. The point wasn’t that they lost money and how funny it was but that somehow, they recruited people with a combination of get-rich-quick schemes, antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, and a well-timed anti government movement. They were always there, because bitcoin is such an inherently silly or interesting thing to examine, depending who you are, and the more you dig into it….you might be sucked into the culture. And that’s how you get recruited. That’s how fascists recruit online. Exposure. It’s fine that their ideas are fucking stupid, that they don’t work. But you HAVE heard of them, haven’t you?
April 7, 2021
Was writing a research paper regarding Bitcoin, crypto, and crime and stumbled upon this piece of shit. The book is auth-left grief trying to demonize people for investing in bitcoin and trying to diversify their money. Total waste of time and space. Would not recommend even to my biggest enemy.
December 10, 2016
Very important pamphlet. So much to unpack at Bitcoin front and an excellent model for analysing other technologies.
January 25, 2024
This author traces the beginning of modern far right extremism in America to the demise of the Lochner era after 1937 and the rise of constraints on corporate power with the New Deal. Radical ideas about inflation and the federal reserve, made palatable with empty populist rhetoric and anti-Semitic conspiracy, became a stepping stone on the path toward the deregulation that kicked off the neoliberal era.
Talk to a Bitcoin enthusiast today (or the current frontrunner in the upcoming Canadian election, apparently), and you’re likely to hear some version of those same ideas about central bank manipulation by a shadowy cabal of “elites”, the federal reserve printing money to devalue the people’s hard-earned dollars, inflation as a hidden tax, and so on. Bitcoin proponents tend to lean pretty hard into libertarian belief that there is no legitimate use of government power—except so far as it serves the neoliberal agenda—and laud the potential for Bitcoin to circumvent what it calls government overreach.
In reality, Bitcoin has proven far too volatile to be the populist currency that it’s purported to be, and easily subject to the manipulation of high profile players with established capital. Despite its decentralized nature, in the author’s words, it serves as a “centralized and concentrated locus of financial power”. In other words, it’s just another tool to concentrate wealth into fewer hands.
Golumbia makes strong arguments for an underlying far-right ideology of Bitcoin. As to whether it’s “coded in” to the technology itself as he claims, I’d say this is the case only to the extent that it is for any technology devised to squash progress for workers, sidestep government regulation, and deepen inequality for marginalized groups to bring about the most libertarian version of capitalism yet. A more thorough account of those other technologies might have grounded Golumbia’s arguments for “software as right-wing extremism”. But for such a short read, he gets his point across well, even when touching on denser topics like economics. I’d absolutely recommend a read in 2024.
Talk to a Bitcoin enthusiast today (or the current frontrunner in the upcoming Canadian election, apparently), and you’re likely to hear some version of those same ideas about central bank manipulation by a shadowy cabal of “elites”, the federal reserve printing money to devalue the people’s hard-earned dollars, inflation as a hidden tax, and so on. Bitcoin proponents tend to lean pretty hard into libertarian belief that there is no legitimate use of government power—except so far as it serves the neoliberal agenda—and laud the potential for Bitcoin to circumvent what it calls government overreach.
In reality, Bitcoin has proven far too volatile to be the populist currency that it’s purported to be, and easily subject to the manipulation of high profile players with established capital. Despite its decentralized nature, in the author’s words, it serves as a “centralized and concentrated locus of financial power”. In other words, it’s just another tool to concentrate wealth into fewer hands.
Golumbia makes strong arguments for an underlying far-right ideology of Bitcoin. As to whether it’s “coded in” to the technology itself as he claims, I’d say this is the case only to the extent that it is for any technology devised to squash progress for workers, sidestep government regulation, and deepen inequality for marginalized groups to bring about the most libertarian version of capitalism yet. A more thorough account of those other technologies might have grounded Golumbia’s arguments for “software as right-wing extremism”. But for such a short read, he gets his point across well, even when touching on denser topics like economics. I’d absolutely recommend a read in 2024.
