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Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto"

Over the last couple of years, "crypto" has become an increasingly important topic in political policy, with various jurisdictions considering bills that regulate various actors doing blockchain things in various ways. This includes the Markets in Crypto Assets regulation (MiCA) in the EU, efforts to regulate stablecoins in the UK, and the complicated mix of legislation and attempted regulation-by-enforcement from the SEC that we have seen in the United States.

What originally created crypto was the cypherpunk movement, a much broader techno-libertarian ethos which argued for free and open technology as a way of protecting and enhancing individual freedoms generally. There was even an early equivalent of " regen culture": Bitcoin was an incredibly easy means of online payment, and so it could be used to organize ways to compensate artists for their work without relying on restrictive copyright laws. Freedom and privacy-friendly digital identity: there are some blockchain applications here, most notably in allowing revocations and various use cases of "proving a negative" in a decentralized way, but realistically hashes, signatures and zero knowledge proofs get used ten times more.

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