Due to surging exchange rates in the past few months, the opening of Bitcoin futures, and the likelihood of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the near future, there is renewed mainstream interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Mainstream investors tend to be attracted to the profit potential, portfolio diversification, and technological curiosities of cryptocurrency. But there are other benefits of cryptocurrencies which may scare away the average investor. Let us consider eight activities which can be performed with or aided by Bitcoin and its alternatives that will be cheered by political outsiders to the chagrin of the establishment.

1. Tax Evasion

Charles Stross famously complained that 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.”

The problem is that he views this as a negative. From a moral standpoint, taxation is armed robbery, slavery, racketeering, trespassing, communicating threats, receiving stolen money, and conspiracy to commit the aforementioned crimes. If anyone dared to challenge the state’s monopoly on tax collection, they could face any of these criminal charges. By doing business in cryptocurrencies and taking additional steps to protect one’s identity (Bitcoin is pseudonymous rather than anonymous, though other cryptocurrencies are fully anonymous), one can keep part or all of one’s income and stored wealth away from Leviathan’s watchful eye. Establishment politicians and pundits will decry tax evasion as immoral. But as Murray Rothbard writes,

“Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one’s house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns.”[1]

The weapon of cryptocurrency is thus more of a shield than a sword, though it may be employed in an offensive posture (see #8).

2. Agorism

One way to reduce the size and scope of the state is to starve it of funds. Agorism is a strategy introduced by Samuel Konkin for reducing and eventually eliminating state power by expanding the size and scope of gray and black markets. As more people rely on the informal economy to a greater extent, they will develop a culture of resistance against state power while depriving governments of revenue by keeping their taxable income out of official records. This will incense people who believe that the state is necessary for the provision of essential services such as military defense and legal systems, but those services could be performed by private entities if they were not forcibly stopped from doing so by state monopolies. It will also worry those who believe that governments must take care of the poor and down-trodden, but private charity is quite capable of solving the problem, especially with tax burdens removed.

3. Undermining Prohibition

From the beginning of the original Silk Road, cryptocurrency has played a role in helping people to obtain goods and services that are prohibited by state laws. Though that site was shuttered by government intervention, this had more to do with the incompetence of Ross Ulbricht than with any inherent flaw in Silk Road or Bitcoin. Since then, many other sites have been created to serve the same purpose. This is a terrifying prospect for drug warriors and gun control advocates, who believe that strict laws against the sale of such goods are necessary to keep communities safe. But the available evidence suggests that state bans only raise the prices of banned goods while increasing the violence involved in their trade. Thankfully, online black markets will continue to undermine prohibitionist policies while reducing the amount of violence involved in both law enforcement and black market disputes.

4. Circumventing Child Labor Laws

Most developed countries prohibit children under a certain age from working. Proponents of child labor legislation believe that it is necessary to protect children from exploitation and lack of education. However, in most places where child labor is still prevalent, it is better than the alternatives of lackluster schooling, child prostitution, or starvation. In more developed countries, child labor laws prevent children from earning income, learning useful trade skills, building a work ethic, and avoiding indoctrination by the state. Cryptocurrencies provide a framework to allow people to hire and pay children outside of official channels (see #2), while smart contracts on a cryptocurrency blockchain can prevent wage theft and other exploitation.

5. Circumventing Capital Controls

In many countries, there are laws that forbid carrying more than a certain amount of money or goods out of the country. Such laws are easy to enforce when currencies are centralized in a specific country, and when money and goods must take physical form, as precious metals and cash do. But cryptocurrencies are not particular to any physical location and do not require a physical form. This allows a person to trade one’s fiat currency or precious metal in one country for cryptocurrency, travel to another country, and either sell the cryptocurrency for fiat currency or precious metal in the other country or use the cryptocurrency directly. Economic protectionists may argue that this weakens the economy of the nation that experiences capital flight, but capital flight would not be occurring if the nation experiencing it had a more responsible government that was not creating adverse economic conditions.

6. Financing Disapproved Activism

Political dissidents and the causes they support are frequently rejected by the legacy financial system. Banks, credit cards, Paypal, and other money handlers have a long history of closing accounts and denying service to people and groups that oppose the current power structure with sufficient ardency and effectiveness. This occurs partly because these companies tend to be controlled by virtue-signaling members of the establishment, and partly because government regulators can make business difficult or impossible for companies that refuse to crack down on dissidents. If there were no other options, then the establishment would be able to effectively eliminate its opposition by starving them out. But ever since Wikileaks came to depend on Bitcoin donations for funding, cryptocurrencies have provided an alternative financial system that allows activists to make a living, engage in commerce, and perform their activism despite the disapproval of ruling elites.

7. Thwarting Monetary Policy

Ever since Keynesian economics became prevalent among policymakers, central bankers have sought to manipulate interest rates and the money supply to stimulate the economy. But in practice, this only distorts the economy further, encouraging those with capital to make malinvestments. True to the Austrian business cycle theory, this forms yet another economic bubble that then breaks, after which misguided commentators blame markets and call for yet more intervention. Over the long term, central banks also destroy the purchasing power of a currency, with the US dollar losing 96 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was formed in 1913. In order to continue to function, central banks must have a critical mass of economic transactions occur in the currency that they manipulate. Should enough people make the switch away from state-backed fiat currencies, monetary policy will lose its effectiveness. Cryptocurrencies threaten this critical mass by offering an alternative to people who wish to opt out of the scam of central banking and own an asset that appreciates over time.

8. Assassination Markets

Perhaps the most controversial application for cryptocurrencies is known as a death pool or an assassination market. First theorized by Tim May and fleshed out by Jim Bell in the 1990s, assassination markets predict the date on which a particular person will die and provide payment to those who guess correctly. This incentivizes an assassin to bet on a certain date and kill the person on that date. The original proposal was made long before cryptocurrencies were invented, and thus called for the use of anonymous remailers. Cryptocurrencies render remailers obsolete, as they better serve the purpose of compensating the assassin without leaving evidence that law enforcement can use to discover the identity of the assassin and/or the crowdfunders. The goal is to increase the level of occupational hazard for being a politician or minion thereof to such an extent that the benefits of wielding state power are no longer worth the cost. The theoretical result is that if politicians, central bankers, enforcers, and other such people suddenly become frequent targets of assassination, then these occupations will cease to exist due to a lack of interest in assuming such roles. Although the establishment will only ever view such an approach as murderous, and cryptocurrency enthusiasts are deeply divided over the concept, there will almost certainly be many attempts to create assassination markets in the coming years.

References:

Rothbard, Murray (1982). The Ethics of Liberty. Humanities Press. p. 183

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