Questioned Trust: Bitcoin as protest
Originally posted February 21st, 2023
Table of Contents
Introduction
Bitcoin is news and has been since its start in 2008. Most of the literature about Bitcoin talks about how Bitcoin works, in both a technical and an economical sense. You can fill libraries with the literature about what Bitcoin is: a currency, a commodity, or just plain fraud. In this essay, I want to explore a different question, namely, why Bitcoin is. I believe an account of Bitcoin from this angle will shed light on the question of why it attracts people and holds their loyalty, even when it does not fulfill its immediate promises, and so many different views of what it is and should exist.
Our world is increasingly digitized and forces us to integrate tools into our lives. We use services like Google, Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram on a daily basis, not to mention the more mundane services like calendar, mapping and online banking tools. We need to be able to trust these tools blindly, but often, the institutions and companies that provide these tools turn out to have goals at odds with the public function these tools have in our lives. The Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook and intrusive KYC required by banks are examples of this. Google stores our searches, our calendars and mapping tools are potential sources of our whereabouts and could be used against us. Police and justice departments routinely campaign for more access to these tools, via backdoors, in order to preempt criminals, even though it would violate privacy laws. People lose trust in both institutions and in the tools that we are dependent on to function. It seems difficult to defend ourselves against tools that have no safeguards against misuse, but rely on redress after the fact. In Bitcoin, we find a form of software that critiques and defends against these other forms of software. In a sense, Bitcoin, and the broader crypto movement it spawned, is an expression of a wish for a different world. As such, it does not need to even function to make its point: its existence IS the point.
I will defend the view that Bitcoin (and much of the broader “crypto” movement) expresses a need to enable meaningful consent to digital systems that are necessary to integrate into our cognitive processes so we can participate in society.
I will then show how an account of crypto projects from a goal-oriented angle can explain their continued appeal, while also showing how such projects can easily be captured by ideas that are antithetical to their original goals.
The building blocks
Bitcoin does not exist in a vacuum. People have worked on the private money technology for well over three decades before Bitcoin emerged. They had reasons, which are conditions for Bitcoin to exist in the first place. In the following paragraphs, I will outline some of the issues that I consider to be necessary conditions for the existence of Bitcoin and for its continued relevance.
Digitalisation
Humans are limited beings. We do not have the capacity to do all things or think about all things. This observation is the basis for all political philosophy. as well as economy. While humans can clearly live solitarily, this way of living would be at a subsistence level, and we would not be able to create many things we do today, nor even think of the things we do today. Only by combining our efforts can we scale to the societies we have today. To be part of such societies, we need to form connections with other people to function. In our current society, we are required to process much more information than ever before. We are offered many tools to help us with this task, like digital calendars, communication applications, and financial tools that allow us to manage many regular tasks that, if we were to do them manually, would leave us no time to perform other tasks. It is no longer possible to fully function in our society if we do not use these tools.
The verb “use” means something different here than when we refer to more traditional tools, however. The way we relate to a tool like Google is very different from how we relate to a hammer. When we use a hammer, we will learn about the use of a hammer and get better at using it, but the hammer does not learn about us. When we use a tool like Google, however, we learn about using Google, but Google also learns about and uses us. The more appropriate term here is that we integrate the digital set of tools into our lives, in much the same way we integrate people into our lives. This integration is an intimate act: we leave ourselves vulnerable to harm. In human relationships, we speak of trust when we allow ourselves to be open to harm. Can we speak of the same with tools?
Trust
Trust is necessary to form meaningful connections to people. A society in which we work together needs these connections, so we know that the people we work with do their part. If we could not trust they did, we would need to spend time checking whether they held up their end of our agreements, which would lead to a loss of constructively used time. Trust allows us to work together with a minimum of time spent second-guessing each other. Usually, trust is considered an attitude that refers to the relationship between two or more human parties. It seems necessary that trust exists between two parties, that both have free will, or agency. Trust is usually seen as a relationship with three positions: Party A trusts party B to do (or not do) C. This analysis of trust does not allow for trust in objects and tools. However, the dominant theories of trust originated in a time that was not so integrated with computerized systems as ours. Is it possible we have developed new attitudes to the tools we used since these theories were published?
