OCTOBER 2025 – Finn Brunton is a PhD. academic (aren’t they all) who’s been focused on science and tech studies the last few decades, and last week he penned in the NYT a dread-filled commentary on the unsupervised, corrupt nature of crypto-currencies – and their ideological links to libertarianism. You know, Ayn Rand’s all-or-nothing, totally unregulated free-market capitalism. As Brunton concludes:
Crypto is the most successful libertarian project in American history. A technology developed to escape the state is now at the political center of a global superpower. Crypto has become a machine for transferring control and wealth from the many to the few, a bribery-as-a-service platform for buying and selling influence among authoritarian oligarchs. It’s the perfect technological expression of the Trump moment: our country’s crypto era. .
It’s all fascinating stuff – but grim, as Brunton suggests there is no easy fix to stop the slide to crypto dominance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/opinion/crypto-trump-libertarianism-corruption.html