Implications of the Crypto Boom
Well well well. It turns out that crypto was NOT dead, was NOT over, not at all. This is, of course, what I have been saying all along because I actually know what is going on around here, unlike the many, many, many liberal “critics”, including professional critics building their careers on tech critique, who literally made fun of crypto for years, making sure no one took it seriously, right up to the exact second that Bitcoin completely went through the roof. As a result, the left is woefully unprepared for a moment where crypto in all is entering into a long. Long. Long. Bull run.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about crypto, is that: it is a full-fledged financial system that is owned and controlled by venture capitalists. This is self-evidently true, they are where all of this came from, they funded and own all the crypto companies, they have huge and dominating amounts of crypto itself, they own and manage all the infrastructure, they do all the marketing, they are funding the campaigns against the SEC, they are backing crypto-friendly politicians, the Bitcoin paper itself came out of a den of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and so on. And what is involved in “crypto” is not merely Bitcoin or memecoins but rather a fully functional financial system, INCLUDING the currency, including banks, including loans companies, and including a crypto “S&P”, the crypto stock market, which the CEO of Coinbase recently “pre-announced” in an interview and called the “Coinbase 500”.
Add to this the massive weight going into the tokenization of real estate and other assets, and what you have, again, is simply a new, independent financial system — that is completely owned and controlled by a small group of fascist venture capitalists. So, when we talk about the “crypto bull run”, what we are ACTUALLY talking about is the RISE of the VENTURE CAPITAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM.
Implications, what can we expect, where are we going?
When in doubt about the sustainability of the “crypto bubble”, please keep in mind that the potential market for the venture capital financial system is in fact the global economy. Even a few slices of that, which they are skillfully targeting (I.e. the ETFs), represents a massively impactful financial force. For example, all of the rich people of the world have portfolios of investments. These portfolios aim to be diversified - I.e., to have a large range of eggs in a large range of baskets. And even in that alone, if a bunch of those people start putting even 1% of their portfolios into Bitcoin, that is a giant fucking market that Bitcoin -alone- has only begun to tap into. This is a blue oceans situation for them and really the only place to go is up.
This is a financial system that is already operating globally and more than that, nation-state actors are becoming key players; we see this most clearly in El Salvador and Argentina, both with fascists installed at the head of government (Bukele and Milei respectively, Milei who opened for Trump at CPAC, generating such headlines as “Trump exchanges a close hug with Argentine President Javier Milei at conservative summit”). Both of these fascists adopted crypto as legal tender as key parts of the transition to power. And both of these leaders, especially Milei, have been trumpeted and adored and paid homage by such central crypto fascists as Marc Andreessen. THEE most important developments in crypto are happening at the geopolitical level and happening around the adoption or non-adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender at the nation-state level, with all of the venture capital activity that comes along with that (crypto tourism, new startups, money pouring into the tech economy, backing of politicians, etc).
What is happening in these instances is fascists turning over their country and currency to venture capitalists, transforming the country into one that benefits venture capitalists and their cronies. Take the El Salvador bitcoin mine, on the site of its precious and valuable volcano, which turns over more profits to investors than to the people. Or Honduras, which is trying to fight off the venture fascists as they colonize the Honduran island of Roatan, setting up medical experimentation startups and Bitcoin schools.
One of the biggest coming impacts of the crypto bull run is the way that venture capitalists have been accumulating political capital, deploying huge crypto funds, designing fake grassroots campaigns out of its memecoin pools — all of which means that crypto is about to have a MAJOR impact on upcoming American elections. One of the major vehicles they are using is the Fairshake superpac, weighing in around $100 million, not much in terms of tech money but its amazing how far tech money can take you in the real world. Fairshake recently spent $10 million in attack ads against a Dem senate candidate, with some extremely concerning tactics that point to how crypto VCs are working overtime (kidding, they never work overtime) to hook up the “crypto community” to the political apparatus: “The targeted digital splash from Fairshake will push the anti-Porter ads directly to crypto owners ahead of next Tuesday's primary, Axios has learned… Porter's campaign argued the ads from the super PAC aren't about crypto, but "a handful of greedy billionaires rigging an election." “
Then you have Coinbase, with their “Stand with Crypto” campaign, “Stand With Crypto has gotten results, with its trademark shield omnipresent in profile names across Crypto Twitter. The organization claims a successful digital campaign with more than 310,000 “advocates””… “Stand With Crypto has been flying entrepreneurs to D.C. to meet with the offices of prominent lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and hosting town halls in places like Ohio and New York to bring together community members (again, mostly crypto entrepreneurs) and local lawmakers to talk policy. It even hosted a presidential debate in New Hampshire in December, although it was only attended by third-tier candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and Dean Phillips.”
So yeah basically these fucks are extremely serious about continuing their attacks on the United States government (see also: them blowing up Silicon Valley Bank to onboard onto its crypto infrastructure, them engaging in a war to dismantle the SEC whose major charter is to protect the American economy, etc).
I wrote months ago about the emergence of crypto as a fascist political function and body, observable in El Salvador and Argentina, and increasingly visible in the US. From that earlier piece: “What I find remarkable for our purposes is the way that these events point to the existence of a new political element — the Bitcoin and crypto body — as a floating, international political body, involved and invested in global elections for which it has no other interest than increasing the value of Bitcoin through country adoption ushered in by fascists.”. (It’s only a matter of time until Trump gets behind this publicly, though his stance has already been more friendly to it on the campaign trail).
Of course another major implication of the crypto boom is WHO IS GETTING RICH and that is, in fact, venture capitalists and the tech class. The crypto boom is a massive infusion of wealth into this apparatus. If you think that venture capital is scary now, consider that they will likely 10-100x in the next 5 years as far as value of their assets, their infrastructure, and so on. We are looking at a situation that is entering a crypto-fueled hyper growth period and importantly, the opposition to crypto fascism *is not growing financially*. And because there are thriving bodies of fascists in crypto, that means that a lot of fucking fascists are making a lot of fucking money. I think we all know that it is not the left that is making money here, and look no further than Bored Ape Yacht Club from Yuga Labs, hundreds of millions in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and the logo is a literal Nazi SS logo. So we are talking about a huge boon to fascist elements all over the world as crypto continues to go through the roof. Meaningwhile we, the good guys, are broke.
I won’t go into it too much here because I recently published an update on the Network State - the plot of tech fascists to start their own sovereign nation-state, running of course, on crypto. I will simply remark here that the success of crypto and the bull run is also a key part of the growth of the Network State and as a result we are seeing significant scale happening, with new settlements in the Philippines just announced by Pronomos Capital, and a new “Prospera Africa” announced to extend the colonial settlement model in Honduras to the continent. The crypto bull run is the foundation of the rising fascist state.
Flagellating of the impotent left.
Words of encouragement.
Call to courage and materialism.
Highlight need for underground anti-fascism organizing.
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Now that the environment is thawing out around here and we are starting to have some better conversations about what is happening in tech, please check out the archives of this site. Most of this content was created prior to the start of the bubble and you can both marvel at how right I am but also get a LOT of the information we need to fight this round with the fascists. This stupid blog site doesn’t display the year in a lot of the posts except on the list posts page but they were written from end of 2022 til the present.