I am fed up of hearing about Bitcoin
A reality check on cryptocurrency's promises versus its destructive reality
I am fed up of hearing about Bitcoin. Fed up of the breathless evangelism, the get-rich-quick schemes masquerading as technological revolution, and the wilful blindness to what this entire circus actually represents. We’re now nearly a decade into this experiment, and it’s time for an honest reckoning with what cryptocurrency has actually delivered versus what it promised.
The Austrian Economics Trojan Horse
Bitcoin didn’t emerge in a vacuum - it’s the latest iteration of a decades-long libertarian project to smuggle Austrian economics into the mainstream1. Launched in 2009 with Satoshi Nakamoto’s genesis block message about “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” it was marketed as a solution to financial crisis whilst actually implementing the very economic theories that created the crisis in the first place.
The early adopters weren’t revolutionaries - they were reactionaries peddling Friedrich Hayek’s “Denationalisation of Money” wrapped in cryptographic packaging2. Bitcoin promised to solve the problems of capitalism by giving us more capitalism, harder capitalism, capitalism immune to democratic oversight or social intervention.
The 2008 financial crisis created genuine anger about banker bailouts and systemic inequality. But instead of questioning capitalism itself, Bitcoin channelled that anger toward the one institution capable of constraining capital: democratic government. It’s a masterclass in misdirection - blame the state for capitalism’s failures, then offer “decentralised” capitalism as the solution.
The Get-Rich-Quick Recruitment Drive
But the real genius of Bitcoin isn’t technical - it’s ideological. By the late 2010s, cryptocurrency had become the perfect recruitment tool for right-wing economics, packaging Austrian school theories as a path to personal wealth. Young men, facing economic precarity and offered no socialist alternative, were told they could get rich by embracing the very free-market fundamentalism that created their problems.
WordPress began accepting Bitcoin payments in November 20123. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched Bitcoin futures4. PayPal and Visa started exploring integration. This wasn’t the system being disrupted - it was the system adapting, incorporating Bitcoin as just another speculative asset whilst its advocates unwittingly promoted laissez-faire economics.
The cryptocurrency movement became a Ponzi scheme with an ideology attached. Early adopters got rich not through productive labour or social value creation, but by convincing others to buy into a deflationary currency designed to concentrate wealth upward. It’s pyramid selling meets the gold standard, with a libertarian manifesto as the sales pitch.
The Predictable Results
This isn’t a bug - it’s a feature. When you implement Austrian economics in code, you get exactly what Austrian economics delivers in practice: extreme inequality, environmental destruction, and a playground for criminal capital. Let’s examine what cryptocurrency has actually delivered:
Criminal Infrastructure: Silk Road processed over $1.2 billion in illegal transactions before the FBI shut it down in 20135. Its founder, Ross Ulbricht, is serving life in prison for narcotics trafficking and money laundering. Silk Road wasn’t an aberration - it was Bitcoin working exactly as designed, enabling anonymous transactions beyond state oversight.
Spectacular Fraud: Mt. Gox, handling 70% of all Bitcoin transactions, collapsed in 2014 after losing 744,408 Bitcoin to hackers - approximately 7% of all Bitcoin in existence6. BitConnect promised 40% monthly returns before collapsing in a $2.4 billion Ponzi scheme7. OneCoin stole $4 billion without ever operating an actual blockchain8. The 2018 ICO boom has generated over $100 million in exit scams9.
Extreme Inequality: Bitcoin’s wealth distribution makes traditional capitalism look egalitarian. Approximately 2% of accounts control 95% of all Bitcoin, with a Gini coefficient of 82.69% - worse than any nation on Earth10. This is what happens when you hardcode Austrian economics into a monetary system: you get feudalism with extra steps.
Environmental Devastation: Bitcoin mining now consumes 138 TWh annually - more electricity than entire countries like Argentina11. The network generates 39.8 million tonnes of CO2 annually, equivalent to Slovakia’s total emissions12. Each Bitcoin transaction has the carbon footprint of over one million Visa transactions13. This isn’t a rounding error - it’s an environmental catastrophe.
The Blockchain Myth
The response to Bitcoin’s failures has been to pivot to “blockchain technology” - the supposed innovation that will revolutionise everything from supply chains to voting systems. This is perhaps the most pernicious myth of all.
Blockchain is not revolutionary technology. It’s an extremely inefficient distributed database that trades performance for theoretical decentralisation. Most “blockchain” projects are actually centralised databases with extra steps, offering none of the supposed benefits whilst adding massive complexity and energy consumption.
The blockchain hype cycle has become a way to launder Bitcoin’s failures. Can’t defend cryptocurrency speculation? Talk about supply chain transparency. Uncomfortable with energy consumption? Pivot to smart contracts. Embarrassed by criminal use cases? Focus on “Web3” buzzwords.
But strip away the marketing, and blockchain offers solutions to problems that either don’t exist or are better solved by conventional databases. The supposed advantages - immutability, decentralisation, trustlessness - are either illusory or outweighed by massive inefficiencies.
The Socialist Response
Here’s what should truly concern socialists: cryptocurrency isn’t an alternative to the current system - it’s the current system without any democratic constraints. It’s capitalism with the safety net removed, the regulations stripped away, and the public interest abandoned entirely.