In his paper Trust as an Unquestioning Attitude, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen analyses the way in which we trust these kinds of tools to support us. According to Nguyen, we can not only enter trust relationships with human agents, but also with objects and tools. We can do this by ending our deliberative process about these objects, in order to fully integrate them into our cognitive functions. One of the examples Nguyen gives is the way we trust the ground. If we constantly questioned the carrying capacity of the ground, we would be expending a considerable amount of our attention on that task, which, being limited beings, we could not expend on other tasks. We choose to step back from that deliberative process, integrate the solidity of the ground into our lives, and expend the freed resources on other tasks. Should the ground suddenly give way beneath our feet, we would feel betrayed by the ground, in much the same way we would feel betrayed by a human agent if they suddenly ceased supporting us. Whether we like it or not, many of the services and tools we use today, are more like the ground we walk on than a hammer. I believe it is even possible to extend this metaphor into the realm of consent: we can choose to use a hammer or not, but just like we have only one ground to walk on, we do not have freedom of choice in the necessity of having to use digital tools to participate in society.
Consent
The notion of consent has become so blurred these days, that this requires explanation. We have become very used to continually answering the question of whether we consent to contracts these days. Each time we visit a website, we are asked whether we consent to cookies being placed on our computers. When we put new apps on our smartphones, they ask whether we consent to the application accessing data or storage space. When we install new software, it shows us Terms of Service for us to accept. If we tried to read all of these, we would not have time to work, sleep and spend time with our loved ones. These examples just deal with consent in the context of our use of digital tools. The topic of consent in the context of interpersonal relations is even fuzzier, in the days of social media and ease of sharing.
We call all these things consent, but do we consent in a meaningful way? One of the questions that philosophers ask when thinking about free will, has to do with the problem of alternative choices. For instance, when we are confronted with the classic choice “Your money or your life,” most people will intuitively agree this is not a real choice between equal alternatives. No real choice exists; we can only sensibly choose to give our money. Because there is only one option available, this also has moral consequences: Without choice, we judge actions and results differently.
In the same way, consent to digital tools needs to be meaningful. For meaningful consent, we need to have an alternative to offering consent. To withhold consent and not be harmed for doing so. But, in many of the cases I mentioned earlier, you cannot do so. There are many digital tools that have become all but indispensable to our lives, and if we chose to do without them, we would be severely disadvantaged compared to our peers who chose not to refuse. And this is problematic. Would we accept the same outside the digital realm?
Public goods
Tools and services that we need to fully participate in society are considered public: our roads, water supply, electricity, and so forth, are public goods. In economics, they are defined by being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. They almost never are pure public goods, but the ideal is again, that all be available to all citizens, as they are considered beneficial to all, and excluding citizens will put them at a disadvantage. We are justifiably outraged when utilities are cut off, even when people cannot pay for them. We expect safe water and power supplies. One of the roles we expect our governments to perform is to ensure a fair distribution of public or common goods and services. Even when corporations run utilities, we still expect them to do so with their public availability in mind. Many countries have, over the years, abandoned the direct control of utilities in favor of a market driven approach. Whether that was a good development is another debate, but we cannot deny that even now, these companies are held to provide a public service and customers have extensive protections against being denied services.
When we look at digital services, we see a different picture. Digital tools and services, whether governmental, semi-governmental or corporate, seem to lack many controls we expect from physical public goods. Banks, IDs, communication services, and others are not as freely available as they should be, nor are they harmless to the user. Banks routinely deny service to users based on Anti Money Laundering directives to small businesses, crypto businesses, and sex workers, to name a few, communication services are badly secured, and governments regularly try to break their confidentiality by proposing legislation that would break their security, and digital means of identification run the risk of leaking personal data or allow tracking of people without judicial oversight.
