Bitcoin doesn’t care if you think its right wing

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Bitcoin is a mirror in which we look and see a mirror image of ourselves.

As some estimates indicate, there are currently north of 100 million cryptocurrency users in the world, roughly the population of Japan, time limitations, information availability and working memory. human mean that we are necessarily blind to the fullness of cryptocurrency as an ecosystem. There are use cases we can’t understand, inventions we haven’t seen yet, motivations we don’t understand. When we criticize cryptocurrency, we must be aware that the content of our criticism may have more to do with what we cannot see than what we can.

Preston Byrne, a CoinDesk columnist, is a partner in Anderson Kill’s Technology, Media and Distributed Systems group. He advises software, internet and fintech companies. It is not legal advice.

Related: Jackson Palmer vs. Spike Lee: “Inherently Right Wing” or “Digital Rebellion”?

We are long past the point where generalizations about cryptography are intellectually useful. That hasn’t stopped some from trying to make them, often in 280 characters or less. Jackson Palmer’s recent bitcoin tweetstorm is one example. Palmer is the co-founder of Dogecoin, a project that requires no introduction. Palmer eventually retired from cryptocurrency to work at Adobe after the prank project took on a life of its own.

In his tweetstorm, Palmer calls the cryptocurrency an “inherently right-wing hyper-capitalist technology, designed primarily to amplify the wealth of its supporters through a combination of tax evasion, reduced regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced scarcity.”[.]He criticized the industry as a beehive of dishonest media and billionaires who exploit vulnerable people, move markets with tweets and cynically evade their legal obligations.

Is Palmer right? In some cases, sure, but it’s still a cheap shot, first performed – unconvincingly, in my opinion – six years ago by the academic at Virginia Commonwealth University, David Golumbia. Yes, crooks and fascists use bitcoin; they also breathe air and use TCP-IP. Yes, they were disproportionate in the early days of cryptocurrency; This is no longer the case.

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Palmer’s review hits all the right notes, using all the right language that, under normal circumstances, could spark a letter-writing campaign of the kind that freaks out most PR departments (“Did you hear, our service is used by – gasp – right – wingers !?). This necessarily precipitates an inappropriate and creepy public apology, a pattern which in the recent past has resulted in the removal of politically radioactive individuals – Alex Jones comes in mind – web platforms, payment processors and banks.

Related: The ‘Crypto-Colonialism’ Headache

The difference is bitcoin and any cryptocurrency worth its salt is based on game theory powered by proof of work, not politics. He does not feel anything and does not respond to anyone. More and more, we’re seeing other functions – social media, content distribution and monetization, and even entire businesses – adopting a decentralized bitcoin-like modality of operation. These services, too, will have no opinions and no masters.

Designing such systems well is not an easy task. Outside of bitcoin itself, there are no clear winners. We can be sure that anything that ends up going decentralized PayPal or Twitter will not be aware of the partisan language or the successful articles of think tanks or news magazines for a long time.

Whatever conversations we choose to have in public on these systems, we will conduct them knowing that no matter how angry we are, however loud we scream, however rhetoric we employ , these systems will ignore us, continue to work and continue to be used by people we hate. One can only hope that this makes us more civil to each other.

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