The Bitcoin ideology propagated through two propositions:
if you want to get rich for free, take on this weird ideology;
don’t worry if you don’t understand the ideology yet, just keep doing the things and you’ll get rich for free!
The promise of getting rich for free is enough to get people to take on the ideas that they’re told makes it all work. Bitcoin went heavily political very fast, and Bitcoin partisans promoted anarcho-capitalism (yes, those two words can in fact go together), with odd notions of how economics works or humans behave, from the start.
The roots of the Bitcoin ideology go back through libertarianism, anarcho- capitalism and Austrian economics to the “end the Fed” and “establishment elites” conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins. The design of Bitcoin and the political tone of its early community make sense only in the context of the extremist ideas ancestral to the cyberlibertarian subculture it arose from. Most of Bitcoin’s problems as money are because it’s built on crank assumptions.
