What do the left and cryptocurrencies have in common?

There is something curious about the way cryptocurrencies came to occupy the contemporary political imagination. A technology designed to allow value to be transferred without depending on a central authority became, in many circles, almost a symbol of liberal or libertarian identity. For part of the left, that association was enough to create distance. For some of its advocates, the very idea of bringing Bitcoin and progressive thought together seems contradictory.

But technologies do not arrive with all their social consequences determined in advance.

Electricity was not born progressive or conservative. Neither was the internet. Both were incorporated into different economic and political projects, producing possibilities for emancipation, new dependencies and new forms of concentrated power.

Decentralized technologies deserve similar treatment.

We need to recognize that Bitcoin has specific monetary characteristics, that blockchain refers to a family of technological architectures, and that so-called Web3 brings together projects with very different economic models and governance structures.

Placing all of it under a single political label would be as inaccurate as assuming that every internet company shares one single vision of society.

Even so, there are relevant points of contact between certain possibilities of these technologies and historical concerns of the left.

They appear in the defense of autonomy, in collective organization, in the critique of concentrated power, in the circulation of knowledge and in the search for more democratic forms of economic participation.

These convergences do not amount to an ideological identity. They are possibilities that need to be examined in their concrete conditions.

Perhaps the first step is to drop the question of who cryptocurrencies belong to and investigate which economic relations they can change.

Decentralization and the old question of power

One of the recurring concerns of socialist, democratic and progressive traditions is the concentration of economic power.

That concern runs through debates about ownership of the means of production, monopolies, the organization of work and the ability of large institutions to influence collective decisions.

Technological decentralization also starts from a question about the distribution of power, although it often offers very different answers.

In Bitcoin, for example, validating transactions depends on rules shared by the participants of a network, rather than on an authority responsible for keeping a central record of every operation.

This model introduced a particular form of technological coordination.

But the absence of a central authority over the protocol does not mean the absence of economic concentration.

Large players can control significant shares of the existing assets. Companies can concentrate custody and intermediation services. Mining infrastructure can carry geographic, energy and corporate dependencies.

Decentralizing one function does not mean decentralizing all the others.

This distinction is essential to bring the technological discussion closer to the concerns of the left.

The progressive question should not stop at whether a network is open. It needs to reach the real conditions of participation.

Who can use this infrastructure? Who has the resources needed to influence its development? Who captures the economic benefits? Which dependencies remain?

A network can reduce the need for intermediaries and, at the same time, allow new centers of power to emerge.

That does not invalidate its possibilities. It simply shows that the distribution of economic power cannot be deduced from technical architecture alone.

For the left, this is a particularly relevant field of inquiry, because it links the study of technology to an old question: the difference between formal freedom and the material capacity to exercise that freedom.

A person may be technically allowed to join a public network and still face economic, educational or technological obstacles that make effective participation difficult.

An open door does not mean everyone is able to walk through it.

Cooperativism: a history older than blockchain

Long before Bitcoin was created, workers and communities were already experimenting with forms of economic organization based on shared ownership, democratic participation and collective distribution of results.

Modern cooperativism consolidated principles that are still recognized internationally, among them voluntary membership, democratic member control, economic participation and organizational autonomy.

These principles do not depend on blockchain.

Their importance lies precisely in showing that collective organization has a social and institutional history much older than digital technologies.

Among the principles for primary cooperatives, the International Co-operative Alliance establishes equal voting rights for members, regardless of how much capital each person holds.

This creates an important difference from many decentralized autonomous organizations, known as DAOs.

A DAO can use smart contracts to record proposals, organize votes and carry out certain decisions. However, when voting power depends on the number of tokens held, participants with more wealth can exercise proportionally greater influence.

In that case, the organization is decentralized in certain technological respects, but not necessarily democratic by cooperative principles.

It is precisely in this difference that a possible connection appears.

A cooperative could study blockchain tools to record decisions, manage shared resources or make certain processes easier to audit.

But its governance model would need to preserve its own principles.

Technology would be a tool serving the organization, not a substitute for its social purpose.

Imagine a cooperative of producers in a rural community.

