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

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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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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Chaum’s research is said to be a direct inspiration for “cypherpunks”. The term was coined by Jude Milhon (or St Jude, as she was sometimes referred to),6 a civil rights activist and cyber-feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, to mean computer users who were dedicated to online privacy through encryption. In 1992, a small group of cryptographers and ear

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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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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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The truth is that the story of the “tragedy of the commons”, commonly used to justify the need for capitalist markets and push for neoliberal economic policy, was one made up by the conservative American ecologist Garrett James Hardin.8 Hardin later retracted his original thesis in response to evidence of historical and existing commons, stating th

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In the past decade and a half the institutions that people were told had their best intentions at heart have failed them, and the cypherpunk ethos of distrust of institutions and prioritisation of personal liberty has become a compelling story. The appeal of cryptocurrencies is the promise of the creation of new institutions that are resilient and

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It seems that their audience is not those who are closest to being able to answer their critiques (i.e., people working in the industry), but instead others who are jockeying for position within what might be termed the “Critique Economy”, a largely discursive and academic mini-industry that seems to have consumed too much of the left’s energy of l

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If using money and prices is an instrument for signalling preferences in an economy, it is an extremely blunt one that loses all of the finer details and qualities of what we as humans actually care about should we be given the opportunity to stop and think about it. What our dependence on money shows is that we have a monoculture of value expressi

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