Bitcoin transcends traditional political alignments: decentralized, uncensorable, and beyond state control, it challenges the very foundations of modern power.
Born in 2009 as a decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin quickly exceeded the boundaries of technological innovation to become a widespread social and economic phenomenon. Its nature has attracted the attention not only of investors but also of political thinkers and activists. Too often forgotten is that the movement that led to the creation of bitcoin originates from the Cypherpunks who merged punk culture (late 70s) with computer culture. This article analyzes Bitcoin’s (non) political identity and how it embraces ideas from both the right and the left.
The political ideology
Bitcoin embodies ideals of freedom, decentralization, and economic self-determination, but it’s interesting to see how the global political context influences its perception and impact. Some see Bitcoin as a currency that challenges traditional financial institutions and offers freedom to individuals, others as a mere technological tool, and still others as pure speculation for its own sake.
The truth is that Bitcoin is many things to many different people, but if one wants to be consistent with the chronology of events, with the cypherpunks, and with the facts that led to its creation, some considerations must be made. One could say that Bitcoin challenges every form of post-modern ideology by returning to an enlightenment that, to invoke Kant, wants man to emerge “from his self-imposed immaturity.” In his book “What is Enlightenment,” the philosopher describes the pre-enlightenment human condition of the 1700s as “immature” because it was still too dependent on the parental care of institutions (King, church, state).
However, if in the 1700s reliance on institutional authorities was also the result of an information asymmetry derived from the inadequate information infrastructure accessible to the people, in the modern era, “immaturity” (a metaphorical minor phase of man) is certainly not caused by a lack of information means – quite the opposite. Precisely during the fertile post-war conflict years (a thesis I will explore in a subsequent article), with exponentially growing communication technologies starting with the internet, there has been an information flooding that has mostly been exploited by those service providers which we felt we could not do without and whose terms and conditions we accepted without ever reading a line of the contracts. Just as the enlighteners began to question traditional authorities, Bitcoin culture enables us to question any news we are flooded with daily. The symbol of this decay is certainly “accept” in any app or website that no one has ever read, but which has gradually degraded the quality of data. The price of all those services to which we have given consent with lightness has been paid by our personal data on which the media could then build the reality we liked (or didn’t like), catering to our desires and amplifying our fears. Naturally, the only way is a search for truth that is completely agnostic and free from any now-ancient ideology. Nowadays, we rely on services and supports that shape the reality in which we live without actually having the will to fully understand each issue. The terrible qualitative crisis of world journalism has been communicating for years within the right-left dichotomy, bringing information that the internet should have made free and independent to now be consumed by an environment full of gatekeepers from one team or the other, who claim to have the truth on their side.
In the comfort of technological development, the centrality of the individual in politics has been progressively forgotten, leaving more and more space for grand ideologies that have taken the debate further and further away from reality, favoring comfort and personal enjoyment at the expense of one’s responsibility. One of the mottos in the Bitcoin community is indeed “don’t trust, verify.” Bitcoin deeply criticizes all this, and even its fathers had predicted this situation in the very early years of the internet, which is why they sought an answer to the computer threat, within computer science itself. To take a step back and have a more general picture of the reasons that led to the birth of Bitcoin, we can say that: the cypherpunks identified in computer science a threat that could have been exploited by different political currents to condition the masses and found a computer, energy and at the same time monetary response to a political-social problem.
We therefore have a cultural movement that responds both to the right’s need to see private property protected from state interventions, and to the left’s need to see the individual emancipated regardless of their social status, religion, or ethnicity. A revolutionary and non-conservative movement, prone to free and non-interventionist economic policies, international and not national.
If Bitcoin is neither right nor left, which side is it on? Yours! Given its uncontrollable nature, Bitcoin is on the side of its user who can make whatever use of it they prefer. It gives them unprecedented protections:
- Absolute responsibility for one’s money;
- Uncensorability of every single economic transaction thanks to the computer anonymity given by a correct use of protocols;
- Defense against reckless fiat economic policies that erode citizens’ purchasing power year after year;
- Planetary access and no national barriers.
The Bitcoin community is naturally anything but cohesive, and this is one of the most significant indicators of the fact that it includes personalities with profoundly different ideas, who constantly dialogue and agree on one thing or another. Attention, do not expect an elegant French salon where gentle debate takes place with classical music in the background. Freedom is also the possibility to fully express what one thinks in the preferred way, and it is therefore not unlikely to read swear words, blasphemies, personal and racial insults from users coming from one or another political or thought current. Despite this, the debate exists, is alive, and arguments are often not lacking. Again, it is important to be responsible for one’s search for truth, which sometimes must also go beyond the impropriety and investigate the underlying thesis.
