Bitcoin: A Philosophical Roundtable

Strauss, Arendt, Schmitt, Kojeve, Scholem, Benjamin, etc. on Crypto

Continuing our previous panel discussion

Moderator: What are your thoughts on Bitcoin?

Strauss: If it succeeds in destroying the nation-state, we should expect lots of violence. If it does not, and becomes regulated by nation-states, we should expect it to be a cosmopolitan force that runs up against the forces of nationalism and patriotism. It will be one more example—but not an exceptional one—of a technology that creates global consciousness at an intellectual level, but fails to provide one at a political level. The original blockchain was and is philosophy. Heidegger’s readings of Descartes are a kind of metaphysical smart contract. Despite my skepticism, let us say this in its favor: Where once philosophers had to conceal their true understanding from society—both for their own good and for the good of society—blockchain technology allows all people a screen of protection from state violence. Socrates the “anon” would not have been forced to drink Hemlock. But then Socrates the “anon” also would not have been very compelling. For the corrupting of youths, through passionate education, requires the intimacy of IRL. There is no good way to practice Socratic method through “poasting,” which is the subject of Plato’s Phaedrus.

In short, to the extent that the blockchain succeeds in escaping the political it becomes irrelevant, and to the extent that it does not, it proves just as vulnerable as the next thing. There is no way to be a good philosopher without accepting the risk of persecution.

Schmitt: Diamond hands. I will Hodl until the world ends. Not because I believe in crypto, but because I believe in tribalism, and crypto has become one of the rare ciphers in our culture of opposition. However, I reject the idea that crypto will replace gold, for that is like the dream of Esperanto that defangs particularism and dissolves the distinction between friend and enemy. Crypto’s power exists entirely as a protest vote against the establishment.

Kojéve: The value of Bitcoin is not the pseudonymity it offers, but, on the contrary, the tribal sense of belonging it affords all who trade it. Bitcoin is a kind of faith. But like all sectarian cults, it must decide whether it wants to join the mainstream or remain what Hegel calls a “Beautiful Soul”—hiding in a monastery (or bubble, if you will) of its own making.

Bitcoin’s power and momentum correspond to that of the Protestant Reformation. But eventually new movements cool and become unremarkable. The idea of Bitcoin promises a new global currency corresponding to a new global order, but the cultural ideal it enshrines is alienation. Bitcoin’s very success will require its failure, as we see from all revolutions.

Finally, it is Bitcoin miners who are “creating value”—not Bitcoin owners. Only when the owners experience themselves as miners, that is, as creators of value, will the world become harmonious.

Heidegger: All valuing, be it rooted in an algorithmic spreadsheet or in old-fashioned bartering, is a distraction from the truth of Being, which exceeds and precedes all value. The clearing cannot be “minted,” nor can it be found in the small-mindedness of those who have replaced an awareness of what the Greeks called physis with day-trading. The volatility of crypto-currencies is the perfect metaphor for an epoch that worships the ephemeral.

Benjamin: Bitcoin is a misnomer since there is no coin to be held. Where once we could hold a penny and glimpse the mystical trace of authority, pointing ultimately to the King of Kings, the worn face of an icon over which wars were fought for centuries, now we have only the trace of the trace of the trace. Efficiency has stamped out our attachment to things, no more wallets to be lost and found, inherited; no more heirlooms. We just have “digital wallets,” perfect abstractions. But God is said to be a remember of all things, and so while we become increasingly abstract, an equal and opposite force accrues to things in their thingliness. One day, when the servers break, we will discover once again the aura of the tangible. For now, it suffices to point out that the saddest part of the tech revolution is that all the marketing fonts are the same.

Arendt: Everywhere the best and brightest talk about “store of value” and “medium of exchange,” yet have no abiding sense of what they should value or how to appear in the agora, the public, and exchange anything but lies and cliches.

Adorno: In the lie of a currency that knows no boundaries, is the truth that money is just velocity, and that redemption will find us only when money can travel at such light-speed that it cancels itself.

Levinas: All technologies which abstract us from the face-to-face encounter risk detaching us from the realization that we are fundamentally ethical beings. But crypto is not any worse from this point of view than drone warfare or one-click checkout or SMS.

Scholem: Finally, our monetary system will make explicit what we Jews have long known, the saving power of the Marano, the doubled identity, the disjunction between appearance and inner life. Bitcoin is the antinomian moment of our time. But will it go the way of Sabbatai Sevi or will it go the way of Hasidism? The multiplicity of crypto currencies, fragmenting into different blockchains, suggests a radical instability at the heart of this project, an irony at the heart of Creation. Each new chain, be it Etheruem or Solana, is a reminder, that the law cannot contain itself, God cannot contain Godself. They are an excessive, creative light which causes the “shattering of vessels” (shevirat haKelim). Human life is a function of the shards of Creation, and so the dream of a universal currency, like that of a universal language, will forever remain a dream. Only in certain acute moments, flashes of history, will there rise up radical attempts to make the dream a reality again. While the bourgeois norm is a humdrum disappointment, we must admire the rebellious, youthful spirit of today’s technologists to hasten the apocalypse.