Institutions
It is problematic that we cannot rely on necessary services to be either accessible or safe. Being able to opt out of these services, or having a choice between multiple providers would help, but we cannot and haven’t. Even if we seem to have a choice, in many cases, the issues are not at the level of the corporations, but at that of regulations. Banks do not deny services because they particularly want to, but because certain kinds of customers have become very risky because of laws and regulations. Banks will deny them services out of fear, even when access to those services is mandatory by law. For example, denial of service by banks to historically marginalized people. At this moment, we can still choose when it comes to messaging software, but if governments succeed in implementing laws that outlaw end-to-end encryption, that choice will immediately vanish. This will marginalize people because they either are forced to communicate over unsafe channels, or because they opt not to use them, depriving them of essential tools in society. This presents us with a problematic situation: citizens need access to tools, but the available tools are increasingly at odds with civil liberties. We are often forced to integrate systems that are not worthy of our trust.
Measuring trust in institutions is hard, but we can use the Updated OECD framework of drivers of trust in trust in public institutions of 2021 as a model to analyze these trends, not only for governments, but also for corporations that provide services that tend toward public goods. The model uses two basic categories to track public trust: Competency and Values. The values category is subdivided into Openness, Integrity and Fairness. It seems to me that, especially in the digital realm, these three metrics have become problematic. Corporations like Meta seem to fail all three of these metrics: they are not open about their algorithms; they have been proven to misuse their data in ways that harm their users and they fail to provide a level playing field for their customers. Governments often fail this test, too, however. Just in the last two years, the Dutch government, for instance, has fallen over a scandal regarding misuse of personal data, which left thousands in deep debt. It also illegally followed citizens in a broad anti-terrorist program and tried to legislate a broad surveillance tool to detect social fraud. The Netherlands is far from the only government to attempt these, but these examples are better known to me, as I am a Dutch citizen.
Protection
At this point, you may well ask what this all has to do with Bitcoin, and I would not blame you. But please bear with me; all the topics I covered are threads in the weave that makes up the reason Bitcoin was created and why it continues to hold people’s attention. Before I can do this, I need to introduce one more topic that is needed to properly explain Bitcoin and the movement that it engendered.
I have painted a picture in which we, as people who, out of necessity, need to integrate digital tools into our cognitive functioning, have no real choice in the applications we use. Furthermore, the software and services we need to integrate, often are not behaving like a public good to our benefit, but instead put us at a disadvantage, and use the data they gather about us to their own advantage and sometimes to our detriment.
How then can we protect ourselves? The philosopher Jeffrey Reiman wrote an early article about the systems discussed in this article. He wrote Driving to the Panopticon in 1995 when computer scientists experimented with tracking traffic. I cover this article extensively in my earlier essay Privacy Fundamentals. What interests me here is Reiman’s explanation about how to protect ourselves against intrusions of privacy, which I think can be extended to the whole digital world. According to Reiman, there are two ways to protect our privacy. First, formal means: legal, customary, and moral. Second, material means: physical ways to impede access to our person or our information: locks, doors, distance, that kind of thing. I want to add mathematical to the latter list. In the digital world, encryption takes the same place as physical means in the physical world, and the addition is meaningful in this context.
Both forms of protection can exist without the other. We can have formal protection without the material, for instance, if the law prohibits entering a building, but the door is unlocked and open. Likewise, we can have material protection without the formal. We can, for example, wear sunglasses and a hat so we won’t be recognized. We can keep silent about having certain information. Material means of protection are certainly more reliable: Taking someone’s valuables might be outlawed and frowned upon, but a lock and a sturdy door will more reliably protect your goods than societal disapproval or the uncertain reach of the law. Formal protections rely on the first form of trust I discussed, and the protections themselves are necessary for us to feel secure in integrating tools and services into our lives.
The problem with formal protections remains that they only offer safety if society supports and enforces them. Enforcement is done either by people amongst themselves, in the case of custom and moral transgressions, or by governments in the case of legal ones. Even then, formal protection does not offer protection against damage per se. If protections are materially absent, damage is always a possible, and formal protections can only offer reparations after the fact. In the case of privacy violations, the damage can never be repaired, but they can only compensate for irreparable harm.
Material protections, on the other hand, offer protection against harm being done in the first place. If no one can reach your data, or even better, knows personal data I available at all, it is much safer.
