What does it mean to be a politician and support bitcoin? What are the political and ideological values of the crypto community? CoinFox made an effort to overview the whole range of bitcoin politics.
When asked, in 2014, to guess political views of Satoshi Nakamoto, BitcoinTalk users could not come up with a common opinion if he was left or right. However, some of his phrases seemed to indicate a tendency towards Libertarianism:
“We can… gain a new territory of freedom for several years”
“It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than with words though.”
In any case, a lot of early bitcoin adopters were hardcore libertarians. A decentralised currency that did not depend on any authority and eliminated (as it seemed at the time) any need for a third party was indeed very attractive to people who wanted more freedom from the government. But as long as the mysterious father of bitcoin was in charge, it seems he was trying to keep bitcoin away from politics. According to Julian Assange, Satoshi did not want WikiLeaks to accept bitcoin in 2010:
“Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
It was in June 2011, after Satoshi’s demise and during a spectacular surge in the price of the cryptocurrency (reaching $22), that WikiLeaks started accepting bitcoin. By that time, bitcoin community had a strong ideology. In 2012, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jon Matonis argued in his Forbes article that “bitcoin prevents monetary tyranny” being a “powerful instrument” that challenges centralised monetary authority and the state’s encroachment on privacy.
In their turn, politicians started giving more consideration to bitcoin. In May 2011, Richard Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party of Sweden, declared in his blog that he decided to put all his savings in bitcoin. And, during the 2012 election, three American politicians, two of them Republican and one Libertarian, made headlines when they started accepting bitcoin donations for their election campaigns. Later they were labelled as “three politicians that received bitcoin donations before it was cool.” One of them, Mark Warden, who ran for the New Hampshire House of Representatives, won the election. He raised around $9,500 in fiat currency and 160 bitcoins, worth of $1,600 at the time. He was astonished to receive cryptocurrency donations from faraway countries in Europe and South America. The very fact that a politician treated bitcoin like real money electrified crypto enthusiasts all over the world.
At that time, receiving donations in bitcoin was regarded as taking a political position. Warden, for instance, has been a vocal proponent of cryptocurrency. However, as bitcoin became more widely used, the situation began to change. As new people came into the industry, a rift started between the die-hard anarcho-libertarians and more moderate bitcoin users who did not seek to destroy governments.
In November 2013, Forbes published an article about bitcoiner Kuwabatake Sanjuro and his darknet website named Assassination Market, “a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official – a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations.” Six targets had been submitted by users, including President Barack Obama (40 BTC) and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve System (124 BTC). According to Sanjuro, if someone on the list got killed, the hitman could collect the bounty. Sanjuro, a self-described “crypto-anarchist”, explained to Forbes that he “needs dead politicians” in order to protect liberties and privacy.
The publication provoked an outrage in the mass media worldwide, on one occasion bitcoin being defined as “distributed right-wing extremism.” However, at that time people like Sanjuro were already a small if vocal minority among the mass of bitcoin adopters (and no one got killed after all). When Joe Manchin, a Democrat Senator from West Virginia, demanded to ban cryptocurrencies altogether, Jared Polis, a Colorado Representative, also a Democrat, answered him with a satirical letter where he called for a ban on US dollar because
“The very features of dollar bills, such as anonymous transactions, have created ubiquitous uses from drug purchases, to hitmen, to prostitutes, as dollar bills are attractive to criminals who are able to disguise their actions from law enforcement.”
In fact, in 2013-2014, it was already “cool” to receive bitcoin donations. Many politicians, running for local offices or representing small political parties added a bitcoin address to their site and gathered support from young and tech-savvy people. But the number of politicians willing to accept bitcoin grew far quicker than the number of those who could and would contribute. It took an effort to start a bitcoin address for donations and discuss the issue with authorities (in the US, the Federal Elections Commission finally decided to treat bitcoins as “in-kind contributions”) – and in some cases, the total sum of contributions could be as derisive as 0.13 BTC.
To impress bitcoiners, one needed something stronger than just an “accept cryptocurrency as a donation” banner. And this step was taken in July 2014 by Swedish politician Sundin Mathias who decided to accept campaign donations exclusively in bitcoin and won the election, becoming a member of the Swedish parliament. He promised, if elected, to protect digital currencies and disruptive innovation in general from “knee-jerk regulation” and heavy taxes and defend the right to privacy. Another Swede, Christian Ander, went as far as to create a Bitcoinparty in September 2014, but it was forgotten soon after making just a few headlines in bitcoin media.
