Anti-Fiat Strategies for the Denationalization of Money
Discussion
Stefan Eich:
“On the level of rhetoric, we can distinguish between two distinct strategies. The first, closely associated with Bitcoin and its early adopters, offers a vision of money not just beyond the state but liberated from all politics. This is the original Bitcoin vision of money beyond trust and hence beyond any form of power or politics. It draws heavily on what Fred Turner has called the anti-political side of the counterculture that morphed into cyberculture over the course of the 1980s. Much of the early cypherpunk vision of electronic money drew on that anti-political strand of the counterculture.
But, and one cannot stress this enough, this is obviously a complete delusion and a very dangerous one. Power, trust, and politics will always form part of money and the same is true for cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, as anyone will attest who has spent any time studying them.
From the oligopolistic power of miners, to the associated energy consumption, to underlying questions about the design of the consensus protocol, to disputes over so-called forks in the blockchain, politics and power don’t disappear and their imprints can be found all over crypto.
A second set of strategies essentially grants as much and is no longer wedded to the claim of crypto is beyond politics, but it adds a different perverse twist. Decentralization is on this account no longer presented as allowing us to transcend politics, but instead as allowing for a new democratization of money. Where the first rhetorical strategy is a (self-)delusion, this is a sleight of hand based on a bizarre understanding of democracy. Democracy on this reading is a libertarian fiction opposed to the state and any form of mass politics. Alongside crypto, much of FinTech and decentralized finance today has adopted the slogan of “democratizing money” or “democratizing finance.” Not only is that an empty meaning of democracy, but it’s one that conflicts directly with what political theorists actually consider essential to democracy: namely, forms of collective decision-making based on the egalitarian principle of “one person, one vote.”
Instead of this basic democratic principle, the crypto conception of democracy is essentially the old neoliberal aspiration of “one dollar, one vote.” Contrary to egalitarian conceptions of democracy as a form of rule based on collective agency, the FinTech fantasy of democracy as decentralization is simply the freedom of the strong trumping that of everyone else – only now wrapped up in the gibberish of blockchain-speak.”
(https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/stefan-eich-on-hayek-and-money/)