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Introduction: The Institution of Liberty

Cryptocurrencies are often deemed ‘revolutionary’ and, indeed, Bitcoin’s manifesto shares striking similarities with the most prominent revolutions in history. Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision that it is possible to trade without bankers as intermediaries cannot but remind us of Martin Luther’s claim that believers can entertain a direct relationship with God without priests as intermediaries, which in 1517 kickstarted the Protestant Reformation. It has a similar feel to the declarations of Oliver Cromwell, George Washington and Maximilien de Robespierre, according to which the people can govern themselves without princes as intermediaries, declarations that gave rise to the great political revolutions.

Obviously, the Bitcoin ‘White Paper’ doesn’t tell us how to obtain eternal life like the Reformation did, and the petty calculations of small investors worried about their savings seem to have little in common with the struggle for liberty, so one might well doubt whether any of this goes beyond a vague resonance, and whether Bitcoin really promises the same kind of disruptions as those earlier revolutions. But it would be a great mistake to overlook cryptocurrencies because they are just about ‘money’. Finance is anything but trivial. The economy is not only a fundamental aspect of our societies; in some senses it is the continuation of the religious and political spheres by other means.

Holy communion wafers are shaped like coins because originally both were cast in the same moulds.¹ The first ‘central banks’ in history were founded in reformed countries; financial engineering required ‘trust’, above all, trust being just another word for ‘faith’.² By placing faith (fides) and guilt at the centre of religious life, Protestantism allowed associates who trusted one other (con-fide) to give each other ‘credit’ (crede, ‘to believe’) for their debts (moral as well as financial). It was a Protestant, John Law, who introduced the first paper money into France at the beginning of the eighteenth century.³ And it is also the Protestant concept of faith, in the sense that implies trust and letting go, and therefore being free, that supported the construction of liberal democracies and allowed them to emancipate themselves from monarchy.

In fact, Satoshi’s invention, insofar as it also deals in trust and faith, is a substantial and worthy heir to the theological-political history of the West that runs from the Reformation to liberal democracy. It may even represent its fulfilment, for whereas reformation and revolution were based in a subjective concept of faith, Bitcoin is an algorithm of faith. Because it allows mathematical emancipation from ‘trusted third parties’, it is a machine for producing faith and liberty.⁴

This having been said, revolutions are also plagued by misconceptions, and the cryptorevolution is no exception; Cryptocurrency ‘fanatics’ – we use the word advisedly, since it is indeed a new religion and a new party – may be in for a disappointment regarding their beliefs. The cryptorevolution might spell the end of the international financial system as we know it, but it won’t end all misery and injustice, neither will it give birth to a brave new world of empowered individuals freed from paying taxes and obeying the law – the story that a great many libertarian prophets, alt-right bitcoiners and cryptocultists like to tell. If revolutions of the past teach us something, it is that emancipation, freedom and liberty have a very special way of coming up with new obligations and even, sometimes, woes.

Certainly, during the Middle Ages peasants gathered around Reformation gurus such as Thomas Müntzer, who had deduced from Luther’s theses that it was now possible to live free of all moral and clerical authority. And there were revolutionary enragés who believed that their newly gained freedom gave them the right to cut off as many heads as they wanted, especially those raised above their own. Eventually though, all of them would discover sooner rather than later that they were mistaken about the deeper meaning of the Reformation and the Revolution. Protestantism was to introduce even more rigour into religion than Catholicism, to the point where Protestants would end up being known as ‘Puritans’. Priests were abolished, cathedrals, altars, incense and Church Latin destroyed, replaced by a religious practice that did away with all visible signs only to become all the more ascetic, demanding to be observed at all times and in every aspect of secular life. Similarly, democracy would prove to be even more complex and convoluted than the ancien régime. The princes were cast out, only for bureaucracy to run rampant, with swarms of civil servants and lawbooks thicker than the dictionary and telephone book combined.

Now, it might be argued that the return of Church and State following the Reformation, and the liberal revolutions that had attempted to destroy them, means that they failed at what they set out to do and that the real, proper revolution is yet to come.⁵ But the truth is that this return was a feature, not a bug. Luther didn’t want to overthrow the law of God, he wanted to fulfil it; Rousseau didn’t want the rule of nature to replace the rule of men, he wanted to ensure that the rule of men would be duly observed and carried out. In fact, they had both understood that liberty is paradoxically the best way to enforce the word of God and the rule of men, because ultimately it consists not in being free from all laws, but in freely imposing laws upon oneself, as the word ‘autonomy’ clearly suggests: a ‘law’ (nomos) imposed upon ‘oneself’ (auto).

Liberty is not a whim. It is an institution. It relies on institutions and it creates institutions. The same can be said about Satoshi’s project. Bitcoin seeks to restore trust, not to destroy it. It seeks to restore institutions we can believe in, not burn them to the ground. It wants to make this society liveable. And in a very compelling sense, it does so in the same way as the Reformation and the revolutions did: by replacing old institutions with new ones, which are more robust only because they are chosen institutions. Bitcoin frees us by allowing us to impose chains upon ourselves, as the appropriately named blockchain clearly indicates.

Thus, there is no doubt that cryptocurrencies will bring with them a new wind of change, spreading freedom across the world; but there are reasons to believe this will happen not in the way dreamt of by the eager children of the Tea Party, but by subjecting our lives to a new church and a new state yet more ascetic than Luther’s Reformation, more rigorous than Rousseau’s Republic. The theological-political regime of crypto will not be ‘cryptoanarchism’; quite the contrary, it will be a regime that will impose a new law on us, a new common law, more austere than liberal laws, thus more like a regime that too deemed itself to be revolutionary in its time, even if it didn’t succeed in bringing about the revolution its believers had hoped for: namely, communism – or, more precisely, cryptocommunism.

Notes

1 1. Jean-Louis Schefer, L’Hostie profanée (Paris: P.O.L, 2007).

2 2. See Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II, The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). In particular, Berman remarks upon the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the Venetian banking models in this respect.

3 3. Needless to say, it didn’t go down too well with the Catholic establishment. The king having taken a liking to the printing of paper money, inflation bankrupted France within five years.

4 4. Even more than it is a ‘truth machine’. See Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).

5 5. A belief that has fuelled the numerous reformations and revolutions that have continued to break out since the original Reformation and the French Revolution, on the basis there is always a ‘purer’ way of doing things.