WE live in an unfortunate time when words have lost meaning. It used to be that when a word was used incorrectly by a child, or a person ignorant of the true definition, it was our obligation to correct them. Language is a mathematical concept where words like numbers are specific and need to follow a set order to make sense.
Two must always mean exactly “two,” no more and no less. If not, then “two plus two equals four” is not a fact but an opinion.
Words must have a strict and concise meaning to be able to express strict and concise ideas. However, we also know that some thoughts are abstract. Irish writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in her 1878 novel Molly Bawn that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in 1964 to describe his threshold test for obscenity, “I shall not today attempt further to define…. ‘hard-core pornography,’ and, perhaps, I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
A 2016 book titled The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, which presents the idea that cryptocurrencies are, in part, a reaction to “big government” and central bank control of currency, they are, in fact, a reaction and result from right-wing extremist thinking. Of course, even “right wing” is a term used so often with so many meanings, the ideas behind the title could go in any direction, and they have. Now, some thinkers who identify themselves as “progressives”—whatever that means—are saying that Bitcoin is racist.
“Racist” is normally defined as a situation or person that limits or discriminates against a person or group based on race.
The problem is that there is no set definition of “race” either. We have come from the simplistic “black, yellow, brown and white” to identify our own race. Only in American progressive thinking could the logic of “Bitcoin is racist” come forth. “Bitcoin is supported by the political right. The political right is racist. Therefore, Bitcoin is racist.”
However, if racist means something that is dominated by a particular racial group, then Bitcoin is definitely racist. In terms of total numbers of people who own and trade the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is “yellow.”
Measured by which national currency was used most often to purchase Bitcoin, the Chinese yuan account for an average of over 60 percent in the first three quarters of 2017. Since then, yuan volume has dropped to almost nothing. For the past two months, on any given day, it has been the Japanese yen or the South Korean won accounting for more than 50 percent of all transactions. The US dollar transactions—presumably from all those “white right-wingers” have been fairly consistent for the past year at about 30 percent.
Sadly, not only is Bitcoin racist but it is also misogynist. Based on Google searches, 96.7 percent of all people looking for Bitcoin information are male.
The one demographic truth about Bitcoin is that ownership and trading is limited to the higher economic classes. Unlike for the Philippine stock market—where even P5,000 can buy a person into a mutual fund investment—only the relative “rich” are getting richer in Bitcoin. Does that make Bitcoin anti-poor, too?
3 comments
Bitcoin isn’t racist. White leftist reporters just like stirring up racial hatred then directing that hatred and violence at anyone who opposes their will. All white leftists are covert racist totalitarians.
A regressive-left and “alt-right” cannot exist in the Philippines, for both are the extremes of their opposites yet each are as destructive to the nation as the other; horseshoe theory. Thank you for this.
Lol, what a stupid article. What’s stopping you from buying P5,000 worth of Bitcoin?