Bitcoin in our politics
At the heart of the critique of politics lies a fundamental conflict: power concentrated in the hands of technocrats and unelected leaders, who act primarily for their own interests. How has democracy, which should reflect the popular will, been supplanted by a system where decisions are made without the knowledge of the 27 States (in the European case) or the citizens themselves, through layers of representation that take decisions further and further away from the people, but closer to power groups?
This theme finds a direct parallel in the vision of Bitcoin as a force that challenges the state monopoly on currency and economic policies. Bitcoin, in fact, is not only not under the control of any government, but also offers an escape route from the centralized power system that characterizes most modern states. This system exposes an enormous vulnerability for the individual. A glaring example of the danger of entrusting one’s savings to banks is Greece in 2009, where our neighbors could not withdraw more than 60 euros per day at ATMs. Banks that own your savings can decide, by contract, to impose limits or prohibitions on withdrawals at any time, and the European Central Bank, in turn, constantly decides how much to impoverish the middle class with reckless monetary policies that devalue our currency. Examples of situations where central banks have literally defrauded citizens are all those countries that “suffer” from hyperinflation, regulated, however, by the very same central banks.
Even in war scenarios, the first thing a government usually does is freeze accounts and impose banking limits, leaving the individual at the mercy of events. Bitcoin offers a decentralized protocol that doesn’t need to go through centralized intermediaries, and consequently cannot be manipulated or controlled either by governments or by its own creators at any time.
In this context, Bitcoin represents a threat to the traditional political system, just as populist movements and internal criticisms of the EU or individual states denounce the growing detachment of institutions from citizens. Governments, while claiming to defend democracy against autocracy, actually favor policies that undermine citizens’ sovereignty. Similarly, Bitcoin questions the authority of states to impose monetary and fiscal laws, giving individuals complete control over their own economy.
This criticism of political centralism finds a perfect echo in the Bitcoin project, which not only rejects state intervention but promotes an idea of a freer, more transparent economy accessible to all. Bitcoin, in this sense, is not just a “cryptocurrency” as mainstream trash newspapers write, but also a political act of resistance against forms of government impositions. Many will wonder why this seemingly perfect solution is not considered by either right-wing politics, the extreme right, the drawing-room left, or the social center left. The answer is that Bitcoin is simply an innovation that takes years of study to understand, and most individuals are not ready for a real search for truth, settling only for newspaper headlines or news snippets from television news.
Expect the expectable
Being a public protocol accessible to anyone, it is normal that other nations are exploring the creation of special economic zones where Bitcoin can play a central role. These zones could operate with fiscal and regulatory rules different from the rest of the country, creating favorable environments for financial and technological innovation. Moreover, the idea of independent cities based on Bitcoin is gaining attention, with projects aiming to create autonomous communities with economies based entirely on Bitcoin. After hundreds of years without any technological innovation in the monetary field, here comes Bitcoin that shuffles the cards and gives the “last” the opportunity to free themselves from the “first.” Despite this beautiful dream, the immense obstacle of politics imposed from above remains. Any politician who has so far soiled their mouth with words in favor of Bitcoin has then concretized actions only in their own direction, completely forgetting or ignoring the principles we talked about at the beginning. It is therefore right to always doubt when a charismatic personality seems to veer in the direction we consider right.
Conflict with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)
With the advent of central bank digital currencies, such as the digital euro or the digital yuan, a clash between centralized and decentralized systems is looming. Bitcoin could emerge as the libertarian alternative to CBDCs, representing a choice for those who distrust state control over financial transactions. If Bitcoin is anti-censorship and “anonymous,” CBDCs are the exact opposite. A currency programmed by the government to be tracked, blocked, or even with the possibility of having a spending time limit. This is the direction of both the ECB and other nations that clearly have all the interests in opposing consideration of a free tool like Bitcoin. This inevitable conflict also makes it impossible to create a real “Bitcoin party” as it would have to deliberately go against the democratic and economic foundations on which today’s nation-states are based. The options are therefore two:
- Politics can decide to integrate Bitcoin into its sick system, contaminating and depriving it of its characteristics (this is only partly possible, as it could not act on all the different peculiarities of the protocol).
- Politics will forever reject this technology until it clashes with the popular will that, hopefully, has embraced its ideals: civil war and popular insurrection.
Bitcoin is already politics, even if it doesn’t want to be
Bitcoin has now crossed the boundary of finance to become a true global political issue. Its decentralized nature makes it incompatible with centralized governance models, yet governments, institutions, and citizens cannot help but take it into consideration. Even without a formal political direction, Bitcoin is already influencing the debate on individual rights, privacy, economic control, and state sovereignty. If Bitcoin continues to grow and evolve, it could not only be the future of currency but also the future of global politics, creating new paradigms of governance, economic justice, and personal freedom.
