Could an Inside Sneak Attack on Bitcoin Destroy It?

By Paul Rosenberg, FreemansPerspective.com

This is important.

I’ve been warning about an outside attack on Bitcoin for some time, but the biggest threat may come from inside: from people who profess to love Bitcoin.

The people I’m talking about don’t love Bitcoin itself, and they don’t love the freedom it brings, no matter what they say. Instead they love the money they hope to make by becoming the new techno-riche: successors to Zuckerberg, Gates and the rest. (Yes, that’s an unfair thing for me to say, but I’d also be willing to bet large on it.)

The people I refer to are a neo-plutocracy — insiders who wish to institutionalise Bitcoin, making billions for themselves while turning it into just another version of PayPal.

One long-time bitcoiner has been warning for some time that this group controls the Bitcoin Foundation. He describes them as “regulatory statists.” He has analyzed their backtalks since their beginning and has been telling anyone who would listen that they wished to politically co-opt the Bitcoin market.

At last weekend’s Bitcoin conference, he was proved correct.

Robert Wenzel of economicpolicyjournal.com reported this, directly from the conference:

The most important vibe I am picking up at the event is that there are many money players who want to get Bitcoin up and running and are willing to play by government rules, that is, register all accounts they open and take down the name, DOB and social security number of Bitcoin buyers and sellers… Many of these players argue that it is impossible to battle the government, [one developer] told me that “It is a period to build the baby and not send it to war.”

No sooner than that passed my screen, I got an article entitled Winklevoss twins on Bitcoin: Time to work with the Feds. The article quotes Cameron Winklevoss (one of the Facebook twins) saying this at the conference:

I don’t think anyone wants a fight — I think everyone here wants to build Bitcoin, to work with regulators, cooperation is really the way forward.

Let’s be clear about this:

Bitcoin is a new thing. If it is forced into the old mold of politics, regulation and control, it will become just another tool of an oligarchy. And the prospective Bitcoin oligarchy are precisely those people who wish to shove Bitcoin, against its nature, into the same old statist, plutocratic mold. The result would be a few dozen insiders getting very rich and leaving the rest of us back where we started.

Regardless of the new plutocracy’s creative justifications and their fear-based scenarios, Bitcoin will be neutered and co-opted by governments and bankers if they get their way.

This is the largest single threat facing Bitcoin at the present time. Fear and greed work, and corruption follows with them.

I am not alone in this, by the way. Bitcoin expert Mike Gogulski has come to the same conclusion, writing “the Bitcoin Foundation is TOXIC and must dissolve.”

An unnamed “old radical” warned about precisely this in 2012.

The inside threat to Bitcoin is real, and was on open display over this past weekend.

If bitcoiners are serious about human liberty — as opposed to the same old crap in a new wrapper — they must turn hard against this neo-Plutocracy and their promises of an easy way out. Nothing great comes easy, and important things are more often killed by their supposed friends than by their enemies.

I will close with a comment Martin Luther once made to a young assistant who was asking God to save them from their enemies. Please take it to heart:

We can handle our enemies. God save us from our friends.

[Editor's Note: Paul Rosenberg is the author of FreemansPerspective.com, a collection of insights on topics ranging from Internet privacy to economic freedom and alternative currencies. Join our free e-letter list to receive other articles like this one... and immediately get a report that explains in a unique way how the US Government got into the mess it's in, the dangers that creates for us, and how to protect ourselves from it.]