December 6, 2020
This book is quite densely referenced, which gives the first couple of chapters a 'literature review' kind of vibe, but that, combined with its decent general overview of the structure and history of bitcoin, makes it a useful introductory text. There's great material in here on inflation and its persistent misunderstanding by commentators; the trope of anxiety over paper money and its deviation from the fixed value of some more stable 'gold standard' is well skewered by Golumbia, who points out (without quite making this connection politically explicit) that functional money systems are basically dependent on, and entirely intertwined with, nation states, not to mention the fact that any use of gold as money (i.e. as store of value and unit of account plus medium of exchange) would require (and historically has required) that it be subsumed into a specific governmental apparatus, through which gold would itself become a kind of fiat currency. This is not to mention the obvious point that gold, and other seemingly 'intrinsically valuable' currencies, has been subject to fluctuations and manipulations of price throughout history. It doesn't take long thinking about this to realise that 'value' itself is tied up in systems of social negotiation (i.e. is socially constructed, is partly determined by socially-necessary labour time) that cannot realistically be replaced by digital technologies, by 'software as political program,' as the title of chapter 5 has it.
This leads me to my only real issue with this little book, which is that it doesn't really have a political program of its own. It's a clear-sighted critique of right-wing thought and right anarchism, but at times it seems to fall into potentially quite naive liberal or centrist positions, mostly to do with representative government. Bitcoin software is touted by some as a project "to dismantle the very project of representative governance," and Golumbia has a problem with this because representative governance is, for him, characterised by a level of accountability to the people which is sorely missing from any corporate structures or decision-makers (33). He laments that "there is simply no consideration of the idea that it might be appropriate for financial providers to cooperate with the government against efforts that directly and purposely contravene perfectly valid law," and argues that the theoretical claims of bitcoin advocates "are profoundly antidemocratic, insisting that the introduction of devices and software by a self-identified technocratic elite trumps duly enacted laws and law enforcement mechanisms" (35, 65).
Now, to be sure, I agree with Golumbia's express point here: anarcho-capitalism sucks and replacing states with markets is not a solution to the widespread violence and injustice that characterises our world. However, some of the things that Golumbia is worried about - the destruction of representative government through software - seem, on balance, to actually be quite appealing not just to left anarchists (as opposed to the strains of anarchism that Golumbia is at pains to criticise, at times perhaps not quite precisely enough) but to Marxists in general. The project of representative government is actually not something with a proud record that we should be defending on its path to ever-increasing enlightenment. Golumbia is right that libertarians have no idea what they are saying when they criticise the central banking system for 'stealing value' from people by printing money, or whatever (and his point that they confuse 'regulatory' modulation of inflation by a non-government entity with executive branch 'regulation' of criminal and civil codes is a great clarifying distinction), but he doesn't even gesture towards the role that central banks very much do play in the administration of capitalist economies, which is not, to put it lightly, a social good. So, basically, when Golumbia writes that right-wing thinkers misuse the concept of liberty ('negative' liberty) and end up undermining "exactly those democratically enacted structures and programs among whose main purposes is to curtail the tyrannical abuse of individual liberty by concentrated economic power," my response is 'read Lenin!' because (as he almost concedes elsewhere when talking about the absorption of Milton Friedman's doctrine into the mainstream) right-wing extremism in one form or another very much does constitute the bourgeois state's raison d'être (11).
This leads me to my only real issue with this little book, which is that it doesn't really have a political program of its own. It's a clear-sighted critique of right-wing thought and right anarchism, but at times it seems to fall into potentially quite naive liberal or centrist positions, mostly to do with representative government. Bitcoin software is touted by some as a project "to dismantle the very project of representative governance," and Golumbia has a problem with this because representative governance is, for him, characterised by a level of accountability to the people which is sorely missing from any corporate structures or decision-makers (33). He laments that "there is simply no consideration of the idea that it might be appropriate for financial providers to cooperate with the government against efforts that directly and purposely contravene perfectly valid law," and argues that the theoretical claims of bitcoin advocates "are profoundly antidemocratic, insisting that the introduction of devices and software by a self-identified technocratic elite trumps duly enacted laws and law enforcement mechanisms" (35, 65).
