Crypto’s libertarian faction captured it and issued their own fiat currency

Evidence

But soon cracks began to appear, and it was the libertarian faction of the crypto movement who ultimately gained the upper hand. For them, enemy number one had always been the central banks, which they portrayed as a sort of Catholic Church, insisting on acting as intermediary between humans and their sacred profits, with themselves in the role of a latter-day Martin Luther pushing for a Protestant Reformation. Thus, the crypto movement which had also initially attracted anarchists and socialists, became a supremely volatile currency market, in which anyone sufficiently expert in the new blockchain technology issued their own ‘coins’ whose dollar value they tried to boost before cashing in. Their ideological contempt for fiat, or state-created, money turned out to be a ruse for issuing their own fiat money. By the time, in 2017, one Bitcoin traded for more than $20,000, the early emancipatory promise of crypto had vanished. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 686

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: ‘The Reformation that wasn’t’ - how crypto’s Protestant narrative of escaping the central-bank church collapsed into a new priesthood issuing its own indulgences.
• QUESTION: Is the ‘ruse’ claim falsifiable, or is it an ascription of post-hoc motive? Worth interrogating.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 686
• XREF: connects to: Crypto functions as a utopian reaction to technofeudalism — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 677; Crypto’s influence was cultural rather than practical or technological — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 742; Currency issuance is inseparable from national sovereignty

Broader Connections

• Crypto functions as a utopian reaction to technofeudalism #corroborates (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 677
• Crypto’s influence was cultural rather than practical or technological #complicates (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 742
• Currency issuance is inseparable from national sovereignty #qualifies (0.70)