Bitcoin and Anarchism
The anarchist movement, which opposes any government at all, began around
1880 and followed a slow growth path, according to a search for anarchist or
anarchism on Google Ngrams. But the term itself dates back decades earlier, to
the work of philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and others. Proudhon described
anarchism in 1840 as follows:
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven,
numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled,
checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have
neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.4
Proudhon’s words clearly appeal to people who feel frustrated by authority or
blame authority for their lack of personal fulfillment. It took about forty years
for anarchism to reach epidemic proportions, but it has shown immense staying
power, even to this day. Indeed, the Bitcoin.org website carries a passage by
anarchist Sterlin Lujan, dated 2016:
Bitcoin is the catalyst for peaceful anarchy and freedom. It was built as a
reaction against corrupt governments and financial institutions. It was not
solely created for the sake of improving financial technology. But some
people adulterate this truth. In reality, Bitcoin was meant to function as a
monetary weapon, as a cryptocurrency poised to undermine authority.5
Most Bitcoin enthusiasts might not describe their enthusiasm in such extreme
terms, but this passage seems to capture a central element of their narrative. Both
cryptocurrencies 
and 
blockchains 
(the 
accounting 
systems 
for 
the
cryptocurrencies, which are by design maintained democratically and
anonymously by large numbers of individuals and supposedly beyond the
regulation of any government) seem to have great emotional appeal for some
people, kindling deep feelings about their position and role in society. The
Bitcoin story is especially resonant because it provides a counternarrative to the
older antianarchist narratives depicting anarchists as bomb-throwing lunatics
whose vision for society can lead only to chaos and violence. Bitcoin is a
contagious counternarrative because it exemplifies the impressive inventions that
a free, anarchist society would eventually develop.

The term hacker ethic is another modern embodiment of such anarchism.
Before the widespread availability of the World Wide Web, sociologist Andrew
Ross wrote, in 1991,
The hacker ethic, first articulated in the 1950s among the famous MIT
students who developed multiple-access user systems, is libertarian and
crypto-anarchist in its right-to-know principles and its advocacy of
decentralized technology.6
In his 2001 book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, Pekka
Himanen wrote about the ethic of the “passionate programmers.”7 In the Internet
age, people’s willingness and ability to work together with new technology—in
new frameworks that do not rely on government, on conventional profit, or on
lawyers—have surprised many of us. For example, wikis, notably Wikipedia,
encourage cooperation among large numbers of anonymous people to produce
amazing information repositories. Another success story is the Linux operating
system, which is open-source and distributed for free.
But among the many examples of viral economic narratives, Bitcoin stands
supreme. It is a narrative that is well crafted for contagion, effectively capturing
the anarchist spirit; and, of course, that is why most of us have heard of it. It is
part bubble story, part mystery story. It allows nonexperts and everyday people
to participate in the narrative, allowing them to feel involved with and even build
their identity around Bitcoin. Equally appealing, the narrative generates stories
of untold riches.

Bitcoin as a Human-Interest Narrative
The Bitcoin narrative is a motivating narrative for the cosmopolitan class around
the world, for people who aspire to join that class, and for those who identify
with advanced technology. And like many economic narratives, Bitcoin has its
celebrity hero, Satoshi Nakamoto, who is a central human-interest story for
Bitcoin. Adding to the romance of the Bitcoin narrative is a mystery story, for
Satoshi Nakamoto has never been seen by anyone who will testify to having
seen him. One early Bitcoin codeveloper said that Satoshi communicated only
by email and that the two had never met in person.8 On its website, Bitcoin.org
says only, “Satoshi left the project in late 2010 without revealing much about
himself.”
People love mystery stories and love to unravel the mystery, so much so that
there is a rich genre of mystery literature. Bitcoin’s mystery story has been
repeated many times, especially when intrepid detectives have identified a
person who may be Nakamoto. The repeated publicity for an intriguing mystery
made the contagion rate of the Bitcoin narrative higher than it would have been
otherwise.