Bitcoin and the Fear of Inequality
In addition to tapping into anarchist sentiment and the mystery of Satoshi
Nakamoto, the Bitcoin story is a story of the desire for economic empowerment.
During the twenty-first century, as economic inequality in advanced countries
has increased rapidly, many people feel helpless, and they desire greater control
over their economic lives. Bitcoin prices first took off around the time of the
2011 Occupy Wall Street / “We are the 99%” protests. Adbusters, a social
activist organization that wanted its message to go viral, launched these protests
in the United States, and Occupy protests occurred in many other countries too.
It is no coincidence that the Bitcoin narrative is one of individual empowerment,
because, according to the narrative, the coins are anonymous and free of
government control, management, and reach.
Another part of the underlying narrative that has spurred Bitcoin’s and other
cryptocurrencies’ high contagion rate is the story of computers taking greater and
greater control of people’s lives. In the twenty-first century, people have access
to automated assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Alibaba’s
Tmall Genie, that understand human speech and respond knowledgeably and
intelligently to questions with a simulated human voice. In addition, driverless
cars, trucks, trains, and ships seem likely in the near future, raising the specter of
mass unemployment among truck drivers and other people who drive or navigate
for a living. The “technology is taking over our lives” narrative is the most
recent incarnation of a labor-saving-machinery narrative that has scared people
since the Industrial Revolution.
The insistent fear in this Luddite narrative (to which we will return in chapter
13) is that machines will replace jobs. The fear is not that you will show up for
work one day and be told that the company is purchasing a new computer that
will do your job. Rather, the changes are more gradual, inevitable, and cosmic.
More likely, as computers automate more tasks, you may find that your
employer seems increasingly indifferent to your presence, fails to offer pay
raises, does not encourage you to stay with the company, and doesn’t hire others
like you, and eventually no longer even remembers you. Fear about your future
is more an existential fear about not being needed.
In such an environment, options are eliminated. Computers can be educated
to perform new tasks many orders of magnitude faster than human beings can.

Calls for government expenditures on education of people to offset the job loss
created by computers seem justified, but it is hard to imagine that people can win
in the long run. Millions of students around the world question whether their
education is preparing them for success, creating an anxiety that indirectly feeds
the contagion of technologically driven cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which
seem at least superficially to offer some imaginable hope of mastering the
computers.

Bitcoin and the Future
The digital signature algorithm that underlies Bitcoin, that defines a Bitcoin’s
individual owner, and that makes it prohibitively difficult for thieves to steal
Bitcoin has received some attention since the early 1990s, but coverage of that
narrative epidemic cannot compare with coverage of Bitcoin itself. ProQuest
News & Newspapers finds only one article with the words elliptic curve digital
signature algorithm in its entire database. It finds only five articles that use the
phrase digital signature algorithm. The RSA algorithm, the original
cryptography algorithm that may have started the Bitcoin revolution, dates back
to 1977. ProQuest lists twenty-six articles that mention the RSA algorithm. But
that number doesn’t begin to compare with the fifteen thousand–plus articles that
mention the word Bitcoin.
The difference must result from the contagiousness of the larger Bitcoin
narrative. The phrase digital signature algorithm sounds like something a
student would be trying to memorize for an exam: technical, painful, boring.
There is so much more to the Bitcoin story. Notably, it is a story about how
Bitcoin investors have become rich simply by being aware of new things on the
cutting edge. Bitcoin is about the “future.” That sound bite is easily remembered,
a topic to bring up with enthusiasm in conversation at a social gathering. In
short, Bitcoin is a gem of a story.
People often buy Bitcoin because they want to be part of something exciting
and new, and they want to learn from the experience. This motivation is
particularly strong because of the underlying story, the narrative that computers
are poised to replace many of our jobs. But computers can’t replace all of our
jobs. Somebody has to control those computers, and there is a narrative today
that the people in charge of the new technology will be the winners. Very few
people feel secure that they will be on the winning end of this curve. Even taking
a degree in computer science doesn’t seem to be a sure path to success today,
because it may lead to a humdrum job as a low-level programmer, or even to no
job at all. A desire to be on the finance side of the tech business, where Bitcoin
sits, is popular because there are so many stories illustrating that financiers take
control of things. Bitcoin enthusiasts may think that experimenting with Bitcoin
will put them in touch with the people who are going to be winners in the new
world, will give them insight about how to stay in (or gain) control. It is easy to