The Road to Bitcoin
As I have said earlier, the goals of Bitcoin have been worked on for decades. In the following, I will offer a brief, very generalized history, concentrating on the goals that were pursued. I will also offer some thoughts on why Bitcoin was only the beginning of the journey and why I believe that Bitcoin needs to be approached by looking at the underlying aspirations.
The Beginnings
The issues I have outlined are not new, although the impact they have certainly has become more visible in the last decade. Problems involving the misuse of personal data, like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have put these issues on the agenda but have not stopped them from happening. The problems have been pointed out for a long time, however. I already mentioned Jeffrey Reiman’s article from 1995, but early warnings already came from the computer science community since the mid-1980s. Bitcoin grew organically from these worries.
The group that is most recognizably connected with early worries about and defenses against privacy issues is the cypherpunks, which became active around 1992. The cypherpunks operated on a mailing list, and people like Nick Szabo, Adam Back and Hal Finney, all of whom later became known for their involvement with Bitcoin, were active contributors. Apart from the mailing list, they are known for Eric Hughes’ A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto and Timothy May’s Cyphernomicon, a bullet point collection of cypherpunk material. Both works show cypherpunks were interested in privacy above all, but only if it served a goal: protection of the private space against unwanted eavesdropping. The very short Manifesto already shows the cypherpunks did not believe that corporations and governments were properly incentivized to resist using data. Therefore they advocated strong encryption methods to protect personal data. One of the other distinguishing features of cypherpunk ethos is an emphasis on acting on theory, summarized in the slogan “Cypherpunks write code.” Cypherpunk contributor Sandy Sandfort, as quoted in the Cyphernomicon, thought this should be taken metaphorically. In his opinion, it meant “cypherpunks take personal responsibility for empowering themselves against threats to privacy.” We will see that this ethos carried over into the Bitcoin community and later the crypto community.
Willing and wishing are two very different things. The difference between willing and wishing something is that in willing, you summon all means in your power to make something a reality. Merely wishing stops at the intent.
Software is a form of intent: software is a tool to make something happen, but can also be a statement about the kind of world you would like to live in. This may sound strange at first but consider the following: social media is not a necessary addition to the world, and neither is any software you currently use. All these applications, and their designs, come from someone’s vision for a future world. Certain forms of software are not available in some parts of the world, mainly because the powers that be in those regions will not allow them. They do not fit with their vision of the world as it should be. Software both shapes the world and embodies aspirations for the world.
Bitcoin
As I said in the foreword, most accounts of Bitcoin describe what Bitcoin is, or how Bitcoin works. I consider all those accounts useful to an extent, but they also miss the point. Since 2009, when Bitcoin started, multiple accounts of the ontology of Bitcoin have been presented, from private currency to electronic gold, a p2p payments network and many more. The 2018 article Visions of Bitcoin tracks a few of these, but as long as Bitcoin exists, more will inevitably follow, because these narratives tend to change with the uses that people find in Bitcoin. Now that we see philosophers becoming more interested in Bitcoin, papers researching Bitcoin’s ontology in a more philosophical tradition have become available. These do not concern themselves with Bitcoin’s function, but with what kind of entity we are dealing with. This kind of philosophy is distinct from the more functionality-focused work we saw before, though.
Descriptions of how Bitcoin works seem unproblematic. Not so, because these can be split into explanations of how the code and the network function on the one hand, and models and projections on how the network will react to external conditions on the other. The second kind has no real descriptive value but ideologically projects what the writer thinks will occur. The first kind is akin to a manual, the second to a kind of Bitcoin scripture, containing prophetic statements about a possible future.
I think both approaches miss the mark, because they fail to explain either Bitcoin’s existence, or its continuing appeal. Bitcoin has been pronounced dead so often, a website called Bitcoin Obituaries keeps track of it. In spite of that, the network worries some environmentalists about the energy the network uses. That is not a dying network! We cannot explain this by pointing to the various and sometimes contradictory narratives about what Bitcoin is, or by explaining how it works. We need to look at the reasons Bitcoin exists instead, and how they inspire people from very diverse backgrounds and with differing goals.