By 2015, bitcoin has lost its aura of novelty but did not become a mainstream. Governments started introducing stricter bitcoin regulation, threatening anonymity of users. Banks began to speak about “blockchain not bitcoin”. Bitcoin price reached its local nadir, oscillating around $150. Probably because of this, bitcoin-accepting candidates became less numerous and those who endorsed bitcoin did not emerge victorious.
Gulnar Hasnain, a Green Party candidate for the House of Commons in the London constituency of Vauxhall decided to accept donations in bitcoins, litecoins and dogecoins. She remarked that the Green Party and the bitcoin movement have similar objectives: “more decentralised power, smaller government, a need for a shift in the concentration of power in the banking system, and a more inclusive society.” Ms Hasnain collected more than she expected – ₤1,500 in fiat money and ₤730 in cryptocurrencies – but came only third in the elections. Another bitcoin supporter, Finnish Pirate Party, which raised a record $15,000 in bitcoin, received only 0.85% of votes nationwide.
In authoritarian countries, officials started growing apprehensive about cryptocurrencies. An article published in March 2016 by Venezuelan state-owned media treated bitcoin as an illegal system, “affecting peace, political and economic stability of many countries in the world” and, because of the anonymity, popular among those “who do not want to leave their fingerprints.” It asked:
“Is it a coincidence if criminal groups and terrorists all over the world are the principal activists and defenders of bitcoin?”
In Venezuela, according to the article, bitcoin is used not only for tax evasion and money laundering but also with a subversive goal. Similar opinions were expressed by Russian politicians. The head of Russia’s Investigative Committee and a former coursemate of Vladimir Putin declared that bitcoin is used to finance “the information war against Russia” and, if allowed to circulate, would devaluate and displace the ruble as the principal currency. A member of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia claimed that “all cryptocurrencies are created by American secret services exactly to finance terrorism and coups d’état”.
But it was the situation in the US that especially attired the attention of politically minded bitcoiners since the beginning of 2015. In April 2015, President Obama declared “a national emergency”, allowing authorities to block any property or assets without further notice if they belonged to someone engaged in “malicious cyber-enabled activities” that could threat “the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States”. He also prohibited sending anything to or receiving anything from one of such persons. The decision provoked an outcry among libertarian bitcoiners who concluded that the real goal of the manoeuvre was to prevent further donations to Edward Snowden and other people that make the government uncomfortable. Over the next few days, more than 300 contributors donated to the Official Snowden Defense Fund, totalling 25 BTC ($6,500). This consequence of US President’s executive order was nicknamed the ‘Obama Effect’.
At the same time, different US presidential candidates started their election campaigns. Some of them endorsed bitcoin. One of them, Rand Paul, representing the libertarian wing of the Republican Party vowed to bring the United States “back to the principles of liberty and limited government” and claimed that his campaign was going to be “the most technologically savvy.” He conducted a meeting with bitcoin enthusiasts in New York, telling he was open to innovation. His colleague Rick Perry, ex-governor of Texas, said that the Wall Street “should not be let off the hook for its bad behavior” and proposed to “create regulatory breathing room for banking with digital currencies, like bitcoin.”
A group of Democrats supporting Joe Biden’s nomination also accepted donations in bitcoin. However, all these politicians dropped out before the primaries or in their very beginning. Not a single one of frontrunners, Republican or Democratic, has expressed any support for the cryptocurrency. Currently, the only US presidential candidate who accepts bitcoin donations is Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and Libertarian nominee. In April 2015, bitcoin industry leaders expressed hope that Hillary Clinton would accept bitcoin donations. However, she ignored these pleas and when she touched the topic (in June 2016) it was only concerning the blockchain, never mentioning the cryptocurrency. As for Donald Trump, he never said a word about cryptocurrency in his speeches. Some bitcoiners, however, hope that if Trump becomes president and decides to curtail remittances to Mexico, it would make the cryptocurrency really popular.
Alexey Tereshchenko
