Are you a dangerous crypto-anarchist or a selfish corporate-bigot? Find out here!

An impromptu essay, with a dash of psychoanalysis, on politics, individual responsibility and how the blockchain challenges identity.
by Joshua P. Aguayo

As a writer, I'm always looking for words. Some are simple, some are fancy, some I get to use a lot, some I can only say to myself. Imagine then, how a budding market, with its burgeoning community and highly technological backdrop, sets up the scenario for a hub of vocabulary and new concepts. This is a boilerplate of new concepts to define and talk about, and so there are two in particular that are half out-there half made-up, which I'd like to explore: crypto-anarchism, and corporate-bigotry.

A great example to define these ideas can be found in Reddit, specifically in the communities: (clickables) r/BTC and r/Bitcoin. Without going into the virtues and drawbacks of each scaling proposal for Bitcoin, these two threads each claim that they represent a specific ideology, and accuse the other of being a corrupt and twisted interpretation of Bitcoin's original purpose.

To grossly oversimplify two very complex ideological postures, one could say:

r/BTC claims that they are following Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin: that of a global, unified, and functional for every-day use alternative currency, while r/Bitcoin claims that Bitcoin doesn't need to behave in the exact same way as fiat currencies, and that Satoshi’s ideal, while great in paper, is too unrealistic and antiquated in practice.

I'd like to argue, however, that the real discussion going on about these topics has little to do with Bitcoin and lot to do with identity at the bleeding edge of modern technology. In this particular reading, /BTC represents what I'd like to call Crypto-anarchism: The idea of individual participation, responsibility, and arguably freedom, allowed and maintained through the participation in encryption-based technologies.
/Bitcoin then represents, perhaps in the eyes of /BTC, the exact evil Bitcoin is supposed to fight: Corporate-bigotry, those engines of capitalism that threaten the individual with massification and homogenization. The Big Brother that doesn't like encryption, the great eye in the Panoptic that doesn't like anonymity or dark places.

And so the battle rages on, these two sides churning and grinding against each other form a turbulent linguistic pool, which allows us to find, regardless of the validity of each side's argument, a lesson to learn about ourselves as individuals and as members of a capitalist society. Unfortunately, this lesson comes from the mistakes made by both sides:

Crypto-anarchy gazes far into the future with its high ideals of freedom and individuality, so far away it projects, and so high and distant are its notions, that sometimes it fails to see the ground on which it stands.

While vision is great, dreams are not user-friendly.

Unbreachable security is not accessible. Irreproducible and unfalsifiable cryptographic hashes are not easy to memorize or recognize. These words are not even easy to pronounce, and the people who don't care and don't need to be able to explain what a hashing algorithm is, are just as important as those who can, and so perhaps concessions could and are being made in favor of accessibility.

In a way it reminds me of an old solution to the problem of evil: "Why does evil exist?" Asked the pony. "Because the greatest good is freedom, and that includes freedom to be evil."

Perhaps crypto-anarchists need to put more emphasis on the anarchism and less in the cryptography?

Corporate-bigotry is on the other side of the island, with its cathedrals of industry, the machines that consume it all, the big corporations: J.P. Morgan, Western Union, AntPool, Coinbase... We could say a lot about all of them, but only one thing matters in the scope of this article: they all want to make money. A simple enough idea to follow. More money means more people, so these corporations are directly or indirectly interested in bringing more and more people into the industry, that can only be good. Ideology is useless if there is no one to follow it, if the industry sinks, ideology drowns with it, and so it's also important to admit that all of this technology won't float without a few whales pushing it, and those whales need to be comfortable, they deserve it. Whether you think it's luck or hard work, they have money and money talks, that's how the world works in 2017. A sad realization, but not a terrible one.

One can fall slowly in the despair of the present, or bask in the light of hope for the future, while gaining the tools to carve a road towards that light.

While two sides clash and push and pull and tug, their voices echo outside their virtual halls. To me, and hopefully now to you, reader, those voices ask questions among the noise, they ask on which side we stand. As someone who invests in cryptocurrency, but who is also a member of the community and genuinely believes in the values and ideas that cryptocurrencies propose, what do I really believe in? Is it okay to hold Ripple if I dislike banking? What about Ethereum Core, a currency whose ideological basis I don't agree with but that is, at least at the moment, a good investment?

I think the answer is, as usual, another set of twin questions: "Who am I in this new platform? Am I even willing to choose?" I think that how we, as a society, answer these questions will dictate where the market heads as a whole. Our answers as individuals will build the community that stands behind that market. And so perhaps it is important that we start thinking about these two half out-there half made-up words with a little bit more care.

So I invite you to ask yourself, reader, are you a Crypto-anarchist, or a Corporate bigot?

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Thank you very much. If you've read this far, I hope you found this little essay interesting. Don't forget to follow me if you'd like to read more! Upvote and ReSteems are very much appreciated.