Bitcoin does not differ from other software. Like any software, it expresses the values of its creator and those who followed. Its users adopt it because it is useful to them or because they consider its ideals worth supporting. Bitcoin itself has a very limited goal: digital transfer of value between parties without an intermediary. Bitcoin solves this, by creating digital scarcity, using an innovation called the blockchain. The system is not hard to understand. Anyone who invests a decent amount of time can learn how it works. The impact it had on people flows from concerns about digitalization, trust, consent, and protection against data misuse.
Bitcoin shows a different way of handling digital finance is possible. Digitally transferring value between parties without needing an intermediary can be done. The absence of an intermediary also means no one actively tracks transactions on the network, although its open design does mean all transactions can be seen. Bitcoin promised a payment network where people can freely exchange value, without needing to fear unwanted surveillance from other people or institutions.
Bitcoin also opened the door to a form of protest against all the problems involving trust and digitalization that I have described earlier. While it may be very hard, if not impossible, for most people to do anything against corporations, governments, and a progressively more digitized civilization, being part of a digital movement that takes a stand against them can feel very empowering. It may seem strange to anyone who has not used Bitcoin but sending a transaction and knowing that you have just did this without involving a bank can feel very liberating, like striking a blow against a massive complex. Just holding Bitcoin can also become a similar act of defiance. Bitcoin does not want to replace banks; it wants to allow people to opt out of the banking system. This feeling of power is a large part of the reason why Bitcoin remains attractive to people.
Aspirational Software
And like any movement, Bitcoin inspired others. Within a year, people began to consider that blockchains might be used to effect change in other areas. Cutting out intermediaries could lead to new systems free from the flaws with regard to privacy and interference that legacy systems have. Starting in 2010, a flurry of projects launched that intended to oust intermediaries from software products. Many of these initiatives defied conventional ideas about how to combat global threats like terrorism and crime by claiming the answers lie not in increasing surveillance and regulation, but by opening systems to marginalized groups that were unfairly targeted by these measures.
Most of these projects failed, spectacularly or otherwise. I do not think that is relevant. They thrive, and that is certainly relevant, in the face of twelve years of continuous failure. Why? Because these projects are often more about expressing a wish than about effecting real change, in the Kantian sense I mentioned earlier. Many of these projects are considered long-shots, even by their supporting communities, but they fill a need, because they offer a place to discuss ideas of how a world without surveillance and intermediaries might look. Where you can give and withdraw consent and not be excluded. Where you are not forced into trusting the untrustworthy. The software itself, in these cases, can be characterized as nothing more than a big banner on which supporters can paint, in letters large: “Fuck you!” to the villain of choice.
Such projects do not have to deliver a working product to succeed. Aspirational software serves a different purpose than pragmatic software. It serves the same function as a T-shirt with a slogan. People wear BTC, Ethereum or NFT shirts to signal their membership of a tribe, not necessarily even financial investment in these projects. This explains why even after projects fail, general sentiment is only down for a short period, and people are willing to join and invest in new projects. Just like protesters, when a single rally, election run or event might fail to achieve its goals, move on, and join a new effort, so do many community members and investors in crypto projects. The eventual delivery of the software is a dot on the horizon, the direct attraction is in joining voices to express an opinion and hope for the future.
Bitcoin’s many deaths and resurrections are also explained by the same mechanism. While many authors focus on either the prevailing Bitcoin narrative or the price, Bitcoin adherents focus on something different altogether: societal change, across a wide political spectrum. That yearning does not change with price volatility. Just because narratives of currency or store of value prove to be either mistaken, or wrong within certain time spans, does not lessen the ambition people have to create a new paradigm on which to model their world.
A big tent
Some writers consider Bitcoin an inherently right-wing project, because some very prominent cypherpunks supported extreme right-wing policies. They suppose Bitcoin and crypto to embody such ideas, and if people who support other ideologies encounter it, they will, instead of changing the course of the project, be tainted by its right-wing essence. I think this is a sloppy argument, which rests on picking out a few characteristics that are shared by right wing groups, like a wariness of the effects of central institutions, and saying these are essentially right-wing. Characteristics may be accidentally shared, though, and I do not believe in this kind of absolute attribution of traits.