Now, to be sure, I agree with Golumbia's express point here: anarcho-capitalism sucks and replacing states with markets is not a solution to the widespread violence and injustice that characterises our world. However, some of the things that Golumbia is worried about - the destruction of representative government through software - seem, on balance, to actually be quite appealing not just to left anarchists (as opposed to the strains of anarchism that Golumbia is at pains to criticise, at times perhaps not quite precisely enough) but to Marxists in general. The project of representative government is actually not something with a proud record that we should be defending on its path to ever-increasing enlightenment. Golumbia is right that libertarians have no idea what they are saying when they criticise the central banking system for 'stealing value' from people by printing money, or whatever (and his point that they confuse 'regulatory' modulation of inflation by a non-government entity with executive branch 'regulation' of criminal and civil codes is a great clarifying distinction), but he doesn't even gesture towards the role that central banks very much do play in the administration of capitalist economies, which is not, to put it lightly, a social good. So, basically, when Golumbia writes that right-wing thinkers misuse the concept of liberty ('negative' liberty) and end up undermining "exactly those democratically enacted structures and programs among whose main purposes is to curtail the tyrannical abuse of individual liberty by concentrated economic power," my response is 'read Lenin!' because (as he almost concedes elsewhere when talking about the absorption of Milton Friedman's doctrine into the mainstream) right-wing extremism in one form or another very much does constitute the bourgeois state's raison d'être (11).
April 22, 2022
I'm sort of abstractly interested in the politics of cryptocurrencey but haven't done much actual thinking or reading about it. I'd say this snappy, polemical little book is as good a place to start as any. It sets out some of the more utopian visions of Bitcoin and then dismantles them, arguing that the whole thing is an inherently right-wing - libertarian, specifically, or "anarcho-capitalist" - project to create a currency which evades democratic oversight and regulation in a way that ultimately benefits private corporations.
At times his characterisation of certain views as right-wing extremism seems a bit much - a lot of the views he associates with it exist on the left, as well, and right-wing extremism to me invokes views a lot more fascistic and offensive than what he's really talking about here. But he does makes an important point that the conspiracy theories that some Bitcoin enthusiasts subscribe to - about central banking and a sinister world order - are significantly antisemitic in origin.
There's a lot to think about here and while I didn't find every part of the argument totally convincing, there's so much value in the essential point that it's important to think about Bitcoin politically - and this book sets out a really clear model for how to start doing that.
At times his characterisation of certain views as right-wing extremism seems a bit much - a lot of the views he associates with it exist on the left, as well, and right-wing extremism to me invokes views a lot more fascistic and offensive than what he's really talking about here. But he does makes an important point that the conspiracy theories that some Bitcoin enthusiasts subscribe to - about central banking and a sinister world order - are significantly antisemitic in origin.
There's a lot to think about here and while I didn't find every part of the argument totally convincing, there's so much value in the essential point that it's important to think about Bitcoin politically - and this book sets out a really clear model for how to start doing that.
January 8, 2018
Well sourced and a good insight into the political underpinnings of Bitcoin and cyberlibertarian ideology for people with slightly more than rudimentary knowledge of Bitcoin / blockchain. It's a decent cautionary tale for those who may be caught up in the zeitgeist of cryptocurrency speculation and tech worship in general that turns smart folks into people who will trust corporations to have their best interest at heart or even buy into age old conspiracy theories. For such a short book it's a tough read due to some awkward syntax and extended parenthetical asides that would work better as footnotes.
August 15, 2018
It is in interesting introduction to US right wing activists and their love for Bitcoin. At the end the author claims that right wing ideas are "coded" into Bitcoin. He doesn't care to explain that a bit, actually in the same way as he doesn't care to understand Bitcoin itself - his few lines of explanations are simply wrong and many of his economic statements more than questionable.
March 6, 2020
Most readers don't know what their tax money can get them: a bureaucrat that does not get much about the technology, but clearly knows he wants more power.
Read
April 29, 2018A great introduction to Bitcoin and to the discourse surrounding it. It's very short, and I could have done with some just slightly more detailed analysis of and counterarguments to libertarian economics. Sometimes I think Golumbia has a little too much respect for me as a reader: there's a tendency to show that some statement which presents itself as a fairly technical, neutral, uncontroversial idea is actually linked to extreme right-wing philosophy, and then just leave it at that.
