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

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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Unlike the mathematics driven logic of code, law intentionally contains ambiguity in order to allow for applicability to various situations, whereas it is incredibly difficult for code to foresee all of the possible situations in which a law can be applied. This ambiguity allows for participants in a contract to outsource low probability scenarios

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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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