If we consider Bitcoin as a protest, we can explain its attraction to diverse groups much more easily. Seen as an objection to being forced into integrating systems that are not in our best interests, it makes sense for it to attract attention from minorities, dissidents, refugees, sex workers, and all people marginalized by these systems, either by being exploited or by being denied access to services most people take for granted.
It also explains why other groups that are in the margins, like fundamentalist Christians, the extreme right, anti-socials, and the otherwise ostracized, use these systems. They share the property of lacking access to mainstream systems. What attracts them is being shut out, and Bitcoin and crypto make, by design, no difference whether that exclusion is deserved or not.
Memetic pollination
Diversity explains why crypto is described in so many ways. Aspirations do not stand on their own. Ideas cross-pollinate. People speak in terms of what they think to know. Therefore, if your background is rich in religious imagery, you will use this toolbox to describe what inspires you. Crypto communities tend to speak heavily in memes. Memes are nothing more than ideas, and they tend to get mixed with other ideas.
Crypto communities speak to the marginalized, the unheard or those who believe they are unheard, so it is not surprising to find people expressing their inspirations, goals, hang-ups, and fixations via crypto channels. This always comes with the real danger that crypto projects become nothing more than a canvas to project one’s own fixations. We can see this mechanism at work when we see Bitcoin and other crypto projects being cast in openly religious terms.
Marginalized groups are, by definition, vulnerable groups. Since they are shut out of mainstream society, they are exposed to people who want to take advantage of their situation. This vulnerability is the basis of the scams, badly organized projects, and money-making schemes that so many people associate with the cryptocurrency sector. Here, as with the association with right-wing groups, I reject the idea that this is in any way essential to the crypto industry. Using the motivations for getting involved with Bitcoin and crypto offers a much easier explanation of why such practices are so easy in the blockchain sector. Note that it does not matter for this analysis whether someone is genuinely marginalized, but only whether he feels this is the case. This way, we can explain seeing so many varied groups as sex workers and fundamentalist Christians, involved in the same projects.
Vulnerabilities
Software as protest has vulnerabilities, which flow from its aspirational side. These can be split into firstly not fulfilling or proving a claim, striving for another goal then openly stated and changing aspirations over time and either not being conscious of, or not being open about it. Let’s see how these vulnerabilities work.
Remaining a mere wish
Firstly, an activist group that just sits around discussing how great the world will be once they win, but never works to realize their ideals, will remain as ineffective as the People’s Front of Judea from the Life of Brian. Many crypto projects never get past this stage, or, at most, get to the stage where they write “Romanes eunt domus” on the walls of Roman HQ. All projects in the crypto domain, including Bitcoin, face the danger of becoming no more than a loud subculture, if they do not, as Kant says, summon all means in their power to realize their goals. Just like when writing an essay, the broader the domain, the harder it is to create something effective.
Bitcoin has an easier task than projects striving to be complete solutions: its goal is simple, which helps keep its design principles on track. Keeping its principal design simple has guided its community to a large extent, to the point where ossification of what are seen as its core tenets has formed something of an orthodoxy. Other projects, especially the ones aiming to cover large domains, will have a harder task, simply because being everything to everyone is an impossible task.
The ultimate test of a project, however, is not in talk, but in application. This echoes the cypherpunk ethos to “write code,” to act and prove your ideas. Building something also proves a willingness to show you are serious and not bullshitting. Building a product is like following through on a promise, and this links back to the idea of trust. Projects that never build their ideas just sell empty promises and are parasitic on aspirations. A lack of implementation brings the danger of being misled. Without something to test the promises of people running a project, you cannot see whether a project holds up against scrutiny.
Cons, scams and the like
Secondly, pretending to start a useful project, but secretly having another motive is very easy. Confidence tricksters and scams work because the market believes its money supports something worthwhile. It seems so trivial and silly to have to point this out, but people who invest in these projects do so because they have hopes and dreams. Otherwise, there would be no market for these schemes.
Most misleading projects in crypto are aimed at people’s most direct needs. When OnlyFans threatened to exclude sex workers, three or four projects popped up claiming to have solved all problems for sex workers, by decentralizing video distribution and payments. During the Trump presidency, several projects claiming to have solved the problem of fake news by blockchain appeared. Evading censors by blockchain is a perennial favorite.
