Progress pill
The political trend among bitcoiners

The political trend among bitcoiners

What's your Political Leaning?

The political trend among bitcoiners

  • Is Bitcoin a political project?
At the end of this course, we feel it is essential to address the political positioning of Bitcoin and bitcoiners.

Is Bitcoin a political project?

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency, created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, which enables untrusted, peer-to-peer financial transactions.
Bitcoin is controlled by an open source software protocol, with no CEO, no head office, no marketing budget and no designated authority. This means that no political entity or government has control over it.
This neutrality is disconcerting for some, and may lead one to believe that this is an apolitical technology, like the Internet in the 20th century or the printing press in the 14th century.
While Bitcoin itself is neither right-wing nor left-wing, nor does it belong to any religion, it was nonetheless invented to solve a problem - that of trust in financial exchanges and centralized entities. And that in itself is a political problem.
Reading the Satoshi Nakamoto White Paper, we can see that Bitcoin was designed to offer innovative protection against two major contemporary threats: widespread surveillance and the acceleration of artificial money creation.
  1. Although not totally anonymous, Bitcoin considerably enhances privacy by limiting financial surveillance of individuals. This capability enables, for example, a dissident in a dictatorship to hold and exchange value online without fear of confiscation or censorship. While this may seem a long way off for citizens of democracies, it is a crucial step forward for individual freedoms.
  2. Bitcoin enables everyone to protect their savings against the spoliation of private property embodied in monetary inflation. It is an attempt to challenge the state's control on the management of money as an instrument of exchange, and thus to compete with the state. The 2008 financial crisis and the Covid 19 pandemic have highlighted the flaws in the current system. The trillions of dollars printed out of thin air to prevent the economy from collapsing further had devastating effects, which we are still paying for.
So Bitcoin is much more than a financial technology, it's a project to change the world, to improve it. It's an ambitious political project to redefine power relationships between individuals and institutions:
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 fundamental to understanding the philosophy behind Bitcoin. Satoshi highlights the flaws in the Fiat system based on trust in centralized institutions, and proposes Bitcoin as a trustless alternative.
The starting point of Satoshi Nakamoto's intellectual approach is therefore people's overconfidence in fiat currency and the false belief that the state can solve crises. Indeed, in the first mined block in the Bitcoin story, Satoshi Nakamoto inserted a symbolic sentence from a front-page article in the London Times:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on the brink of a second bank bailout.
The inclusion of this title in the genesis block is open to interpretation. But it may appear as Satoshi's commentary on the failures of traditional financial institutions, and as a statement of Bitcoin's aim: to offer an alternative to centralized banking systems.
When the state imposes strict control over all transactions (for example, by limiting cash or imposing a centralized digital currency), it has total control over the economy, to the detriment of individuals' freedom of choice and sovereignty. By monitoring all transactions, the state can better identify new sources of taxation and impose strict regulations.
Yet Bitcoin was designed to operate without the intervention of central banks or other state-controlled financial intermediaries. Because of its decentralized, pseudonymous nature and resistance to manipulation, it could weaken the foundations of the welfare state by reducing its control over money, taxation and the financial system.
So one of the essential properties of Bitcoin is the ability to own oneself. In the world of traditional finance, you can't own yourself. It's always financial intermediaries who are willing to give you access to an account.
Bitcoin was designed to limit the power of governments over currency.
It prevents the use of money for political purposes such as: public spending, wars, ideological formatting and the control of opinions.
  • The government can take the euros from your bank account.
  • It can take your house and your land.
  • It can take your shares.
  • It can take your gold.
  • It can take everything from you.
But the government can't take your bitcoins, because it can't confiscate the contents of your mind.
That's why Bitcoin is built on a fundamental philosophical presupposition: freedom means owning oneself, the fruits of one's labor and one's private life.
In this sense, it is driven by a vision of the world that is both moral and political. When the state has a monopoly on money, you're in a statist system, whether right-wing or left-wing. Bitcoin's project is to offer everyone a free money market.
But Bitcoin didn't appear out of nowhere. It is based on advances in mathematics, physics, computer science and philosophy. Satoshi Nakamoto, though brilliant, built on the ideas of other innovators. Among them, the pioneers of the cypherpunk movement.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to Satoshi Nakamoto's philosophy, what is the fundamental problem with conventional currencies that Bitcoin was designed to solve?