The Bitcoin Foundation should be Destroyed
https://disband.it/218/arcanum-imperii/My words should not be mistaken as part of some centralization controversy. I’m not complaining that the Foundation is corrupt, superfluous, or has undue development influence. I’m willing to be realistic and admit the original intentions of the organization’s founders (Make dough with regulatory cover, bonus points for veneer of public respectability). Like any capable postmodern shysters, they couldn’t just rip us off. It was better to color the whole affair with a farcical civic-mindedness. To run around with this annoyingly earnest mien.
We find their type outside the Foundation as well. I still recall Jaron Lukasiewicz spreading his perfectly bleached asshole for Ben Lawsky back in July, only the day after BitLicense dropped:
“…the BitLicense is an important asset that will allow us to provide US banking and regulatory protection to our target customer group. I’m happy to see the New York DFS making tangible progress towards offering the first achievable regulatory bitcoin license in the country.”
The first, but certainly not the last!
I say attack the Foundation because it is the think tank of the bitcoin counter-revolution. Its record (hey guys, this time we focus on core dev, for reals) is and will continue to be the (re)production of the state-form in bitcoin thought. Yes, the State-form. That reef on which the revolutions of the past two centuries ship-wrecked. Unseen by the hapless steersmen who with their organization set sail in the name of technological libertarianism.
But bitcoin isn’t ideological! Some stripling yips, dimly aware the slogan is NATO-grade BZ.
What to make of them? The mises-thumping market liberals, the high finance back-benchers, these… startup people. Each in his turn discovers modern political economy’s happy accident, a working stateless currency, and each continues the promotion of the State to de jure universality. They next rally around this word. Oh, you remember it. Every stunted little nequient and pasty oddity shrieks it in choral unison. The signature term of our gigantic Stockholm syndrome: Legitimacy.
The Bitcoin Foundation is a Legitimacy Machine
Think of how bad it could have been, writes Jim Harper, acknowledging the enormous criticism now. We had to ensure bitcoin and its human network were palatable, discernible objects of state power. To make bitcoin fit within the pre-defined models of acceptable political-economic practice. Luckily:
“[Murk] set the tone for public policy in the U.S. today, which summarizes as ‘getting the benefits of Bitcoin while mitigating the risks.'”
And everyone agrees! Everyone agrees with elevating bitcoin to a sublime moment of mainstream acceptability by way of security normalization.
The Foundation’s was a crusade for some abstract unity, fueled by a syncretist drive for it all to work–with permission. But bitcoin with permission denies the universe of political and economic multiplicities that stare at us from beneath all this code. It deforms the raw difference of bitcoin into sameness.
What about we cryptos? We who find the risks of bitcoin to be its benefits? We are damned to a Hell of the Same.
We’re at the heart of the matter now. This Bitcoin Foundation works to provide the moral foundation for state action against bitcoin. Its apologists’ proliferating canards aren’t just the justification of the state-form in thought, but the State’s literal and active manifestation. For the State is not just institutional, it is immanent in thought- it guides, even determines thought’s possibilities.
Be realistic, Harper admonishes us. Recognize how the world works.
“This is Advanced public policy. I do hope everyone is following along.”
Mfw career wonk pulls rank over political realism.
It’s been two years of this “time to grow up and overcome your dangerous idealism” now. I remember the day we announced the Dark Wallet, the FT reporter called back and said the Foundation wouldn’t go on the record but kept telling her to drop our story and cover the nine million dollar Circle investment. And of course. Allaire is avowedly, even boastfully anti-libertarian. The Foundation knows he’s a grownup who gets it.
The Terror
Charlie Shrem’s defense counsel at sentencing:
“This is the big leagues now, this is American business. To be an American business means to be a grownup, follow the rules. That message is loud and clear.”
Shrem’s pathetic prepared remarks, as earnestly felt as, say, James Foley’s.
“No one [in bitcoin] is doing this anymore, they’re terrified … Bitcoin needs to stay away from criminals, from people taking actions that I did […] I need to be out there … helping the world to make sure they don’t do a stupid thing like I did.”
The invocation of terror is apt. We’re at the mercy of moral terrorists. The federales and the Foundation tell us that some novel uses of bitcoin are not just illegal, they’re wrong. Morality, the state discourse of Family America.
The Family was all there this year at a little invitation-only event called “Virtual Currency Workshop” and organized by Business Executives for National Security (Because National Security is about Executing Business). CENTCOM was there. And so was our beloved Foundation. Hey, what did they talk about? Chatham House Rule, brother. Impolite to ask. But our old friend Mr. Harper didn’t miss the chance to moralize to NBC. He explains his complicity with terror later.
“We won’t publicize individual meetings or their content, for example, because doing so would undermine trust with people we are trying to learn from and influence. That’s offensive to acolytes of radical transparency…”
But you are being transparent, Mr. Harper. We can see right through you.
I should say that I agree with the pimps and legitimists and reality fundamentalists in one respect, however. There is a maturity problem. This Foundation lot was never philosophically seasoned enough to prevent their experiment from getting away from them. Harper is right. Pivot all you want, but you’ve built a machine that does something else entirely.
To war on the State one must also wage war on the principles which provide state power with a moral and rational foundation.
I invite you to the ritual destruction of the Bitcoin Foundation.