The most common theme is solving poverty, by promising massive returns on investments. I consider this on a par with other forms of marginalization, and comments of the sort that belittle people’s need for a safety net to be out of touch, to say the least. Critics of the sector who, on the one hand use the vulnerability of investors as an argument against crypto, and on the other point towards what they consider vulgar greed, contradict themselves. These are both sides of the same coin. Many people live in a financially uncertain situation. In such circumstances, wanting to win the lottery or realizing great gains by investing in crypto would be a dream come true. At the same time, many people who get rich are thrown for a loop and will exhibit behavior that many would not find acceptable.
Changes of heart
Lastly, a project’s goals can change as time goes by. This can happen in several ways. During the course of a project, the original goals may turn out as simply not attainable within the scope of the project. This doesn’t need to mean a tool cannot be built, but it might mean rethinking a project. A tool could be illegal, or the uses would come under such a level of scrutiny that a project needs to rethink its strategy. An example of projects that face such choices are privacy-centric ones. In these cases, just building a tool is not enough if you are serious about the original goals. They will also need to expand into legal and political avenues. Otherwise, they run the risk of their applications being outlawed, or, even worse, their developers facing legal peril.
Another way for goal drift to happen is when communities internally diverge from the original goal. While this happens often within activist groups, when it occurs in crypto projects, such divisions usually mean a split in the blockchain, and that means an immediate dilution of the money supply and a loss of value. These kinds of goal changes therefore, usually lead to in-fighting, to the point where all energy of a project can be temporarily lost to contests over the legacy of the original project. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have gone through such a phase and the effects are still felt and continue to be referenced within the communities. Blockchains accommodate this kind of contest between ideas and sunk costs at the technological level.
I would like to give extra attention to the fact that projects do not necessarily need to be aware of a change of goals. For instance, if the majority of a community over time starts to favor a new idea as driving goals, they may not notice it. We also see this in political parties, where the current incarnations would be unrecognizable to its members of a century ago. Goals change, and projects evolve. However, being clear about shifting goals is for the best, because it allows people to see that the content of a certain container might have changed over time.
The last way goals change is specific to any project that becomes valuable over time, and crypto projects are no different. Once a project starts to represent a certain value, retaining and growth of that value can become a goal in itself. The danger in pursuing valuation in itself is that by spending less time on pursuing its ideals, the project becomes a zombie, just trundling along on its original impetus, but always slowing down without new impulses. This, too, may not initially be noticed by communities, but will become recognized in time. In more centralized projects, the goal of value may be confined to the project leads, who may or may not be open about these new goals.
Of course, projects are allowed to stray from their original goals. There may be good reasons for it. Their original goals can turn out to be badly formulated or uninformed. New, more impactful applications can be found. But this comes at the price of abandoning or diluting the original goal. Take the example of a hammer, initially designed with the goal of efficiently driving a nail into a plank. Then, it turns out that hammers also smash in an opponent’s skulls really well in a fight. If hammer design becomes driven by maximizing for that goal, the resulting hammer may well still be used for driving nails into planks, but it will certainly be less suited for the task than the original hammer. There may even come a point where skull hammers will no longer be useful for the original goal.
Epilogue
I will not end this essay with a conclusion, at least not an ironclad one. I have offered an account of why Bitcoin exists and in a broader sense, why the whole crypto sector exists. I believe it offers a clearer explanation of the phenomenon than trying to describe what it is or how it works. Using and associating with this software is a form of protest. What is more important, it is a protest against a state of affairs that is not just targeting one group, but which affects all of us. This explains why so many disparate groups are attracted to Bitcoin.
I have also shown that projects can be misused in various ways to capitalize on the feeling of being marginalized and the wish to act against it. One way is to start projects that never build proper software, so they can never be held accountable for their claims. Another way is starting projects under false pretenses. When trusting new software, at least we should make sure it is worthy of that trust. Lastly, projects can change into something new over time, which is both a strength and a weakness. A strength because it allows it to adapt, a weakness because deceptions may creep in.
Bitcoin is a protest. That protest can only be successful if it not only expresses its message, but also creates what the world aims for.
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