When I was in the process of buying my car about eight years ago, I went to a few different dealerships to compare different cars and prices. One salesman in particular sticks out in my memory. As we were outside looking at a car, he leans into my 22-year-old self and says, “I just sold a car just like this to a really cute girl your age.”
I remember thinking to myself, “Unless you have her somewhere here for me to meet, what does that have to do with me deciding whether I’m going to buy this car?”
That salesman was using a typical marketing tactic. He wanted me to envision myself being able to meet pretty girls because I had this car. This is very often the theme of many (especially light) beer commercials: young, fit, attractive people are together having the times of their lives and you’ll be in that group if you buy and drink this beer.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that type of marketing and the car and beer markets are established well enough that a consumer has a pretty good idea of what he’s going to get when he makes a purchase.
But in the bitcoin and larger cryptocurrency movement, these tactics are not exactly exciting to witness especially when it comes to libertarian communities.
Bitcoin (but not other cryptocurrencies) is an interesting product. Their hopefully decentralized and trustless nature depends on the software and resulting network structure as a whole. You don’t purchase bitcoin like you purchase a beer. When you purchase a beer, its fate is up to you. In cryptocurrency, the consensus of the network determines the coin’s fate. To me, that makes it important to have some understanding of what the software does before you get involved if you’re interested in being an endorser for it.
If someone’s trying to sell you on a cryptocurrency or a service for a cryptocurrency, make sure they sell you on what it actually does. There has been a trend in the libertarian community to instead promote a project by suggesting that a main reason for supporting it is because either principled libertarians are the builders or are major supporters of it (or both). While it would be great that a project would fit well with libertarian ideals, the fact that certain libertarians may like some project is not the cause of why it will be successful. The code is what matters.
If I’m selling you my services as a plumber, do you really care if I’m a libertarian? Would you feel good about the transaction if I left your pipes leaky because a libertarian fitted them? While all else equal, it may be nice to support fellow libertarians, but if my selling points for my plumbing are about my libertarian qualities, you should question why I’m not focusing the attention on the plumbing.
What’s worse is when libertarians appeal to economic arguments as opposed to how the project or product is supposed to work and benefit you. I’ve seen people responding to questions about security issues with “Well, it’s not in their economic interest to cause you any harm.” That may be true, but that doesn’t guarantee any outcomes. Just look at Mt. Gox or Bitconnect as two major examples of people losing a lot of money in the bitcoin world.
Don’t be fooled: there have and will continue to be scams in the bitcoin world. There are plenty of incentives out there.
But my point is not to say that these people have nefarious intentions. They may have the best intentions, but being a principled libertarian does not predict how well you write code. This is especially important for projects that are custodial in nature. The strength and security of their code is what will keep your money in your ownership. The code is what matters. The network is what matters. Don’t let cheap marketing tactics make you think that one cryptocurrency project will make you more of a libertarian than others.
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