Crypto’s Core Values Are Running Headfirst Into Reality

Crypto was taking off, and governments were finally starting to act like it. In 2013, when a young writer and software developer named Vitalik Buterin wrote an impassioned screed defending the blockchain gospel for his publication, Bitcoin Magazine, cryptocurrencies were still a niche curiosity. But a series of regulations was spooking the nascent industry, threatening the sort of anti-government ethos that has always been core to the project. For Buterin the panic felt a little overblown. Crypto, he argued, couldn’t truly be regulated. After all, this was the whole point of the new system: an internet with no masters, no mediators, and no guardrails. “The future of crypto-libertarianism is fine,” he wrote. “Stop worrying.”

This is the promise crypto advocates have sold consumers and politicians over the past decade, as crypto has blown up into a trillion-dollar behemoth—in the process making Buterin, now best known as the founder of the Ethereum network, very, very rich. (Buterin’s Ethereum Foundation did not respond to to crypto networks as “censorship-resistant rails of last resort.” And the venture-capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, now the foremost backer of crypto start-ups, has invoked that same idea in promoting its multibillion-dollar funds.