A few months ago Charlie Stross wrote an article titled “Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire.” Charlie is one of my favorite science fiction writers, I have a lot of respect for him, and I pay attention to him even when he is very wrong, as I believe he is in this case.

I think Bitcoin is a very important development and a game-changer that can be used to bring about a better world. This seems evident to me, so I tend to think that the naysayers just don’t understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. But Charlie Stross does – his novel Halting State is dedicated to “Datacash Ltd. and all who sailed in her, 1997–2000,” and his masterpiece Accelerando introduces concepts similar to Decentralized Autonomous Corporations, now popular among Bitcoin fans.

When a smart and informed person hates something that should be loved, there may be a political agenda. And indeed, here it is:

“BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind – to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions,” says Charlie. “Which is fine if you’re a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).”

My (theoretical) view of Libertarianism is not too different from Charlie’s view – I think pure Libertarianism relies on oversimplified models (like every other political ideology) that hardly capture the complexity of the real world. So, I don’t want to live in a pure Libertarian world. But I do want to live in a MORE Libertarian world, one where everyone is free to pursue happiness in their own way without making others less happy, with some privacy, autonomy, and personal space. I am afraid today’s states – all states – are more and more opposed to personal freedom and addicted to bureaucratic control freakery, so I hope that Bitcoin will, indeed, damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions, so that we will have to radically reform the state. I am not a Libertarian, but at this moment in history I support Libertarianism.

Those who despise Libertarianism should pause and think of the alternative – authoritarianism. In an authoritarian society, regardless of the color of the ruling party, you don’t own yourself – you are owned by the state. All the civil rights that we enjoy today are the result of struggles for personal freedom, and today many civil rights are under attack by the state.

Some people mistake Libertarianism for its gun-loving, gay-hating, racist wing, but that is fake Libertarianism. Real Libertarianism is about your right to live your life as you wish, without limiting others’ right to do the same. It’s something that you should support. Again, I don’t think a pure Libertarian society would work, but I am persuaded that today the world needs many more Libertarian voices to counterbalance the rising control freakery.

“[Bitcoin is] inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society,” says Charlie. “You think our wonderful investment bankers aren’t paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion.”

​Evading taxes and recycling dirty money is bad. But I prefer a world where bad things can happen occasionally, to a world where everyone is miserable all the time. Wait a sec, one of my favorite science fiction writers said that better, let me quote him:

“We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” (Charles Stross, Singularity Sky)

Yes, Bitcoin can be used for bad things. Now that I think of it, also water can be used for bad things, including very bad things – there are forms of extremely painful torture that use water. But water is a good thing most of the times, and I prefer to live in a world with water.

The rich bad guys don’t need Bitcoin to evade taxes and recycle dirty money, because they already have very effective means to do that (and often with the complicity of bribed state bureaucrats). History and current news show that the state is powerless against the sophisticated financial tricks that the really rich people can use to hide their money – it’s the life of the rest of us, the little people, that is made miserable by over-regulation and state interference in every aspect of our life from the cradle to the grave.

I think of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as powerful social equalizers that offer everyone the financial freedom that only the very rich have enjoyed so far. If society is not able to cope with that, perhaps we should think of radical social reforms.

Bitcoin used to be thought of as electronic cash to buy drugs on Silk Road, but the real game changer is the distributed consensus encoded in the blockchain, which can be used not only to validate financial transactions but also for a lot of other things. For example open source, distributed, blockchain-based surveys, polling and voting systems, which could have huge positive social impact.