Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It

Having the option to accept or use cryptocurrencies comes in handy when you may have legitimacy for your cause (people want to support it) but are considered illegal at the behest of capitalist institutions. In the case of Sci-Hub, it has legitimacy in challenging the current structure of how science publishing is done today as well as the entire e

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While these shows of force can be intimidating, it deflects from the reality that sanctions don’t really work.4 Sanctions are imposed by governments to punish dictatorships or “bad guys” in other countries. The idea in the liberal or conservative mindset on geopolitics is that by intentionally harming the general population in those countries, by d

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While central banks are overseen by directors chosen by those elected to government, and central banks can increase the money supply through open market operations (where central banks provide liquidity directly to private banks in their currency like during the 2008 recession and more recently with COVID-19), the vast majority of money is created

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Essentially, we have two money systems that we as normal citizens take part in. The state physical (cash) and the bank digital (numbers on a digital ledger) money systems. The writer Brett Scott, in his book Cloudmoney, has presented extensive evidence of how private banks have been influencing consumers and businesses to be more “cashless”, hurtin

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There are essentially two definitions of the commons. It can be used to signify a resource that is freely available like water, air or land, at least before private property enforcement was used to prevent local populations from accessing land or water. Alternatively, as the work of Elinor Ostrom showed, it can also be seen as an institution. Ostro

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Another important consideration is that since all money that is loaned out by central banks to private banks is done so at interest, as are the loans those private banks then make to their clients, there is always more debt owed by the economy than actual money in existence, making money a scarce resource. So how can these debts be paid off? This c

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This seminal event exposes how smart contracts are deterministic, but only up to a point, and that point has a lot to do with what humans collectively decide is legitimate or not. When bugs are found in smart contracts, just like any other code, they are taken advantage of in ways that are not only unintended, but can be detrimental. There is not o

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Friedrich Hayek, the libertarian Austrian School economist who inspired many of the men who had a hand in the creation of Bitcoin,1 argued that money and prices were efficient signalling systems to facilitate the free market by aggregating vast amounts of information in a way that planned economies could never do. While prices certainly do coordina

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If you’re on the left, when you hear the word “finance”, you’ll likely think of a hyper-individualised pursuit of personal wealth, or the power that large financial institutions have had over society, especially in the fallout of the 2008 recession. If you’re on the right, you may think of the more “entrepreneurial” aspects we associate with financ

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