{"id":6221,"date":"2020-08-31T11:38:43","date_gmt":"2020-08-31T15:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/?p=6221"},"modified":"2021-07-24T11:35:04","modified_gmt":"2021-07-24T15:35:04","slug":"is-ethereum-left-and-bitcoin-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/2020\/08\/31\/is-ethereum-left-and-bitcoin-right","title":{"rendered":"Is Ethereum left and Bitcoin right?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hacktivist Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki took aim at Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Twitter recently for essentially writing off smart contracts inventor Nick Szabo as a right-wing crank.<\/span><\/p>\n

Taaki <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> that this sort of attitude was typical of an \u201cEth[ereum] culture which is about sparkling burner parties, privileged digital nomads, microdosing LSD, sex orgies and \u2018social-justice\u2019 \/ vague doing-good.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Pretty much everyone had the same initial thought: <\/span>\u201cWhy aren\u2019t I getting invited to these parties?\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

But Taaki\u2019s comments also highlighted the political divisions between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Is it really as simple as Bitcoiners lean to the right and Ethereans lean to the left?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You can make up your own mind about Nick Szabo\u2019s views, thanks to this obsessively curated list of his <\/span>tweets<\/span><\/a>. Buterin characterizes Szabo\u2019s utterances as bad faith arguing and \u201cincholate yelling.\u201d He appears to <\/span>regret<\/span><\/a> naming a denomination of Ethereum after Szabo.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Taaki, who is British-Iranian, took <\/span>exception<\/span><\/a> to \u201cwhite-leftypol\u201d Ethereans canceling Szabo because \u201che doesn\u2019t fit their worldview\u201d and wrote in a <\/span>tweet<\/span><\/a> that they reminded him of \u201cwhite left (fake socialists) on an anti-rascist crusade.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s neo-colonialist white saviour attitude,\u201d he wrote. \u201cEth is exactly this.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A savior to savor<\/h2>\n

To be fair, Ether isn\u2019t exactly like that, but there are definitely some elements that might lead you to draw that conclusion. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>To take one example, the man sometimes <\/span>referred<\/span><\/a> to as \u201cEthereum\u2019s chief economic thinker\u201d is self-proclaimed \u201csocial liberal radical\u201d Glen Weyl, who founded RadicalxChange. That\u2019s the sort of progressive, nonprofit outfit that thinks the No. 1 most crucial thing to <\/span>inform<\/span><\/a> new visitors to its website is not what it actually does \u2014 some sort of think-tank stuff? \u2014 but that it stands with the social justice movements Black Lives Matters and Global Pride. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Buterin is a big fan of Weyl\u2019s and sits on the board of RadicalxChange. The pair have held lengthy email exchanges about his societal engineering ideas, which include imposing a tax to penalize \u201cusing standard white English\u201d or taxing \u201cmasculinity to subsidize femininity.\u201d A proponent of a Universal Basic Income and quadratic voting, Weyl gave a speech at <\/span>Ethereum\u2019s DevCon<\/span><\/a> that he <\/span>described<\/span><\/a> as \u201ca rally cry\u201d against \u201cextreme individualism and capitalism.\u201d At its conclusion, he explicitly asked for questions from women and minority groups first. Of course, Ethereum conferences are just as full of nerdy white men as the rest of crypto, but at least the first guy to ask a question had the good grace to apologize for that fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Try that kind of left-wing malarky at a meet-up for hardcore Bitcoiners, though, and you could bring a firestorm down on your head, as the author of <\/span>Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies<\/span><\/i>, Andreas M. Antonopolous, found out when he asked his audience for a few suggestions of podcasts he could appear on that weren\u2019t the stereotypical \u201cwhite, male, finance-focused\u201d podcasters he talks to endlessly, as he wanted to \u201creach out to a broader audience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This seemingly innocuous request outraged his fanbase (which may have some crossover with the Gamergate crowd) and <\/span>caused<\/span> a Twitter storm, with users complaining about how \u201cBitcoin doesn\u2019t care about identity politics\u201d and getting their noses out of joint at his outrageous rejection of meritocracy by trying to chat to some different people<\/span>.<\/span><\/i> Even Bitcoin icon Hodlonaut questioned his focus on \u201crace and gender.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Antonopolous was unrepentant. \u201cI will not apologize for being an \u2018SJW,\u2019\u201d he wrote, characterizing the backlash as: \u201cA lot of whining because I didn\u2019t allow the implicit bias to drive 90% of my podcast interviews but only 75-80%. Oh the horror.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Eth wing<\/h2>\n

