Crypto and the Politics of Power

The Illusion of Freedom

Crypto is sold as a path to freedom. Supporters claim it breaks banks’ grip and challenges states. But in reality, wealth concentrates in the hands of miners, exchange owners, and investors. The story of decentralization hides new forms of control. Power doesn’t vanish—it shifts. And for ordinary people, risk grows while gains shrink.

The Hidden Work

Behind every transaction are workers. People assemble machines in unsafe factories. Others face pollution from energy-hungry mining farms. Technicians labor to keep systems running. These lives rarely appear in glossy crypto ads. Digital coins don’t just appear—they rest on exploited labor and wasted energy.

Governments and Control

States talk about crypto like it’s a threat. But many copy its tools for their own use. Central bank digital currencies extend surveillance. Digital wallets can be traced. Transactions can be monitored. Instead of freedom, crypto often strengthens state power. What was imagined as escape can easily become another chain.

Speculation and Gambling

For most users, crypto is not money—it’s speculation. Exchanges mirror gambling halls. The thrill of a win hides the reality of loss. Like a tonybet casino, platforms create dependence. A few walk away richer, while millions lose. This is not a fair economy—it is another way for capital to prey on desperation.

Ecological Cost

Mining burns energy at a staggering pace. Server farms rely on fossil fuels, not “green” promises. The result is rising emissions and stressed communities. Crypto becomes another example of capitalism’s contradiction: endless growth on a planet with limits.

Seeds of Resistance

Not all is lost. Activists demand energy caps. Communities experiment with cooperative digital currencies. Developers build open-source tools that resist profit logic. These small actions prove something important: crypto’s future is not fixed. It depends on collective struggle.

Rethinking Value

The issue goes beyond code. It asks us to rethink what we value. Should wealth be tokens on a screen, or care, solidarity, and survival? If people reclaim crypto, it can become part of a broader fight. If not, it will remain another weapon of inequality.

Crypto as a Mirror of Capital

At its core, crypto operates less as a rupture with financial capital than as its distorted reflection, reproducing speculative frenzy and wealth polarization under the guise of technological novelty. Far from dissolving hierarchies, it manufactures parallel elites—early adopters, venture capitalists, and mining cartels—who consolidate influence while rhetoric of decentralization pacifies critique. What appears innovative is, in fact, a continuation of the same extractive logic, dressed in cryptographic mystique and marketed as liberation.

The Fetish of Code

Crypto’s defenders often invoke the neutrality of code, the incorruptible purity of algorithms. Yet code itself is neither autonomous nor apolitical; it is written, maintained, and governed by humans embedded in systems of class, race, and power. To imagine otherwise is to fetishize technology, to pretend lines of programming can transcend history. This illusion masks the very real social conflicts encoded into protocols: who sets transaction fees, who validates blocks, who gets excluded from the chain. The myth of neutrality conceals a battlefield.

Beyond the Market’s Horizon

If crypto is to hold emancipatory potential, it cannot remain confined to the speculative logics of accumulation. It would need to be integrated into wider networks of solidarity economies, cooperative structures, and ecological limits. This means rejecting profit as the sole measure of value and embracing collective survival as the horizon. Such a transformation is not inevitable; it requires rupture, organized resistance, and the courage to imagine money not as a vehicle of domination but as an instrument of care.

Crypto as a Mirror of Capital

Crypto does not break from financial capitalism; it mirrors it in new forms. The dream of decentralization hides the rise of new elites. Early adopters, investors, and mining pools concentrate wealth and influence. The language of freedom works as a cover for old hierarchies. What looks like innovation is often the same system, repackaged with cryptographic style and sold as change.

The Illusion of Neutral Code

Supporters often claim code is neutral, as if algorithms stood above politics. But code is written by people, shaped by power, and never outside history. Decisions about fees, validation, or access reflect interests, not pure logic. Pretending otherwise makes technology look innocent while it organizes exclusion. The myth of neutrality hides real struggles over who controls the system and who gets left behind.

Beyond Profit’s Horizon

For crypto to mean more than speculation, it would need another foundation. Instead of serving profit, it could connect to cooperative projects, solidarity economies, and ecological limits. That would mean reshaping value around survival and care, not accumulation. This shift will not happen on its own. It requires pressure, organization, and the refusal to let markets decide the future alone.

Conclusion: A Contested Future

Crypto mirrors the world around it. It offers hope but deepens contradictions. Left to corporations and states, it will reproduce exploitation. Reclaimed by communities, it could help build something new. The fight is not about coins—it’s about power. And like every struggle, the outcome will be decided by those who refuse to accept the system as it is.