Bitcoin: A View From The Left with Ben Arc - WBD453
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2022
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Location: London Date: Thursday 13th January Project: LNbits, NOSTR Role: Bitcoin and free open source software advocate
What are the politics of Bitcoin? Satoshi in a post in 2008 said "It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly." And, it certainly has garnered a strong libertarian following, principally because of its unique utility to undermine governments' control of money.
However, Bitcoiners are a broad church. The original cypherpunks philosophy was predicated on anarchist ideals, to work outside of government controls. This attitude is analogous to a wide variety of political philosophies, including those on the left who feel disenfranchised by the current global capitalist hegemony.
There is a strong and growing group of left-leaning Bitcoiners, who see the protocol as a radical means of achieving a fairer society where the levers of power and organisation are controlled by a community rather than elites.
This may trigger a powerful section in Bitcoin whose views are antithetical to those on the left. And yet, this broad range of communities with divergent dogmas have all enabled Bitcoin to develop its critical mass. This is because early adopters viewing Bitcoin as a philosophy, whatever that philosophy may be, has inspired ardent advocacy and robust hodling behaviour.
It surely underlines the genius of Bitcoin's protocol if those with seemingly divergent opinions can all lay claim to the benefits of the technology. Furthermore, history has shown that robust societies are ones where ideas are debated, tested, and then synthesized. If we can do this as a community we have a real opportunity to lay the foundations for a more open and fair society.
In this interview, I talk to Ben Arc, an industrious Bitcoin and free open source software advocate. We discuss the attraction of Bitcoin to those on the left, Bitcoin as a commons for society, developing open source applications to take on big tech, and Marxism.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Bitcoin is a common, it's a monetary commons, a value transfer commons, a shared resource which people can use, and then it's within their interest to keep that resource going and then it's within their interest to keep that resource going and |
| 0:14.4 | nurture that resource and help it grow and that's what Bitcoin is and if anyone |
| 0:18.9 | tried any private interest tried to co-opt Bitcoin like Bitcoin errors attacking. |
| 0:24.0 | Hello there, how are you all doing? |
| 0:26.0 | Welcome to the What Bit coin did podcast, |
| 0:28.0 | which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I am using for buying Bitcoin. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm your host, Peter Peter McCormack and before we get |
| 0:34.8 | into the interview today I have a quick message from my show sponsors and this show is |
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| 1:24.4 | K-E-S-C-A-S-A. Next up we have my new sponsor to the show which is B-T-B-B-G group who provide online business banking for companies in the |
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