Cryptocurrencies were never apolitical. The fateful 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto treatise did not appear in an ideological vacuum: Notions of online privacy, proactive use of cryptography for protecting individual freedom, and denationalization of currency that informed the Bitcoin creator’s vision had been brewing for at least two decades, at least since the rise of the cypherpunk movement in the early 1990s. The libertarian spirit of individual sovereignty and suspicion of governments and central banks has dominated the intellectual milieu where the concept of digital cash was forged and developed into a working technology.

As cryptocurrencies went more mainstream, the core community’s ideological purity has somewhat diluted — however, even in 2018, almost half of crypto users identified as either libertarian or conservative, another label that, in the context of the United States, captures a lot of the individual liberty and anti-big government sentiment.

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