Bitcoiners and Ethereans clearly have differences, which is why Crypto Twitter is beset with largely pointless debates about \u201csupply gate\u201d and \u201cpre-mined coin scams.\u201d When Peter McCormack, the host of <\/span>What Bitcoin Did<\/span><\/i><\/a>, asked his followers \u201cWhat is BTC v ETH really about?\u201d influencer American Hodl summed it up as: \u201cLiberals do Ethereum and Conservatives do Bitcoin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not quite that simple of course: Plenty of left-wing people are into Bitcoin, and plenty of right-wing people like Ether. Even Weyl can\u2019t be easily boxed into the left or the right, as he somehow manages to combine his love of socialism with a love <\/span>of right-wing libertarian hero Ayn Rand<\/span><\/a>. As Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver told Cointelegraph Magazine: \u201cBoth camps are so big now that there are people from every political persuasion involved now.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>And politics understandably comes a distant second when there\u2019s money to be made. As DeFi influencer Degen Spartan said when explaining that he\u2019s not a Bitcoin maximalist or an Ethereum maximalist: \u201cI\u2019m a profit Maxi.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But still, there is a widespread perception that those with conservative or right-wing ideas are more drawn to Bitcoin and those of a more progressive bent support Team Ethereum. A CoinDesk survey of <\/span>1,200 crypto users<\/span><\/a> in 2018 lent weight to this idea, finding that 55% of Ethereans tended left, while 55% of Bitcoiners tended Right. A further 3% of Bitcoiners claimed to be nihilists, which may explain all those Pepe the Frog crypto <\/span>edgelords<\/span> on 4chan.<\/span><\/p>\n

(As an interesting aside, the more hard currency focused the coin, the more right wing, with Monero coming in at 57% right wing, Bitcoin Cash (63%) and Litecoin (69%). The DASH guys must have cupboards full of MAGA hats and Tiki Torches because 78% of them are on the right.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Quantum Economics<\/span><\/a> founder Mati Greenspan says there are philosophical differences between the two leading cryptocurrency projects that help explain these tendencies.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes sense given the nature of what the coins do,\u201d he said. \u201cI would assume that most people that are into Bitcoin are people who advocate for less government intervention \u2014 and especially less government intervention in money \u2014 simply because that\u2019s what Bitcoin was built for.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as Ethereum is concerned, that has many more practical applications that don\u2019t necessarily have to do with governments or banking or even finance in general. It appeals to anyone who\u2019s into technology.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenspan cautions that he\u2019s not basing his views on hard data but says that from what he\u2019s observed: \u201cPeople who prefer Bitcoin are the type of people who are kind of set in their ways, or that are of a strong mind. Whereas people who use Ethereum and other altcoins are generally going to be more people who are more open to new ideas.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bitcoin as right-wing software<\/h2>\n

Professor David Golumbia is the author of <\/span>The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism<\/span><\/i>. In the <\/span>polemic<\/span>, he argues that not only was Bitcoin borne out of the right-wing libertarian culture of the cypherpunks but that the technology itself is inherently right wing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s little doubt that key figures in Bitcoin\u2019s prehistory such as Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May and John Gilmore were staunch libertarians. They opposed big government and taxation and worried about privacy, the rise of the surveillance state and freedom of speech.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Golumbia says the ideas of right-wing Austrian economist <\/span>Murray Rothbard<\/span><\/a>, who coined the political philosophy \u201canarcho-capitalism,\u201d were also very influential to Bitcoin\u2019s early days. That extremely libertarian form of politics that advocates for the elimination of centralized states in favor of self-ownership, private property and <\/span>laissez-faire<\/span><\/i> style free markets obviously will sound familiar to anyone who has been around Bitcoiners.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was born out of anarcho-capitalism,\u201d Golumbia says of Bitcoin. \u201cRothbard has these ideas that there is a single thing called the \u2018State\u2019 whose only point of existence is to enslave people. The only free individual is somebody who is free of government. And these people believed \u2014 and they still believe \u2014 that it was possible to use encryption technology to hide oneself from the state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Golumbia\u2019s view, Bitcoin was designed to become the currency of this new realm, money outside of the control of the state. (Golumbia\u2019s theory runs into trouble attributing this political ideology to Satoshi Nakamoto directly, and he barely mentions him in our hour-long chat.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Needless to say, Golumbia is not a fan of the whole culture. He calls May \u2014 the author of the <\/span>Crypto Anarchist Manifesto<\/span><\/i> \u2014 \u201ca pretty racist, sexist, very disturbing guy\u201d and paints a portrait of the <\/span>cypherpunk mailing list<\/span><\/a> as a sort of alt-right techie version of the <\/span>Tea Party<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is really loud and vicious when you read it, full of hate directed at a lot of people. It intersects with a lot of other anti-government movements we have in the world,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Needless to say, this view is highly contested. McCormack called it \u201cinsulting\u201d when I described it to him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey were certainly paranoid, and I think legitimately paranoid,\u201d said McCormack. \u201cBut I wouldn\u2019t say right wing at all. I would almost imagine a lot of them apolitical. They just wanted to build a better world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI consider them a group of freedom fighters who recognize the overreach of the state, the risks associated with lack of privacy, increases in surveillance, and abuse of the money system by corrupt politicians. They wanted to build tools and technologies to free themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think if anything, they\u2019re a group of fucking heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everybody was an AnCap<\/h2>\n

Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver said that when he got involved in 2011, the early Bitcoiners were all libertarians with a strong belief in free markets. He doesn\u2019t see such views as right wing. \u201cJust read about the thoughts of early Bitcoiners like myself, Ross Ulbricht, Gavin Andresen, and others,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were all libertarians, not conservatives or right-wingers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Voluntaryism<\/span><\/a> \u2014 which is an offshoot of anarcho-capitalism \u2014 was \u201cwhat motivated me and others to get involved and promote Bitcoin early on.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBitcoin was made up and promoted by a bunch of anarcho-capitalists originally. Later, its development community was taken over by a bunch of blue-haired San Francisco leftists types. Most of the AnCaps have moved on to coins like BCH, or ETH.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kain Warwick, the founder of Ethereum-based DeFi protocol Synthetix, said that no one involved in the early days of Bitcoin could correctly be called a conservative.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou couldn\u2019t be a conservative in the sense of trying to maintain the status quo in the legacy financial system. You had to see some problem that you thought needed to be solved in order for Bitcoin to make sense to you,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, those blue-haired leftists were gaining numbers. Buterin describes two strands of political thought growing together in Bitcoin\u2019s early days. \u201cIn the crypto space, as early as in 2010 or 2012, there were a lot of people interested in libertarianism, and a lot of people interested in socialism,\u201d Buterin <\/span>said<\/span><\/a>. \u201cThere was this kind of idealistic energy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While the two strands can be reconciled, Ethereans\u2019 approach to rapid technological progress and evolving codebases is much more difficult to reconcile with Bitcoiners who are invested in protecting the fundamental properties of Bitcoin. successfully merge. As Bitcoin\u2019s ideology around hard money, fixed supply, decentralization and security became stronger, the Bitcoin community became more resistant to changes to its fundamental properties. Something Ver discovered during the damaging <\/span>block size debate<\/span><\/a> that led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bitcoin Magazine co-founder Buterin also ran up against an unwillingness to experiment when he argued in 2013 that Bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. When he failed to get support, he launched Ethereum in January 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

Viewed this way, the Bitcoin\u2013Ethereum battle is not so much \u201cLeft vs. Right,\u201d but \u201cProgress vs. Stability.\u201d If, as Warwick said, no one in the early days of Bitcoin could be conservatives, then have Bitcoiners now become the new conservatives set on maintaining the crypto-financial order?<\/span><\/p>\n

Jonathan Haidt, in <\/span>The Righteous Mind: <\/span><\/i>Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion<\/span><\/i>, makes the point<\/span> that Liberals and Conservatives are both largely correct about their central concerns \u2014 they just prioritize different values and don\u2019t understand where the other side is coming from. The same is probably true for Bitcoin and Ethereum. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>For many Bitcoiners, it\u2019s all about hard money, stability, immutability and security, so they\u2019re unwilling to risk what\u2019s been built. Why improve on perfection? That makes Ethereum a fail. But for many Ethereans, it\u2019s all about experimenting in the name of making technological progress, which makes Bitcoin a fail. If a few things get broken along the way \u2014 like the DAO hack, ICO scammers and DeFi smart contract bugs \u2014 that\u2019s just the cost of progress.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d rather avoid \u2018left\u2019 and \u2018right wing,\u2019\u201d said Bitcoiner McCormack. \u201cI\u2019d rather say Bitcoin is conservative; therefore, it\u2019s likely to attract more people with conservative viewpoints.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMove slowly. Don\u2019t fuck this up. This is the best money we\u2019ve ever had. It\u2019s slowly, slowly simple, simple.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd yes, Ethereum you could argue is\u2026\u201d McCormack clearly couldn\u2019t bring himself to call Ethereum more progressive. Instead he said: \u201cI think Ethereum people just want to go out and experiment, kind of like scientists, experimental technologists. They want to do a lot more with it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mad scientist<\/h2>\n

Warwick is one of those scientists who is comfortable with change. Synthetix began life as a stablecoin project, morphed into synthetic derivatives, and continues to reinvent itself once or twice a year as new ideas come along.<\/span><\/p>\n

