Bitcoin documentary
Banking on Bitcoin is a documentary about the history of bitcoin. It includes every important incident relating to bitcoin.
At the start of the documentary, the creation of bitcoin was linked with the 2008 financial crisis because the bitcoin paper came out just a few weeks after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. It gives the audience a feeling that bitcoin is a tool to oppose the incumbents and the authority which is also the core message of the entire documentary. Then, bitcoin is traced back even earlier to the movement of Cypherpunk in the 1990s. They concerned about the privacy and personal liberty. They wanted to disempower the government and empower the individual by using the technology of cryptography. Digicash was born in such an environment and was very close to success. Its founder David Chaum gave a very inspirational quote. He said ‘Privacy of payment is essential for the democracy not because you need private payment to express yourself but you may need to purchase information to inform yourself.’
His quote accurately describes the reason why Wikileaks attempted to use bitcoin to receive the donation when its funding was frozen by the US government and all the major financial institutions. Yet, Wikileaks just accounted for a small part in the usage of bitcoin. Most of the transactions were done in Silk Road which was an online black market selling different prohibited drugs. The documentary doesn’t simply criticize Silk Road as an illegal marketplace. It was also an experiment done by the extreme libertarian to offer a completely free market which allowed users to buy and sell literally anything. It was a utopia for many cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists which already had this dream back in the 1990s.
Another big part of the documentary talks about the BitInstant which was an early start-up providing customers with a faster way to transfer fund to the online bitcoin exchange. The CEO Charlie Shrem was put into jail because of money laundering. The documentary also tells the audience no major bank executives were locked up due to the same reason. It implies it is unfair for the government to just go after a bitcoin entrepreneur but not the big guys on Wall Street.
If you want to know how bitcoin works, this may not be a good documentary as it only briefly introduces the operating mechanism. It doesn’t even mention mining which was an important part of the bitcoin architecture. However, it is a wonderful video to understand the spirit and ideology behind bitcoin although there is some bias against the authority and the incumbents. You will be surprised that bitcoin is not just a technology or a currency but is also associated with political beliefs like liberalism and anarchism.
Lastly, let’s use this quote to sum up. “Bitcoin is not neutral. You cannot remove the political component that Satoshi implanted in the bitcoin.”
