More than a decade ago, I began writing about the history of cryptocurrency — the project of using cryptography to make new kinds of digital money — because I wanted to write about the people who were building it. They were an eccentric crew of libertarians and anarchists, whose goals ranged from a passionate defense of personal privacy to the destruction of all governments by a global internet black market. Some people devoted to bringing back the gold standard. Others hoped to build posthuman utopias with digital cash; over the decades, some of these utopians have died and had their bodies or heads frozen, to be revived in the future they planned. What all these people had in common was their opposition to states and governments. They sought to embed their beliefs into their technology, building something that would operate outside existing systems of political power. In my guest essay this week, I wanted to explain what happened between then and now: In a decade, crypto moved from the extreme fringe to the center of American power. How did this technology become an oligarchic project, connected to a remarkable array of corruption scandals, in an authoritarian administration? The story I tell takes us from crypto’s philosophical roots in libertarianism, its adoption by a couple of major Silicon Valley investors with different visions, through the Covid years, the Biden era and Donald Trump’s second election, to its triumphant position under “the crypto president.” Tracing crypto’s ascent to the White House from obscure tech extremists explains something bigger than a novel tool for corruption: how a movement, and a technology, that promised liberation has instead delivered a consolidation of power and wealth.
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