He attempted to integrate Bitcoin with online payments in 2012 but saw the technology as a starting point, rather than a finished product.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who wanted to opt out of the legacy financial system, a lot of those people, you know, ended up in Bitcoin,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then people who wanted to kind of extend the power of Bitcoin and extend the potential of what could be built ended up in Ethereum. If you didn\u2019t end up in Ethereum, almost by definition, you were someone who was kind of less open to innovation and more conservative.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenspan makes the point that Bitcoin is also much bigger, which limits its ability to turn on a dime.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBitcoin is a whale compared to Ethereum, which is more like a fly \u2014 but you know, flies can move a lot faster than whales can,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can do different things. Sometimes they\u2019ll keep running into a window in the hope of finding an exit, whereas whales are pretty predictable. They\u2019re not going to suddenly turn around and go the other way.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Warwick believes that the Ethereum community embraces more progressive politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Crypto Twitter that I\u2019m in is very deep Ethereum Twitter,\u201d he explained. \u201cThere is an awareness of societal issues outside of just financial infrastructure. I think that people are much more open to these things and some questioning of the structure of society and how it\u2019s evolved,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

This political bent shares some similarities with Silicon Valley\u2019s left-wing, utopian politics, where technology is seen as something that \u201ccan kind of solve all of the world\u2019s problems.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI am very sympathetic to that view,\u201d Warwick said. \u201cOne of the interesting things about Ethereum is this idea of restructuring the financial infrastructure of the world to make it more open and transparent, and lower barriers to entry. I think it\u2019s really powerful. Technological progress could be one of the biggest levers that we\u2019ve ever seen in terms of improving the world. So, I still am hopeful and optimistic about technological progress.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Which isn\u2019t to say many Bitcoiners don\u2019t also dream of a better and brighter future due to Bitcoin\u2019s innate properties. But there\u2019s also considerable focus on Bitcoin as an insurance policy against hyperinflation and the collapse of fiat, which is an altogether more dystopian future.<\/span><\/p>\n

The flipside of the utopia<\/h2>\n

McCormack has a much less positive view of Ethereum\u2019s grand ambitions. \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot more interference on the left, a lot more desire for rules about what you can, you can\u2019t do, for that kind of stupid equality of outcome,\u201d he said. \u201cI think, I think you may find that a little bit of that in the Bitcoin versus Ethereum thing. I have noticed that Vitalik tends to express more socialist opinions, which is perhaps why Ethereum\u2019s monetary policy is looser than that of Bitcoin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Having an undisputed leader like Buterin in a \u201cdecentralized\u201d project also sees Ethereum accused of top-down control and centralized planning. Bitcoin maximalist Samson Mow from Blockstream attacked Buterin on McCormack\u2019s <\/span>podcast<\/span><\/a> in mid-August for saying years ago that \u201cthe internet of money should not cost five cents a transaction.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>\u201cThat is very anti-free market,\u201d Mow claimed. \u201cThat\u2019s a Soviet-type economic event. That\u2019s a central planning agency that sets the levels of production wages and prices of goods, whereas I think most Bitcoiners are very free market and capitalists, which is, you know, transactions will cost what they cost.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>On HackerNoon, journalist Kay Kurokawa <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> of Ethereum that \u201cits leftist tendency is made clear by the grandiose plans of its developers and the actions it has taken to resolve difficult situations such as <\/span>the DAO hack<\/span><\/a>. Their proposed move to proof of stake will certainly move Ethereum even further to the left.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>But for all of this criticism of Ethereum\u2019s politics, it\u2019s not a particularly ideological project. McCormack himself made this point at the end of the Buterin\/Samson Mow debate.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, I think what\u2019s really missing in Ethereum is a strong philosophical backbone,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what Bitcoin has, and why we don\u2019t have yield farming and YAMs and all this bullshit existing on Bitcoin because it\u2019s very simple and just focused on one thing, which is what I like about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The love you take is equal to the love you make<\/h2>\n

In the end, what unites people in the blockchain world is arguably more important than what divides us. One thing that almost everyone interviewed for this piece agreed on was that there continues to be a wide streak of libertarianism running through crypto culture. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Although what is known as \u201cLibertarianism\u201d is most closely associated these days with guns and freedom lovers on the American right, there have been plenty of left-wing libertarian movements over the years from the peace and love hippies to anti-authoritarian punk rockers. Libertarianism is probably best described as a preference that\u2019s at the opposite end of the scale to authoritarianism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think a lot of the people who are building the space truly believe that there are fundamental flaws in the status quo and want to fix them, and I think that most of the time, or quite often, that does come from some sense of anti-authoritarianism or being against the establishment,\u201d said Warwick.<\/span><\/p>\n

At a deeper level, anti-authoritarianism seems baked into the design of blockchain itself. Authoritarian elements on the far left and the far right might want to impose their crackpot ideologies by force, but that can\u2019t happen with a genuinely decentralized blockchain project \u2014 because there is no central authority able to impose it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDecentralization is a libertarian concept by nature. For sure,\u201d said Greenspan.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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