The complicated politics of crypto and web3

“IT’S VERYAIAI attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly,” wrote Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, in an email in 2008 to Hal Finney, a developer, describing the appeal of the “e-cash” he planned to launch. The attraction stemmed from bitcoin’s potential role as a currency free from verification by centralised third parties and from oversight by governments. Bitcoin would instead be verified cryptographically and governed by its users.Bitcoin doubtless appeals to those on the right. At a conference in Miami on April 7th Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, a firm he once imagined as a young libertarian could supplant the world’s monetary system, waxed poetic about bitcoin’s potential. He views the technology as inherently political, saying in 2020 that “if [artificial intelligence] is communist, crypto is libertarian.” represents the advance of centralised machines making top-down decisions; crypto requires many individuals and computers making decisions from the bottom up.