About 44% of the online crypto-currency’s users self-identify as civil libertarian.
They love it because of following reasons:
1- It’s not controlled by a government or central bank — so no online Fed can “track” more of it and inflate our way out of trouble.
2- They love that it’s decentralized; it’s the currency of The People not the Man.
3- They love that Bitcoin isn’t taxed, so you can hide your income from the government if you want to.
4- They love the way its value reflects pure supply and demand, and not a value forced into the system by regulation or monopoly.
5- They love that it’s “mined,” a bit like gold, because that makes it a bit like the gold standard, which libertarians think real currencies ought to be tied to.
6- They love that it’s fairly lawless — it’s difficult to enforce rules (other than the rules of the market) when everyone in the market is anonymous.
So the Bitcoin experience gives us a glimpse of Libertarian paradise: What life would be like with as little government interference as possible, in a market free of burdensome laws and taxes.
Unfortunately, that experience looks like a total nightmare. It’s characterised by radical instability, chaos, the rise of a boss-class of criminals who assassinate people they don’t like, and a mass handover of wealth to a minority even smaller than the 1% that currently lauds it in the United States.
There is literally a Bitcoin market for assassinations.
There have always been people engaging in murder for hire, using old-fashioned cash. But the operator of this Bitcoin website seems to believe that Bitcoin creates enough anonymity to allow assassination to take place “at scale” (to borrow the parlance of the tech startup world). He wants to destroy “all governments, everywhere.”
The Libertarian Bitcoin dream is an interesting idea, but you wouldn’t want to live there.