Crypto Enthusiasts Are Bullish on the War in Ukraine

Whether they’re discussing refugees attempting to take their money across a dangerous border or supporting unruly truckers occupying a key bridge between the US and Canada, coiners have gradually come to see their holdings⁠—especially Bitcoin, the ur-crypto⁠—Last year much of the talk around crypto’s value was as a hedge against rising inflation. Now, it’s something much more: a last backstop against governments depriving citizens of the one right that matters: the right In the most fundamentalist corners of crypto, the individual is sovereign, and the state has no authority to limit what. a person can do with their assets, digital or otherwise.

While crypto culture is far from monolithic, recent political upheavals have made some coiners more certain that traditional forms of governance can’t be relied upon, that they can only count on themselves. “Not your keys not your coins,” goes one common crypto meme, meaning that coiners must “self-custody” their own coins, without handing over their private keys (passwords, essentially) to exchanges or other third parties.⁠—in the sense of eliminating even the need for trust⁠—with the hard certainty of code and so-called “smart contracts” replacing the messiness, and autonomy, of human intermediaries and traditional, regulated financial institutions.

In the eyes of crypto observers like David Golumbia, the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism,, “All forms of libertarianism use the rhetoric of freedom and democracy to cloak the raw pursuit of personal power,” wrote Golumbia in an email. “Critics of political libertarianism. have long pointed out that quite a few of its leading figures (Hayek, Mises, Milton Friedman) ended up supporting right-wing dictators, most notably Pinochet. Others note that the elevation of what libertarians call’economic freedom’ at the expense of all other values ​​and rights very quickly leads to dictatorial politics. ”

Under this ideological framework, a war that tears apart the democratic fabric of society is a validation of coiners’ beliefs. It reinforces the commonly voiced idea that contemporary political systems cannot possibly guarantee the financial liberty that’s supposedly the precondition for all other rights. What’s most it’s that they have given up on politics entirely and will switch sides in a war based on how it affects their wallets. . When nation-states are invaded and economies teeter toward collapse, they find a moment of opportunity, a time to invoke another core crypto mantra: This is bullish.