Thread by @buchmanster

1/There are people who are genuinely trying to talk intelligently about cryptocurrencies, but can’t because they can only see a contrived side of history. This thread tries to correct that.

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1478017698676228099

2/ The obsession with sound money is not 100 years old. It's at least a few hundred, if not a few thousand. For as long as we've used money, we've been concerned about its properties, about what makes it fair. Money is at the heart of the power struggle that defines sovereignty

3/ But the creation of the Fed was in no way a democratic affair. The entire design was orchestrated by New York bankers to secure their power. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to know about Jekyll Island: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o…

4/ And the central bankers were themselves obsessed with the gold standard. It was their disastrous attempt to return to a gold standard without accounting for the (non gold backed) money printing of WWI that caused the Great Depression.

5/ The tale of how 4 central bankers and their own obsession with an ill-conceived gold standard precipitated the Great Depression is well told in Lords of Finance: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_…

6/ Even Bernanke admitted that the Fed caused the Great Depression:

federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/spee…

7/ There is a lot wrong with notions of the gold standard, and with what became of Austrian economics. I try to outline where the Austrians went wrong here:

https://twitter.com/buchmanster/status/1441459276506021890

8/ But "Austrians" aren't a uniform group. At the very least, there was a major divide between two students of Mises: Rothbard and Hayek. Rothbard represents the anarcho-capitalists and most of what's wrong with libertarians. Hayek has a much more nuanced institutional bent

9/ The Rothbardians are obsessed with gold. Hayek, much less so. Hayek's Denationalization of Money is arguably much closer to the intellectual origin of Bitcoin than Rothbard's work.

10/ To wit, Hal Finney (mayb Satoshi), supported the Free Banking school that grew out of the Hayekian tradition, as developed by @GeorgeSelgin and @lawrencehwhite1. Selgin, who referred to the Rothbardians as "that moronic cult", was an early contributor on Bitcoin mailing lists

11/ And Rothbardians disdain Hayek. But one thing all Austrians seem to agree upon is the corruption/ systemic fragility inherent in the financial system. 2008 demonstrated this to be undeniably true. What collapsed was abhorred by Austrians, not adored!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial…

12/ It's disingenuous to talk about intellectual history of Bitcoin w/o mentioning it's a direct response to catastrophic collapse of non-Austrian, global financial system & the deeply inequitable response.

"Chancellor on brink of 2nd bailout for banks"
investopedia.com/news/what-gene…

13/This isn't to say Bitcoin has perfected monetary theory. Almost surely it hasn't. Bitcoin is the start of a new conversation about how we architect a more fair and sustainable monetary and financial system in the 21st century: ebuchman.github.io/posts/orange-i…

14/ But to equate Bitcoin's intellectual history with plots to kill FDR, eugenics, and fascism is obscene. I'm not denying the histories of these phenomena, or their association with a toxic kind of libertarian, but to claim they are related to the origin of Bitcoin is nonsense.

15/For one, despite certain disapproval of the New Deal, Hayek opens his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, with an approving quote from FDR. And the entire rest of the book is about how to avoid fascism!

16/The intellectual history of Bitcoin is also deeply tied up in cryptography and open source - key tools for the empowerment of civil society. There may be some naive libertarianism in the mix, but Bitcoin, and the cryptocurrency phenomenon, is so much more than that.

17/It's about sustainable public goods. About sovereignty and interoperability. About the self-sufficiency of communities. It's about transparency and accessibility of the basic architecture of the monetary and financial system. This is what drew me in:

https://twitter.com/buchmanster/status/1330600004419989518

18/Sure, it's far from perfect, there's a long way to go. Arguably its biggest issue is the invasion of traditional money interests at expense of core principles. But all the more reason for high integrity skeptics to attempt to engage with it more deeply:

https://twitter.com/buchmanster/status/1478213522823782403

19/To go beyond the shallow perception of its moronic libertarianism and engage its deeper mutualism. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is as much Proudhon as it is Rothbard. As much Ostrom as it is Hayek. As Left as it is Right.

20/ But to simply look at all phenomena around Bitcoin and allege "scam" is far too naive and simplistic. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff. Yes, tether is probably a fraud. But tether is wholly independent of Bitcoin's core proposition. And yes, Bitcoin's

21/ Gini coefficient sucks, but Bitcoin is the first system at scale to issue and distribute money to those performing what the network considers valuable work - a model we can extend from "useless" mining to more useful care work and essential services

22/ This is even the kind of thing advocated by MMT, perhaps the most "left" leaning of monetary theories! The synergies between MMT and crypto are deeper than they may appear: ebuchman.github.io/posts/mmt/

23/ We should be vigilant about the inequalities emerging in crypto, but they are primarily entrenched by the same forces of financial oppression that pervade society: securities/tax/banking laws that institutionalize rich-get-richer and restrict wealth formation in communities

24/ And then there's the claim that by aiming to replace the dollar Bitcoin will somehow empower the oil industry. It's literally called the petrodollar. There is arguably no more destructive institution on the planet than that built around the petrodollar!

25/ Anyone blindly disparaging cryptocurrencies w/o understanding the full background of our corrupt financial system, distinctions in libertarian thought, the civil rights case for cryptography, open-source, and consensus, is unwittingly advancing an agenda they don’t comprehend