, Columnist
The Messy Political Story of Bitcoin
The collapse in price shows decentralization was an elite pursuit.
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The cryptocurrency price plunge isn’t only an economic story—it’s political, too. It marks the general public’s resistance to the ideological techno-utopia promised by Bitcoin evangelists. The decentralization they promise remains a niche, even elite, pursuit.
Bitcoin wasn’t just the invention of mysterious author Satoshi Nakamoto. It relied on decades of advances in cryptography, especially those made by the “cypherpunks” of the 1980s and ’90s, a movement that saw technology and privacy as the key to creating safe spaces free from government control. Bitcoin vividly showed how computer code could enforce rules instead.