Bitcoins to Rule Them All

 

              Bitcoins to Rule Them All

The craze for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies hides a political project: to arrogate control of the currency, a prerogative traditionally reserved for public authorities. This fantasy in vogue among the "crypto bros" has lifted the last taboos around the replacement of democracy by technology.

At the Bitcoin 2022 Conference, a reinterpretation of the famous Wall Street bull in a cryptocurrency version was presented. Personalities like Peter Thiel have begun to consider cryptocurrencies not as simple financial instruments, but as tools to restructure society from top to bottom. Technology offered a way to realise the abstract ideas of Curtis Yarvin and Balaji Srinivasan. If traditional democracy were hopelessly corrupt, as Yarvin claimed, the blockchain could allow new forms of governance based on immutable code rather than on human judgement, which is fallible by nature.

This vision has found its perfect technological expression in Bitcoin. Launched in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis by a creator answering to the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin seemed to validate the central thesis of The Sovereign Individual, namely that technology could allow individuals to evade the monetary control of the state. The timing was perfect: while faith in traditional financial institutions had just been shaken, here was a system that promised to replace human judgement with mathematical certainty.

Cryptocurrency and Cryptofascism

Bitcoin finds its philosophical foundations in the Austrian school of economics and libertarian thought. However, it was the Palestinian-Jordanian economist Saifedean Ammous who made the most explicit mixing of this conceptual background with neoreactionary ideas in his 2018 book The Bitcoin Standard (translated into French as L'etalon-bitcoin). The last chapters in particular take a radical turn. His aesthetic criticism of modern art and architecture as "degenerate" forms, unlike classicism, is very revealing. Intentionally or not, he uses exactly the same language and the same type of argument as the fascists of the 1930s.

The adherence of the Bitcoin community to the theses of personalities like Ammous reveals to what extent cryptocurrencies, far from remaining pure technologies or financial tools, serve as a vector for reactionary political thinking. The idea that Bitcoin could allow us to return to the golden age of a healthy currency was perfectly inserted into a larger narrative about the decline of society and the need to restore traditional hierarchies.

If Ammous and others have put Bitcoin at the service of their reactionary vision of the world, the technology itself can just as easily be put at the service of liberal and democratic values, as the authors of the book Resistance Money, released in 2024, remind us. The essential distinction lies in the way of considering the relationship between Bitcoin and political institutions.

While reactionaries consider Bitcoin as a tool to supplant democratic governance, the authors of Resistance Money view it as a brake on abuses of power and a way to preserve individual autonomy within democratic systems. Bitcoin is therefore not considered a substitute for democratic institutions, but rather as a technological innovation capable of protecting civil liberties and human rights, especially in contexts where traditional financial systems are used for surveillance or oppression.

The Inevitable Death of Democracy

From Yarvin's first writings during the financial crisis of 2008 to the institutional crisis that is shaking the United States today in 2025, we can draw a direct intellectual line. What began as an abstract criticism of democratic institutions has become an effective project to bring them down. Cryptocurrencies have accelerated this process, providing a technological framework and a psychological model to free ourselves from any democratic governance.

What makes this vision dangerous is not simply its hostility to democracy, but the way in which the collapse of democracy is seen as an inevitability rather than a choice. This is described by the expression "epistemic authoritarianism." Rather than recognising that human action and political decisions shape technology, crypto guru Balaji Srinivasan, in his book The Network State (2022), prefers to invoke a technological evolution that would necessarily lead to the dissolution of the nation-state and its replacement by dematerialized government structures. This deterministic thinking leaves no room for public debate, the democratic process, or other paths of technological development. It presents us with a future that has already been established, where the only choice is to embrace it or be forgotten by history.

This deterministic conception explains why so many libertarians have drifted politically. If democracy is condemned, why bother to defend it? If technology is destined to replace human government, why not speed up the process? This is how technological libertarianism becomes a gateway to neoreactionary ideas, far removed from classical liberalism and its attachment to the debate of ideas and progress.

Control to Destroy Better

When Elon Musk takes control of the salary payment system of the Treasury Department, or Donald Trump declares that he will not apply the laws that displease him, they are only implementing ideas originating from the world of cryptos. The notion that code can replace democratic institutions, that technical competence should prevail over democratic negotiation, or that private power must supplant public authority—all stem from the transition from crypto theory to political practice.

Curtis Yarvin and Balaji Srinivasan both see technology as a means to escape democratic constraints, but their approaches differ. Yarvin advocates seizing and dismantling democratic institutions from within, while Srinivasan proposes building parallel structures that render them useless. We are witnessing the convergence of these two approaches, with control of technology being used both to seize and to subvert democratic power.

These frameworks of thought could have remained simple theoretical musings if not for a unique convergence of factors allowing for their sudden implementation in practice. The rise of Trump, a figure both hostile to democracy and eager to align with tech oligarchs, represented an unprecedented opportunity. Now, a powerful autocrat is not content to merely criticise Silicon Valley democracy but embraces it without reservation. His contempt for constitutional obstacles, his belief in interpersonal loyalty over institutional independence, and his vision of a government serving private interests are perfectly consistent with the tech-driven worldview.

Combine all this with an unprecedented grip on information flows, financial systems, and social networks, and you have the perfect storm: an ideology, a political vector, and the technological capabilities to dismantle democracy.