Read
May 24, 2019part of my 'downloading books with funny names' series
n.b. some of the goodreads reviews for this are chefs kiss
n.b. some of the goodreads reviews for this are chefs kiss
February 24, 2022
Pretty clear and informative take on how Bitcoin is completely contradictory. Considering in the foreward it mentions that the book is just a collection of thoughts for others to build upon, the author is clearly very experienced in this area and the 90 or so pages are full of references to relevant resources and tons of further reading is given where possible.
I read this in 2022 after NFTs blew up, while this book doesn't cover that at all, it does make the case that we should be wary of Blockchain technology in general, as the underlying assumptions behind its main selling points stem from the extreme right wing (as is explained in the book! [the author also makes it clear that Blockchain tech, like any tech, can be used by anyone from any political affiliation to do any project they like, just be wary of it and what the end goal is for crypto advocates]).
I read this in 2022 after NFTs blew up, while this book doesn't cover that at all, it does make the case that we should be wary of Blockchain technology in general, as the underlying assumptions behind its main selling points stem from the extreme right wing (as is explained in the book! [the author also makes it clear that Blockchain tech, like any tech, can be used by anyone from any political affiliation to do any project they like, just be wary of it and what the end goal is for crypto advocates]).
January 16, 2018
I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in Bitcoin, blockchain, and the political implications of disruptive technology. It's an important read, though at times it was repetitive and left me wanting more.
The author does a good job of explaining the history and roots of blockchain tech, and Bitcoin in particular. His argument seems to have two parts. The first is that Bitcoin tech was created by people with libertarian and right-wing leanings. This part of the argument is interesting historically, but has a bit of ad hominem ring to it: after all, we should measure the value of tech by what it does (and can do), rather than who designed it.
Having said that, the author makes a second and more important argument, that Bitcoin is itself a right-wing tool, intended to disrupt governmental power and to replace it with newly concentrated and unaccountable power in corporate technocrats. This part of the argument is much more intriguing. I think that Prof. Golumbia is likely correct on this point, and would add that recent studies suggest that most Bitcoins are owned by a small percentage (4%) of Bitcoin holders.
Much of his argument, though, seems focused on Bitcoin, though, and I would have liked to see more of a broad discussion on the political implications of blockchain in general. There are other types of blockchain currencies/commodities. Might some of them better embrace liberal values? What about the use of blockchain as a way to record title? Court records? Are those bad as well?
Hopefully Prof. Golumbia will address such issues in his future work, and I look forward to reading it.
October 2, 2017
A short, helpful book that points out how many of the ideas behind Bitcoin are tied to right-wing conspiracy theories and conservative economics. However, some more substantial discussion of economic theory would have improved the book. Much of the argument consists in simply showing that Bitcoin's ideology comes almost entirely from non-mainstream conservative sources. An important but easily made point. Leaving things there is problematic because it means implicitly accepting mainstream economics; it also means that the ideas behind Bitcoin are not as thoroughly debunked as they might have been, had we gone into why the theories behind Bitcoin should be rejected in favor of other, better ones.
February 3, 2018
An important caveat here: David’s not talking about Right-Wing as in MAGA hats and white nationalism, he’s talking about it in the sense of “government small enough to drown in a bathtub” and other more libertarian-adjacent ideas. It’s a fairly short and focused book that does a great job of pinning the ideas motivating major cryptocurrency thinkers to that libertarian tradition. A major point in here is that many of the motivating ideas of bitcoiners are assumptions from a far-right perspective that are very arguable when explicitly laid out. In a plus for books in the "picking a fight" genre, this one is clearly argued and well referenced.
October 4, 2019
It’s not that there aren’t some interesting points in here. What I object to is that there doesn’t seem to be any reason to care about advances made in blockchain tech that are granted as legitimate. For a book concerned with rooting out conspiratorial thinking, it seems the only two options granted for thinking the topic important is that you’re monocle-polishing or a dupe. Additionally, describing essentially everyone as a right-wing extremist or ideologue is decisively low. If the mirror image happened we’d scoff and be justified.
November 29, 2022
Un livre trop court sur l'idéologie politique qui serait derrière le bitcoin.
