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Bitcoin’s Increasing Value Is Its Real Failure
The technology is fine, but its speculative bias reveals something sad about our relationship with money
As those of us who were around will remember, Bitcoin emerged out of the same spirit as Occupy Wall Street. Those of us holding seminars about economic power in Zuccotti Park were thrilled by the possibility of a decentralized currency that could be authenticated in a peer-to-peer fashion instead of by some big bank. Bitcoin would break the monopoly of the Federal Reserve. And the love affair went both ways. Early Bitcoin enthusiasts made crypto donations to Occupy while many Occupiers lauded Bitcoin as an alternative to bank-issued central currency.
Bitcoin was thought to have two main advantages over traditional money. The one that excited people most, at first, was the ability to conduct transactions anonymously and without the approval of the government or any of the established financial institutions — and not just for drugs, but for activism. For instance, when Julian Assange was trying to raise money for his legal defense in 2017, he was shut out by regular banks and credit card companies. But he was capable of receiving crypto and gratefully announced on Twitter that “Bitcoin is the real Occupy Wall Street.”
