Crypto is overwhelmingly libertarian, as am I. However, those who tie the libertarian agenda to cryptocurrency – to use the latter as a direct, head-on means of undermining state or corporate power – do both a disservice. Because, y’know, most of the world isn’t libertarian.
How to use crypto to achieve liberal aims? Napoleon** perhaps put it best:
“Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs, but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results; the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe.”
To that end – good luck today, Josh Wise! The multitude is rooting for you.
**Note: I have seen, and an earlier version of this blogpost had, these words attributed to Martin van Buren, eighth President of the United States. It didn’t sound like a very presidential utterance so I did a bit of digging; as it happens, the quotation appears in Emmanuel comte de Las Cases’ Memoirs of the Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon (1835), published before van Buren was elected President and the words’ appearance in van Buren’s notebooks. So that settles that.