The crypto movement has become a recruitment funnel for right-wing economics, taking young people’s legitimate anger about inequality and redirecting it toward libertarian solutions that worsen inequality. It’s selling the gold standard to a generation that never lived through its failures, packaging deflation as innovation and austerity as autonomy.
Bitcoin promises monetary sovereignty whilst delivering monetary feudalism. It offers financial inclusion whilst excluding anyone who can’t afford the entry fee. It sells decentralisation whilst creating the most centralised wealth distribution in history.
Labour, and the broader Left, must offer real alternatives to financial capitalism - not its libertarian parody. Public banking, postal banking, central bank digital currencies under democratic control. We need monetary systems that serve social need, not speculative greed.
The cryptocurrency lobby will frame any regulation as oppression, any oversight as tyranny. But we must judge them by their results, not their rhetoric. And their results are clear: environmental destruction, criminal facilitation, and extreme wealth concentration. This isn’t revolution - it’s reaction.
The Reckoning
Nine years after Bitcoin’s launch, the evidence is clear: cryptocurrency has succeeded brilliantly at its actual purpose. It was never about creating fair money or democratic finance - it was about recruiting young people to Austrian economics whilst enriching early adopters. Mission accomplished.
The real victims aren’t the speculators who lost money - they gambled and lost. The real victims are the young people who’ve been sold a libertarian fantasy as technological progress, who’ve learned to see democratic institutions as the enemy and unregulated markets as freedom.
Bitcoin isn’t digital gold - it’s digital neoliberalism. It’s not the future of money - it’s the return of the worst monetary ideas of the past, dressed up as innovation. It’s not revolutionary - it’s deeply reactionary, designed to prevent the kind of democratic economic control that might actually address inequality.
I’m fed up of hearing about Bitcoin because I’m fed up of watching the Left fail to offer compelling alternatives to libertarian snake oil. While we debate theory, the Right is recruiting with promises of quick riches and technological salvation.
We need to do better. We need public alternatives that actually serve social need rather than speculative greed. We need to reclaim the conversation about monetary reform from the charlatans who’ve captured it.
Socialism or barbarism - and Bitcoin is what barbarism looks like when it’s coded by Stanford graduates.
The cypherpunk movement emerged from Silicon Valley’s libertarian milieu, promoting technological solutions to political problems whilst ignoring power structures and class relations. Their “cryptographic privacy” rhetoric masked a deeper antipathy to democratic governance and social solidarity. ↩︎
Hayek’s “Denationalisation of Money” represented the logical endpoint of Austrian school economics: the complete removal of democratic control over monetary policy. Bitcoin implements this vision perfectly, creating a deflationary currency immune to democratic intervention but perfectly suited to speculative accumulation. ↩︎
WordPress became the first major company to accept Bitcoin in November 2012, with founder Matt Mullenweg citing the currency’s potential to enable payments from countries excluded from traditional payment systems. ↩︎
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) launched Bitcoin futures trading in December 2017, providing institutional investors with regulated exposure to cryptocurrency markets for the first time. ↩︎
The FBI’s Operation Onymous shut down Silk Road in October 2013, seizing 174,000 Bitcoin and arresting Ross Ulbricht. Court documents revealed the marketplace had facilitated over $1.2 billion in illegal drug sales since its 2011 launch. ↩︎
Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, revealing the loss of 744,408 customer Bitcoin and 100,000 of the exchange’s own Bitcoin to hackers. The stolen funds were later traced to Alexander Vinnik’s BTC-e exchange, a notorious money laundering operation. ↩︎
BitConnect collapsed in January 2018 after promoting a “lending program” promising daily returns of up to 1%. Investors lost an estimated $2.4 billion in what prosecutors later described as a classic Ponzi scheme. ↩︎
OneCoin, promoted by the “Crypto Queen” Ruja Ignatova, raised over $4 billion from investors despite never operating an actual blockchain. Ignatova was indicted by US prosecutors in 2019 and remains on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. ↩︎
ICO exit scams proliferated throughout 2018, with notable examples including Prodeum (disappeared after raising funds, leaving only the word “penis” on their website), Pure Bit ($2.7 million stolen), and Centra Tech ($25 million stolen despite celebrity endorsements from Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled). ↩︎
Analysis by Chainalysis in 2018 found that the top 2% of Bitcoin addresses controlled approximately 95% of the total supply, giving Bitcoin a Gini coefficient of 82.69% - indicating wealth concentration more extreme than any nation on Earth. ↩︎
Research by Cambridge University’s Centre for Alternative Finance estimated Bitcoin’s annual electricity consumption at 138 TWh by late 2018, exceeding the energy use of entire countries including Argentina (125 TWh) and Ukraine (129 TWh). ↩︎
Bitcoin’s carbon emissions were calculated by multiplying energy consumption by the carbon intensity of electricity in major mining regions. With 67% of mining powered by fossil fuels (45% coal, 22% gas), Bitcoin generated approximately 39.8 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2018. ↩︎
Visa processes approximately 150 million transactions daily using 1.49 TWh annually. Bitcoin processes roughly 300,000 transactions daily using 138 TWh annually, making each Bitcoin transaction roughly 460,000 times more energy-intensive than a Visa transaction. ↩︎
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