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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Zoe Williams

What’s the true value of crypto? It lays bare the lies of libertarians

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried leaving a Manhattan court hearing for fraud charges, on 3 January.
Markets have never been free; they are social spaces … Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried leaving a Manhattan court hearing for fraud charges, on 3 January. Photograph: David Dee Delgado/Reuters

I’ve laboured hard not to engage with cryptocurrency, to turn the page on its scandals and file its many bin fires under “fools and their money being easily parted”. But this has been a mistake, because the story is just getting good.

The PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel said in 2020 that crypto was one of two poles of technological conflict, the other being artificial intelligence. AI could “theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy” while crypto “holds out the prospect of a decentralised and individualised world”. He concluded that AI is communist and crypto is libertarian; it was unnecessary to add which of those he thought was better.

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