When we think of Bitcoin, the king of cryptocurrencies, money exchanges on the deep web and complex speculations limited to a circle of people who are particularly skilled with technology come to mind. We might also think about a connection with Silicon Valley, with high tech finance, and with exchange apps connected to data theft and the black market. The reality is that when it was conceived, Bitcoin was the total opposite: the people who created and developed cryptocurrency technology did so based on a strongly liberal belief, one which drove a desire to break away from the control of governments and banks, and set humanity free from the slavery of taxation on national and international monetary transactions, and the continuing privacy violations associated with them.
The idea behind it was in fact to create a currency that used digital technologies to remove power from the hands of banks and institutions exactly as the internet had done with the monopoly on information: a currency that should not rely on any centralised body to be validated and used, such as a bank or any other national body, and which would allow its users to make purchases, sales and exchanges without needing to be constantly identified and monitored. For the first creators and users of Bitcoin, this was more than a change in the way they made payments and transfers; for them it was a revolution with the potential to influence every area of social and political life around the world.
A currency that could be freely exchanged without the need for authority, which would find its validation in the user community, and which did not require the declaration of personal information, meant it was possible to bypass the centralised institutions of power, and any intermediary companies with their private interests, as well as preventing finance from being used as a weapon against dissenters, free thinkers and undocumented individuals on the fringes of society. As part of this philosophy, Bitcoin was built on the concept of decentralisation, to such an extent that even its creator did not have the power to make changes to the program: since the entire system was based on its users’ computers staying active, adjustments could only be made if 51% of the computers agreed. While this may seem risky in a small community, the creator of Bitcoin knew that once the user pool grew, it would work perfectly well, and would end up balancing out the decision-making power. The importance of community was clear from the beginning, even in the code, which was left completely open source to allow anyone not only to use and improve it, but also to discover errors and even report them.
The first version of Bitcoin was strongly egalitarian, and focused on the common spirit and ideologies of its community of users and developers: an almost utopian project, far from the way society sees it today.
