The founder and former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, made a statement of intent in 2021: "My hope is that Bitcoin helps create a world of peace." Although he clarified that his forecasts were for the long term, this billionaire based his argument on the paradoxical desire that cryptocurrencies end up overthrowing a system governed by "monopolies in which the individual does not have power" and on "the costs and distractions that the current monetary system entails. “You fix this foundational problem and everything improves unbelievably,” settled, who has been in that limited technological elite for years.
The vertiginous crash of the Luna cryptocurrency at the beginning of May and the consequent fall of most of its peers in the market has once again inflated a public debate about an element that has gone from being a niche for nerds and hackers in its origins to a digital universe that moves 1.7 million dollars. About the economic size of Google. Cryptocurrencies give names to stadiums, cover up giant façade works in big capitals and have even become legal tender in some countries.
The drastic variations in its short-term value have made this field an ideal fodder for speculators and opportunists, but also for unsuspecting beginners who see a quick business opportunity, inspired by their trusted youtubers. However, if all that difficult to quantify skein is cleared up, there remains in this complex cosmos a large group of people, like Dorsey but not only millionaires, who believe in cryptocurrencies beyond their profitability. That faith in crypto, which is not only limited to a digital currency, entails a purely political content, which attacks the core of the market as we know it.
A system without intermediaries
The creator (or creators) of Bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, built this monetary system shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and based its technology on a blockchain system that, beyond the complex vicissitudes technological is a digital emulator of what is known in banking as an accounting book, a count of money inflows and outflows. The difference is that in blockchains the intermediary is the computer code and not a third party, a bank or a person, much more “corruptible”. Nakamoto wanted to close the circle of his protest against the system with a kind of joke: he introduced in the code of the first block of the chain a headline from The Times that spoke of a British government bailout of banks.
The absence of intermediaries is the key to everything that orbits around cryptocurrencies. The creator of Bitcoin in his foundational 'white paper' clearly charges against this system based on "trust" in third parties that are responsible for managing transactions. That is why it proposes a decentralized system, based on computer code and perfectly traceable. Anyone can access the record of any transaction.
Apparently, this is the essence of the monetarist dream, or Friedrich Hayek's (1975) idea of “denationalizing money”, which blamed unemployment or inflation on the legal impossibility for people to create their own currencies. But this conception of a decentralized system, without the power of influence of the banks in favor of the elites or the large multinationals, also served as inspiration for other types of ideas, such as anarchist ones, or, in between, anarcho-capitalist ones. Even the French philosopher Mark Alizart wrote in his book Cryptocommunism (Traficantes de Sueños, 2020) that Bitcoin is, in reality, "Marx's dream come true".
I think the most important thing is that Bitcoin doesn't care about political ideas," counters Olivia Goldschmidt, an Argentine communicator who has become a kind of cryptocurrency influencer in her country. She began writing in 2017 on this matter, when the ecosystem did not reach the current levels of development or its volume of business, and despite the fact that she denies her political heart, she does agree that there is an idea of creating something new: “In the The origin of Bitcoin was always tempting something that does not go through politicians, control systems, intermediaries or large decision makers, and that there is simply code.
The crypto world advocates decentralization. In the end, it is governed through a community, not by a country or by an institution, but by a community”, he adds. Goldschmidt also emphasizes this aspect: "What connects me the most about crypto is that it is about communities, and these communities do not have affinity with their leaders but with their peers, that is fundamental.
Men, white and with money
A survey of the Gemini cryptocurrency carried out last year with consultations of 3,000 people who invested in crypto or were interested in the subject showed that the average profile of the investor is a man, white between 30 and 40 years old and with an income above $100,000 a year. Specifically, 71% of cryptocurrency owners; there were only 26% women; and four out of ten had entered this world between one and two years ago.
Most of the surveys carried out in this regard are made in the United States, but nothing seems to indicate that the numbers could vary a lot in Spain. Here there are also parishioners of the crypto cosmos who, although perhaps not as much as Dorsey, have a lot of money, such as Francisco Gordillo, manager of a hedge fund who came to cryptocurrencies when he used them as a means of payment to buy the drugs that people took. Silicon Valley developers to multiply their productivity, as he tells in an interview for El País. Gordillo, who will produce a film about these currencies with Ridley Scott, also defends this decentralized aspect of crypto: “The technologies emanate from tremendously solid technology and are committed to decentralization in decision-making and the defense of individual sovereignty (. ..). They help us build a better movement.”
For Goldschmidt, although it is true that it is a world with a much greater presence of men, it is not so true that it is an ecosystem where only rich people fit. “When I went to the events the first years, we were four women, now luckily there are more. But I think that this prejudice that in crypto everyone is a millionaire is not true,” he says. He then adds that the profile that entered before was not so young: "They were people who were old enough to foresee that there was something similar to the beginning of the Internet." "Now there are many young people and many more men than women, but in the younger generations, it is already more mixed," he explains.
This “young, white, tech-savvy, upper-middle-class” profile is essential to understanding their way of seeing the world: “They live in urban areas in the West and have little understanding of how the world really works, what leads them to believe that blockchains alone can solve this trust problem.” "The sociological profile of these elite makes them particularly vulnerable to believe in these techno-utopian fantasies," censorship.
Cryptostates
It seems no coincidence that the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender is led by a millennial who shows himself on his Twitter profile with laser beams in his eyes, referring to a meme related to cryptocurrency. The conservative Nayib Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in 2019, at only 38 years old, and the beginning of his government will be recorded by his dismissals of ministers through social networks. His authoritarian path as president reached a milestone at the beginning of this year, when he decided to convert Bitcoin into legal tender and reserve currency in the country. On May 10, he presented the model of the first 'bitcoin city', a tax haven for cryptocurrencies on the slopes of a volcano. In those days, the collapse of the currency put the country at serious risk of suspension of payments.
The closest thing so far to a decentralized state based on blockchain technology and legal tender cryptocurrencies does not exist. It actually exists, but only in the metaverse. Decentraland is a virtual reality platform launched in 2017 by Argentine developers that exploded during the pandemic to become one of the most valued metaverses. It is a digital world where users can buy parcels of digital land in exchange for a handful of MANA, their own cryptocurrency. From then on, anything can happen in this world: games, music festivals or a fashion show, the Metaverse Fashion Week, held in March with the presence of brands such as Dolce & Gabanna, Tommy Hilfiger or Perry Ellis and covered by Fashion.
The idea was born from a group of developers who, as they explain in this podcast, are "sons of 2001", from the 'corralito' crisis in Argentina, that is, from the failure of a country's banking and economic system. The curious thing is that in Decentraland the inflation of the price of the plots is very high: in January one of them was valued at 3.5 million dollars. There is also another paradox: this metaverse is regulated by a DAO, one of those communities that decide in a decentralized way, with digital votes, part of what happens inside. “They are governance systems far removed from political parties and traditional institutions, in 100% online communities,” says Goldschmidt.
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