Pour la plupart des gens ça ne vaut pas le coup d'être lu mais tout n'est pas à jeter. Beaucoup d'éléments intéressants sont présentés avec des critiques parfois très pertinentes, tout n'est peut être pas exact (les critiques utilisant certaines théories économiques peuvent probablement être débattues) mais ça a au moins le mérite de faire naître certains questionnements sur des domaines qu'on ne remettait pas en question.
L'énorme point faible reste que tout est trop succin, on dirait un mélange bâtard entre un livre de vulgarisation pour le plus grand nombre et ouvrage destiné aux gens ayant déjà certaines connaissances. Résultat quel que soit l'objectif c'est raté: si vous ne connaissez rien au bitcoin, au libertarianisme, au monétarisme ou à certaines théories du complot vous serez perdu ; et si vous connaissez déjà il n'y aura aucune démonstration complète ou approfondissement suffisant (beaucoup d'arguments sont de la forme: "je ne dis pas que ce mouvement est complotiste d’extrême droite mais regardez ces critiques que des gens en ont fait y a quelques années...").
Heureusement il y a un paquet de source, on peut donc essayer de faire soi-même ce que l'auteur n'a pas fait.
Enfin il faut noter que l'auteur n'est pas "neutre", ce qui est assez évident vu le titre. Il a l'air assez pro-état, dans le sens où il a l'air opposé, par principe, à tout ce qui s'affiche comme étant anarchiste et/ou libertarien. Beaucoup de ses arguments sont assez objectifs, mais pour certains on a quand même l'impression que c'est son idéologie bien subjective qui parle. Notamment quand il parle de certaines notions économiques qui feraient consensus.
Je le recommande tout de même aux enthousiastes du bitcoin et aux maximalistes. Très souvent il est mis en avant par des arguments douteux qui relèvent plus de l'idéologie que des "faits et du réel", ce livre a au moins l'intérêt d’ouvrir des pistes de critiques (mais il est loin d'être suffisant).
Juste, il ne vaut pas son prix, j'espère que l'auteur publiera un nouvel ouvrage bien plus fourni où il pourra rentrer dans le détail de tous les points abordés.
Pour la plupart des gens ça ne vaut pas le coup d'être lu mais tout n'est pas à jeter. Beaucoup d'éléments intéressants sont présentés avec des critiques parfois très pertinentes, tout n'est peut être pas exact (les critiques utilisant certaines théories économiques peuvent probablement être débattues) mais ça a au moins le mérite de faire naître certains questionnements sur des domaines qu'on ne remettait pas en question.
L'énorme point faible reste que tout est trop succin, on dirait un mélange bâtard entre un livre de vulgarisation pour le plus grand nombre et ouvrage destiné aux gens ayant déjà certaines connaissances. Résultat quel que soit l'objectif c'est raté: si vous ne connaissez rien au bitcoin, au libertarianisme, au monétarisme ou à certaines théories du complot vous serez perdu ; et si vous connaissez déjà il n'y aura aucune démonstration complète ou approfondissement suffisant (beaucoup d'arguments sont de la forme: "je ne dis pas que ce mouvement est complotiste d’extrême droite mais regardez ces critiques que des gens en ont fait y a quelques années...").
Heureusement il y a un paquet de source, on peut donc essayer de faire soi-même ce que l'auteur n'a pas fait.
Enfin il faut noter que l'auteur n'est pas "neutre", ce qui est assez évident vu le titre. Il a l'air assez pro-état, dans le sens où il a l'air opposé, par principe, à tout ce qui s'affiche comme étant anarchiste et/ou libertarien. Beaucoup de ses arguments sont assez objectifs, mais pour certains on a quand même l'impression que c'est son idéologie bien subjective qui parle. Notamment quand il parle de certaines notions économiques qui feraient consensus.
Je le recommande tout de même aux enthousiastes du bitcoin et aux maximalistes. Très souvent il est mis en avant par des arguments douteux qui relèvent plus de l'idéologie que des "faits et du réel", ce livre a au moins l'intérêt d’ouvrir des pistes de critiques (mais il est loin d'être suffisant).
Juste, il ne vaut pas son prix, j'espère que l'auteur publiera un nouvel ouvrage bien plus fourni où il pourra rentrer dans le détail de tous les points abordés.
