Is #Bitcoin a fascist currency? White supremacist Richard Spencer once claimed Bitcoin as the ‘currency of the alt-right’ and many scholars note the overlaps between the far right central bank conspiracy theories and some of the ideas that influenced its early developers 1/9 https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1349989737210269696

The @splcenter also maintains an extensive record of the far-right groups that benefit from Bitcoin: https://www.splcenter.org/bitcoin-and-alt-right

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Bitcoin isn't a fascist currency though: it's not a really a currency at all. Bitcoin is a predominantly a tool for unregulated speculation. Price fluctuations & lack of security mean only the most desperate actors who have exhausted all other means would use it as currency 3/9

There is another history to Bitcoin though, one in which disparate developers collaborate on open-source projects to provide free alternatives to platforms that harvest and sell our data. 4/9

This history has been traced by scholars such as @jayapapaya and @lanalana and can be seen in projects that veer away from Bitcoin and seek to use blockchain for other purposes, beginning as early as 2011 with Namecoin which draws on ideas of mutualism, not far-right ideology 5/9

Anyone who knows anything about Bitcoin & blockchain knows that these remain marginal experimentations – the vast majority of the crypto space is dominated by scams, money laundering and dark markets. But this doesn’t mean progressive experimentations are negligible. 6/9

On the contrary, they are all the more interesting. STS teaches us that technology innovations always produce multiple pathways for development, and determining which pathways grow, and which ones are abandoned, are the actions of social groups that engage with the technology 7/9

This is why following such marginal experimentations is important – they reveal alternative functionalities & uses that would otherwise go undiscovered, and they highlight the contested politics of technology, debunking technological determinism. 8/9

@PositiveBlock @p2pmod and @TBSocialist are all great sources for finding out about these progressive experimentations beneath the cacophony of scams and reactionaries 9/9