Bitcoin is being co-opted by the Right
This past week, my Twitter feed was filled with supporters of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protestors in Canada. This is in part because the Canadian government has cracked down on financial institutions — including cryptocurrency exchanges — for facilitating payments to the truckers, and asked those institutions to freeze the assets of people sending and receiving payments.
This led many Twitter users to dunk on Canadian officials for seemingly not understanding how self-custody of bitcoin works (i.e., for users who do not store their bitcoin on an exchange like Coinbase). Self-custody wallet provider Nunchuk wrote the following to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice:
Freedom-loving* Senator Ted Cruz got in on the fun, as well, re-tweeting the Nunchuk post with the #bitcoin hashtag:
And now Tucker Carlson of Fox News is seemingly becoming a spokesperson for #bitcoin:
These are just a couple examples of how bitcoin is becoming more aligned with right-wing figures and movements.
This should be cause for alarm in the Bitcoin community.
On the face of it, bitcoin adoption is great, no matter where it’s coming from. After all, Bitcoin is just a protocol, and protocols don’t care what political parties its users prefer. And I certainly don’t have any issue with Tucker or Ted stacking sats (nor would it matter if I did).
But all Bitcoiners should be very concerned about bitcoin becoming another partisan political issue, like vaccines have become. Vaccines themselves are really just a protocol as well: you follow a set of steps starting with the genetic code of the virus as the input and ending with a boost to your immune system’s ability to defend itself as the output (OK, I’m not a scientist, but you get the idea).
If Bitcoin continues to be affiliated with anti-vaxxers and Trump affiliates in the view of the public, then it will be that much easier for a huge part of the population to dismiss it as a tool used by shady people that they vehemently disagree with. It will become so imbued with partisan rhetoric and Libertarian talking points that the story of why it is the best monetary good ever created will get lost.
At this point, a lot of folks on Bitcoin Twitter will say: “People dismissed it 10 years ago as a money laundering vehicle, and they’ve been proven wrong. So too will those who dismiss it as a tool of the political right. They will eventually come around.”
The problem with this argument is that it blames people for being skeptical. I believe that skepticism is healthy, and is not at all the same as being a Luddite who simply refuses to embrace technological progress. It says to these individuals: “You’re not worth having a dialogue with about your concerns, because I already ‘get it,’ and you don’t. That’s your problem.”
I believe that Bitcoin is too significant of a societal breakthrough to be aligned with any political movement or persona, or to avoid doing the hard work of meeting people where they are at and speaking respectfully to their valid concerns. Yes, we need spokespeople** to educate others, but to reach the broadest audience and grow the network, we should focus on the merits of the Bitcoin protocol itself, why it is sound money, and what benefits that can offer to society as a whole.
*Except when it comes to recognizing the legitimate results of a presidential election
**I recommend Andreas Antonopoulos if you really want to understand Bitcoin without all the political baggage and rhetoric
