The whole philosophy behind Bitcoin is a mistrust of institutions, primarily the FED, and the wish to replace them with what’s supposed to be “neutral”. But th

The whole philosophy behind Bitcoin is a mistrust of institutions, primarily the FED, and the wish to replace them with what’s supposed to be “neutral”. But the criticism that is offered tends to be far off the mark: the FED isn’t a “private bank”, to name just one conspiracy theory. It is also far better at its job as people make you believe: the time of runaway inflation is a 100 years behind us, and even the worst of recent crises in the financial industry is but a shadow of the Great Depression that saw actual starvation. It seems that economists may have improved somewhat, to the point where they are at least able to outperform the outcome of an algorithm that doesn’t even try to use monetary policy for the greater good. Despite its flaws, the FED is also, ultimately, democratically legitimized. Bitcoin, despite its talk of democratization, allocates power proportional to mining power or, ultimately, wealth. That’s closer to feudalism than any recent idea of democracy. There are dozens of other misconceptions that were baked into BC and other coins only to blow up. Sometimes spectacularly so. For example, the community seems to believe the law is nothing but pretense allowing judges to arbitrarily enforce their opinions. Hence, it is seen as desirable to allow for contracts that are not subject to any interpretation. This mostly comes up when someone makes a stupid mistake like omitting a decimal separator and paying 100x what’s reasonable. In the “normal” economy, such errors are almost always easily healed. But the cryptocurrency community believes that anything that cannot be expressed in source code is somehow invalid. Indeed, they seem to take some gleeful enjoyment from seeing people subjected to punishment for minor mistakes, even where it is completely out of proportion. That points at where it could be called “fascist”: that ideology abhors all deviation from the norm and punishes it severely. That’s why Singapore’s extreme laws against drugs or chewing gum are sometimes called fascist, and also why some on the right can’t really understand why anybody would take offense at the idea of public executions for weed dealers.