March 27, 2019
Good discussion of “cyberlibertarianism”
Good, brief, well-researched discussion of the underlying “cyberlibertarian” ideology behind Bitcoin, which is almost never interrogated, even by mainstream sources. Regardless of whether Bitcoin is likely to be successful as “money” (and the book offers a number of good arguments for why it is unlikely to be) or merely remajn a volatile and intentionally regulation-resistant vehicle for speculation, Golumbia demonstrates why we need to be concerned about the radical libertarian (and potentially anti-democratic) ideas it has assumed a major role in promoting.
Good, brief, well-researched discussion of the underlying “cyberlibertarian” ideology behind Bitcoin, which is almost never interrogated, even by mainstream sources. Regardless of whether Bitcoin is likely to be successful as “money” (and the book offers a number of good arguments for why it is unlikely to be) or merely remajn a volatile and intentionally regulation-resistant vehicle for speculation, Golumbia demonstrates why we need to be concerned about the radical libertarian (and potentially anti-democratic) ideas it has assumed a major role in promoting.
January 8, 2021
Very concise and stuck within the confines of the argument being made. Basic thesis being that Bitcoin's greatest success hasn't been technological or financial, but the mainstreaming of really fringe right wing economic theory.
The idea that a lot of these (sometimes contradictory) assumptions are baked into the technology and that the primary social affect of Bitcoin's spread is the spread of these economically libertarian ideas raises an obvious question beyond the scope of this book - what would a technology which fulfilled the same purpose for the left look like?
The idea that a lot of these (sometimes contradictory) assumptions are baked into the technology and that the primary social affect of Bitcoin's spread is the spread of these economically libertarian ideas raises an obvious question beyond the scope of this book - what would a technology which fulfilled the same purpose for the left look like?
August 21, 2020
I went in a bit skeptical about this book because of Golumbia's praise for the problematic "Kill All Normies" however Columbia delivers a lot of research and a better understanding of the economics and the politics of economics to expose the contradiction around crypto that, although poised as new, has roots in very old conspiratorial thinking. Overall it was very informative and if you're familiar with the gold standard weirdos and what not, actually makes sense.
May 6, 2022
I've been involved with the crypto industry for quite some time now. This book addresses some of the concerns that I've seen in the crypto community as well.
I don't think the book had a comprehensive and unbiased outlook into crypto. However, the concerns it raised were done with adequate logic and support. It's not often that we come across a well informed criticism of the industry and purely for that, it will be a valuable book that I shall recommend to my peers. Highly recommend it!
I don't think the book had a comprehensive and unbiased outlook into crypto. However, the concerns it raised were done with adequate logic and support. It's not often that we come across a well informed criticism of the industry and purely for that, it will be a valuable book that I shall recommend to my peers. Highly recommend it!
April 13, 2019
Great and very factually substantive essay about the sociological phenomenon of Bitcoin.
I would sum up the thesis thus:
Ideology can be spread and reproduced even by those who have no idea what they are doing, and the Bitcoin community is reproducing Right-Libertarian ideology with near surgical precision.
I would sum up the thesis thus:
Ideology can be spread and reproduced even by those who have no idea what they are doing, and the Bitcoin community is reproducing Right-Libertarian ideology with near surgical precision.
June 13, 2021
Quite good tracing of the right wing underpinnings of much of the theory around the value of blockchain technologies. Could use a second edition to address the last 5 years: the examples of Bitcoin's price volatility are quite outdated now, for example. Also the section mentioning DAOs doesn't get the benefit of the hilarious bungle when Buterin and co. actually tried to launch one.
September 23, 2021
The author doesn’t understand Bitcoin. Would take too long to cover all the falsehoods. The bits about the history of right wing libertarian conspiracy theories and how they ended up to be so prevalent in the Bitcoin space was interesting. I picked this up to better understand the far right wing views of Bitcoin twitter. I left with a better understanding of where this lunacy comes from.
February 17, 2022
Outlines the origins of Bitcoin, and it's philosophical background. Nothing comes to be without a philosophy behind it, and this essay is a great way to introduce oneself to the people and ideas that have become more and more popular with crypto. A must-read for readers who are not crazed by crypto and are willing to read a more nuanced take on the significance of this technology.
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