Bitcoin is naught but a toy for rich white libertarian men,
says Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress, as she
thinks about the ways she doesn’t like progress if she doesn’t like
the type of people she associates with it, or the ideas she thinks
are behind it, no matter what its actual uses are or might be, for
rich, poor, or in-between.
I guess I can be sure Bitcoin
isn’t really dead if attacks like this are still being produced
and assume they still have an audience. (I blogged back in December
about actually more thoughtful such attacks, in “The
‘It’s Libertarian So It’s Bad’ Argument Against Bitcoin.”)
Strasser starts off with some irrelevant facts–new weird
digital tools, techniques, and trends with a libertarian
philosophical bent might tend to skew toward having lots of white
man as their most active and obvious users and boosters–and a few
things that just aren’t true at all–“there’s a fair amount of
privilege built directly into the currency: In order to buy the
sometimes wildly expensive currency, Bitcoin users need to be
wealthy.”
In fact, for years the price of a bitcoin remained under $10,
not quite the sign of something meant to block the less well to do
by design. Maybe she meant to say that if you were smart enough to
get involved in Bitcoin early, that you are now
wealthy?
The article as a whole ends up implying that it just doesn’t
matter how useful the tool might be to poor, blacks, woman, the
underprivileged, etc, as a (likely) noninflationary way to store or
transmit value, because she doesn’t like libertarians.
In fact, it is the very “unbanked” who she goes on to discuss
and who she seems to think only government can help that will
likely, as awareness and stability in digital currencies spread,
benefit from it the most. But it seems to Strasser all that matters
is that people she can associate with the tool have ideas she
doesn’t like, and might disapprove of some government programs she
is sure other people need.
They may or may not need them; but to take the time to poke at
the valuable-to-all tool of digital currency seems a strangely
retrograde use of one’s time and attention. I get that progressives
think the world’s less well-off need government, and lots of
it.
That needn’t imply being hostile to technical advances that
allow anyone with a wired computer to do interesting things more
easily and cheaply. The
manifold benefits to the third world of the spread
of mobile phone technologies, for example, should teach us
that. But I’m afraid no amount of reality is enough to teach people
not to get really annoyed with anything they associate with
libertarians.
For what some of those advantages might be, for prince or for
pauper (yes, as long as said pauper has access to the Internet,
which many do), as I’ve written before:
What seems easy to say is that for anyone who has ever tried to
transfer money, nationally or internationally, that the values in
ease, speed, and cost of digital currency means that it will have
the same leveling effect on industries like banking and finance
that depend largely on their middleman function that already we’ve
seen happen in book sales, video rentals, and travel agents.People who doubt this are letting their ability to write Bitcoin
and other digital currencies off as “libertarian” blind them to
economic trends of the past 20 years in the digital age. If you can
understand the value of, say, PayPal, then you already understand
the value of Bitcoin; except Bitcoin doesn’t have a middleman
skimming.
I could close by making the argument that attacking
Bitcoin is clearly and obviously just for insanely privileged and
wealthy westerners on the side of the most rich and powerful force
in the world, the U.S. government and U.S. banking and finance
interests, but I’m not that type.
Left-leaning folk having problems with libertarian implications
of digital age
is not uncommon.
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