There’s this one anecdote that circulates the internet a lot. I see it every few months myself, you probably see it just as often. The Bitcoin pizzas. Some guy paid 10,000 Bitcoin for some pizzas, the first notable transaction to occur with the fake currency. Wow, those 10,000 bitcoins are worth over a billion dollars nowadays. Golly gee. It’s one of those stories that frames cryptocurrency as an almost magical thing with humble origins. If you just happened to be the pizza place that accepted those Bitcoins back in the aughts, you’d be worth an absurd amount of money in the modern day.
Wait, I just looked into it a little bit more. The pizza place didn’t accept bitcoin. Of course they didn’t; it was (and still is) a nonsensical currency. The dude that bought the pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin asked another dude to buy the pizzas with normal human money, and then just transferred the Bitcoin to the relevant account. (https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-pizza-day-celebrating-20-million-pizza-order/ ) It’s a story that’s bandied around a lot, and much like every other narrative built around cryptocurrency, is strategically designed to paint crypto in the most positive light physically possible – look here, our humble little currency can be used for something! If you happened to be in the right place at the right time, you too could be worth a lot of money! Invest in the next crypto project you see, why don’t you?

Flash forward to 2026, and that humble narrative has completely eroded away. Advertisements for cryptocurrency exchanges line sports arenas. The POTUS has several personal cryptocurrencies that they flaunt at every opportunity. You’ve almost certainly had at least one unbearable acquaintance or family member “try to get you in on the ground floor” of some “totally radical new cryptocurrency that’s going to shake up the ecosystem”, much to your chagrin. There’s a lot of narratives regarding crypto, but one that I particularly loathe is that cryptocurrency will eventually be a useful, positive tool for the purposes of democracy. It won’t. We’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about just how “won’t” it will be.

Let’s begin with some of the hypothetical advantages of cryptocurrency, the reason somebody might try to push it in the context of democracy and governance. The main appeals of crypto for such purposes are as follows: 1) cryptocurrency is anonymous by default, 2) crypto is generally unreceptive to other worldwide market trends, and is thus more stable in times of economic recession, and 3)  due to the deregulated, decentralized nature of crypto, it is less susceptible to government attempts to directly influence the economy (ie: a dictator can’t take it over once they claim power). There’s a lot to unpack with each of these points, so let’s focus on them one by one.

The anonymity of cryptocurrency is a frequently touted point amongst evangelists. If there is no means for the government to track your account / finances, then the government cannot monitor and therefore punish individuals who use their finances in opposition to the ruling governance. The government also has no means of disabling the account of a crypto user, which is a power they theoretically could use against those who use traditional banking systems. These all sound like absolutely wonderful things, especially in countries experiencing democratic backsliding. These are all, however, hypothetical advantages that have yet to see real world application. On the other hand, the disadvantages of anonymity are frequent and obvious. The people that have the most cryptocurrency are not plucky, right place right time goobers who happened to trade Bitcoin for a pizza over a decade ago. The people with the most money in crypto are the same people who have the most MONEY period, billionaires and millionaires who will not go bankrupt when participating with the wildly volatile prices and transaction rates of cryptocurrency. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/trump-crypto-memecoin-corruption )

There aren’t underground revolutionaries using crypto to fight the regime – the regime is far more likely to be the one using crypto to fund counter-revolutionaries without any direct traces to the regime itself. That anonymity also means that when high profile insider trading occurs, and massive amounts of crypto are sloshed around in response to wild government actions, that the account holders cannot be easily directly linked to the pertinent individuals doing the insider trading.

Secondly, cryptocurrency is generally unresponsive to general market trends, and is thus less likely to collapse in times of economic crisis; similar to gold or physical valuables. At least, this was the theory for many years. If Bitcoin and Ethereum were truly like physical valuables, or actual currencies, then they would be far less receptive to market volatility, a great boon for individuals living in countries with questionable governments. However, because of the glacial transaction times and high fees associated with crypto, it is nigh-impossible to use as an actual currency for day-to-day transactions. Your local 7/11 doesn’t take Bitcoin, and if they say they do, they probably sell weed out of the back. As a result, crypto is rarely, if ever, used as an actual currency, but rather as effectively a stock without an associated product / company. In times of economic downturn, people are just as likely to panic-sell their crypto as they are their stocks. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2026/03/13/bitcoin-in-the-crossfire-what-oil-shocks-really-do-to-crypto/ )

The built-in decentralized nature of crypto may be resistant to market volatility, but people are not. And, as previously mentioned, most of the people who have the ability to buy vast swathes of crypto already have insane amounts of money, and can survive readily in times of recession where laypeople cannot. When a layperson sells their crypto to survive a recession, a rich person can come along and scoop it up for pennies on the dollar, just as they would a stock. This has been seen repeatedly in the current Trump administration, where crypto markets fluctuate in response to whatever recent insane policy is planned to be implemented, and high profile accounts suddenly buy an insane amount of crypto right before the policy is rolled back.

Lastly, evangelists claim that the decentralized, deregulated nature of crypto makes it impossible for malicious government actors to take ownership of crypto the way they can other economic factors. However, given that the SEC has recently started a committee specifically for the regulation and observation of cryptocurrencies, give it two presidents and the whole thing is moot. (https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026-30-sec-clarifies-application-federal-securities-laws-crypto-assets) Just like all other methods of regulation or deregulation, restrictions or the lack thereof placed on crypto are ephemeral. In layman’s terms: this dumbassery isn’t going to last forever. If the US government, or any major world government for that matter, truly saw crypto as something that could actually influence their democratic (or undemocratic) processes, the entire industry would’ve been burned to the ground a decade ago.

In conclusion, there are many arguments made for and against the role of cryptocurrency in a rapidly changing world. Some argue that the virtues of crypto make it great for volatile times, unrelated to the petty squabbles of existing governance. However, just like every other libertarian wet dream, crypto has already been co-opted by existing power structures to benefit the folks who were already in power.