The political trend among bitcoiners

What's your Political Leaning?

The political trend among bitcoiners

Is Bitcoin a political project?
Bitcoin as a project of social transformation
A moral project with political consequences

In this final part of the course, we turn to Bitcoin. What is its nature? Is it a political project? Is it right-wing, left-wing, or something else entirely? And what is the political tendency of those who use it? These are the questions we must now address.

Is Bitcoin a political project?

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency, created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, which enables peer-to-peer financial transactions without requiring trust in any intermediary.

It is governed by an open source software protocol. There is no CEO, no head office, no marketing plan, no designated authority. No company stands behind Bitcoin, and no political entity or government controls it.

An apparently neutral technology

This decentralized nature can create the impression that Bitcoin is simply a technological innovation, neutral and apolitical, comparable to the Internet in the twentieth century or the printing press in the fourteenth. Yet we already know that both the Internet and the printing press, despite being technological innovations, had profound social, economic, and political consequences.

The same is true of Bitcoin, and Satoshi Nakamoto left us messages to make his intention clear.

The flaw in the fiat system

The fundamental problem with conventional currencies is the trust that has to be placed in them for them to work. You have to trust the central bank not to devalue the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of violations of this trust.

This quote from Satoshi Nakamoto is essential to understanding the philosophy behind Bitcoin. Fiat currencies are currencies not backed by a commodity, by something real and physical. They are paper money resting entirely on the authority of the institution that imposes them, and therefore on trust. When an institution holds total control over money, the temptation to abuse is too strong. History has shown this repeatedly.

The genesis block message

Bitcoin was born in direct reaction to the 2008 financial crisis and the monetary interventionism that followed. In the first block ever mined, Satoshi Nakamoto inserted a symbolic headline from the London Times:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on the brink of a second bank bailout.

The intention is unmistakable: to offer an alternative to centralized banking systems.

The devastating consequences of monetary interventionism

Each time a crisis shakes the financial world, or a global event like the Covid-19 pandemic strikes, billions upon billions of dollars and euros are created to bail out banks, businesses, or individuals. These rescue plans have devastating consequences.

The injection of money into the system (monetary inflation) translates into a devaluation of the currency. With the same amount of money, one can buy less and less, because this fresh money does not reflect genuine economic growth. This inflation is a hidden tax, imposed without the consent of citizens. Most people do not see that it is government policy that led to rising prices, which are simply the reflection of currency devaluation. It amounts to legal theft, institutionalized spoliation.

The consequences follow logically: impoverishment of the middle class (while the wealthy can capture new money entering the system through banks and place it in speculative assets), fear of the future, social and political tensions, insecurity, and more broadly, a loss of trust in traditional institutions. This flood of money can also feed political and financial corruption, cronyism between the state and large corporations, and growing bureaucracy.

Bitcoin as a project of social transformation

Bitcoin therefore goes far beyond a simple financial or technological innovation. It was conceived with three aims:

To limit the power of governments over money, preventing institutions from using currency for political ends such as public spending, wars, and ideological control.
To emancipate the individual, restoring control over one's patrimony and one's life. A government can take the euros from your bank account, your house, your shares, your gold. But it cannot take your bitcoins, because Bitcoin, through its decentralized nature, escapes surveillance and control. You hold it yourself, depending on no trusted third party.
To protect against inflation. Bitcoin is a deflationary currency; its supply is limited to 21 million units, and no institution, bank, or government can create more. Its value derives from both its utility and its scarcity.

Bitcoin as individual sovereignty

In traditional finance, one cannot truly possess one's own assets. What we hold are always claims on financial intermediaries. We depend entirely on banking institutions. With Bitcoin, we have direct and sovereign ownership of our holdings. It is simply the act of being one's own banker, holding the private keys that give access to one's bitcoins. If we hold our own keys, no one can confiscate them, because they reside in our minds.

A threat to the welfare state

Bitcoin also represents a challenge to the welfare state: a state that spends beyond its revenues to satisfy demands for economic and social rights (social security, unemployment benefits, pensions). Bitcoin calls into question the three pillars on which this system rests:

The fiscal system, which is insufficient to cover all expenditures.
The monetary monopoly, the capacity to issue money in order to finance spending through debt.
Surveillance of transactions, the ability to prevent people from using any currency other than the state-imposed fiat.

Consider the allegory of the cave, updated for our monetary age. Deep inside the cave, prisoners watch shadows on the wall and see the euro, imagining it to be the only possible currency, trusting the authority that issues it. Then some prisoners escape into the open air and discover Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a way out, a means of emancipation from the cave of monetary illusions.

Protection for dissidents and victims of oppression

Bitcoin also serves as protection for dissidents and victims of oppression in countries experiencing war, dictatorship, or hyperinflation. This may seem remote to those of us in modern democracies, but this capacity for censorship resistance and reinforced privacy is a precious advance for individual freedoms.

A moral project with political consequences

To conclude: Bitcoin was not designed to make people rich, but to make them free. It is not right-wing or left-wing. It is first and foremost a moral project with political consequences. One can embrace Bitcoin regardless of political affiliation, because it is tied to no ideology, no country, no religion.

Bitcoin achieves three things. First, it enables effective property, which is a fundamental incentive to individual responsibility: when one owns something, one takes care of it. Second, it protects the value created by work: when one owns the fruits of one's labor, one is encouraged to work and give one's best. Third, it preserves confidentiality and privacy, a fundamental right, because when one can reveal only what one chooses to reveal, one lives without fear and can establish genuine relationships of trust.

Without explicitly claiming any political camp, Bitcoin carries within it the seeds of a quiet revolution, one that is moral first and political second.

But Bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere. It rests on advances in mathematics, physics, computer science, and philosophy. Satoshi Nakamoto, though brilliant, built on ideas that were already in the air. Among the most important of these were the ideas of the cypherpunk movement.

Quiz

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What three pillars of the welfare state does Bitcoin challenge?