De Groene Amsterdammer: Blockchain in the polder

Society embraces 'blockchain', the disruptive technology behind money alternatives such as bitcoin. But do we also embrace the radical ideals and assumptions behind them?

The Politics of Bitcoin (David Golumbia)"When the first blockchain technologies came up, I immediately recognized the far-right economic ideas of my time on Wall Street, where conspiracy theories about gold and the role of the Federal Reserve were very dominant," writes David Golumbia in an e-mail. For years he was a software developer in the financial sector, now he works as a media professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. About the parallels between right-wing economic ideas on Wall Street and new blockhouse applications, he wrote the book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, which mainly reads as a warning to enthusiasts who are now behind the hype while adhering to other ideas.

'Blockchain is home to a number of intrinsic right-wing principles such as striving to remove' the middleman '. Proponents call this an unnecessary link and annoying bureaucracy, I call that legitimate control and regulation. ' According to Golumbia, the broad embracing of blockchain fits in with decades of striving to reduce the government. 'The danger is that the rapid spread of blockchain technology will also spread the underlying philosophy, and that is strongly opposed to democratic control over economic inequality.'

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Published in: De Groene Amsterdammer
By: Coen van de Ven