Its members could use a shared digital system to record certain stages of sales, follow collective revenue and check that decisions approved in assembly are carried out.

In some circumstances, a distributed infrastructure could be useful, especially when different organizations need to share records without depending entirely on a single operator.

In others, a conventional database would be cheaper, simpler and more appropriate.

The choice should come from a technical and economic assessment, not from enthusiasm for a word that became popular in the market.

The point of convergence, then, is not the claim that a DAO is a modern cooperative.

It is the possibility of using digital tools to support forms of economic organization that already have collective goals.

The historical experience of cooperativism offers criteria to assess the governance of new digital organizations, while some technologies can expand the tools available to cooperatives.

This relationship deserves research, experimentation and follow-up.

Financial autonomy and inclusion: promises that need examining

Economic autonomy holds different places in the political traditions of the left.

In some currents, it is linked to the material independence of workers. In others, to the democratization of credit, protection against abusive relationships or the building of financial institutions guided by the collective interest.

In the crypto world, autonomy is usually presented as the ability to control digital assets directly.

Self-custody lets a person keep the keys needed to move certain funds without depending on a custodial institution.

This feature can matter in specific contexts.

But we must avoid a hasty conclusion: having a digital wallet does not mean being financially included.

Financial inclusion involves access, security, knowledge, fair costs, protection against fraud and the real ability to use economic services.

Someone who does not understand how private keys work can lose their funds irreversibly. Someone with unreliable internet access may not be able to use digital services regularly.

There are also risks linked to asset volatility, to the platforms used and to the quality of the information available.

Technology alone does not solve these difficulties.

Still, certain digital tools can expand the options for moving money.

The cost of international remittances offers a concrete example.

According to the World Bank, the global average cost of sending remittances stood at 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025.

For migrant workers who send part of their income to their families, these costs directly reduce the money available for food, housing and other needs.

Payment networks based on crypto assets and stablecoins can be studied as alternatives in certain international corridors.

But the comparison must account for all the costs involved: buying the assets, network fees, currency conversion, cashing out in local currency and any operational risks.

A transfer that looks cheap on the blockchain can become expensive when the recipient needs to convert the funds to use them.

Besides, conventional instant payment systems can also cut costs and expand access.

The relevant social goal is not necessarily to replace one infrastructure with another.

It is to let people move their money safely, efficiently and at proportionate cost.

The convergence with progressive concerns appears when innovation is examined from the concrete needs of users, especially those with fewer alternatives.

Lowering financial costs can matter socially. Its effectiveness, however, needs to be demonstrated.

Open knowledge and the digital commons

Another relevant connection appears in the development of free and open-source software.

An important part of the infrastructure of networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum runs on programs whose code can be publicly examined.

This allows researchers, developers and other participants to study the rules, identify problems and propose changes.

Open code does not guarantee that everyone can understand it. Nor does it eliminate differences in influence among participants.

But it creates possibilities for oversight and collaboration that are not available in the same way in fully proprietary systems.

The relationship with the commons deserves attention.

The economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom, awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, devoted an important part of her work to studying communities able to manage shared resources through collectively built rules.

Her studies showed that managing common resources need not be limited to full privatization or centralized control by the State.

This does not mean Ostrom defended blockchain or anticipated the features of cryptocurrencies.

Her contribution lies in the understanding that collective institutions can develop their own mechanisms of governance, monitoring and conflict resolution.

This perspective offers useful tools to examine digital communities.

Open-source projects depend on maintenance, funding, coordination and decisions about technical changes.

Even when the code is public, someone has to do the work needed to keep it running.

Who funds that work? How are priorities set? How do participants settle disagreements? Who has influence over important decisions?

These are institutional questions, not just computational ones.

The idea of digital commons also makes it possible to discuss ways of funding infrastructure that benefits many people but does not necessarily offer investors a direct financial return.

Open protocols, software libraries, security tools and educational materials can produce collective benefits.

Community funding mechanisms, donations and development funds can help sustain them.

Some blockchain applications make it possible to record and execute rules for distributing resources, although that does not automatically make these mechanisms fair or efficient.

The interest lies in understanding how different instruments can support the production and preservation of shared knowledge.

There is a possible affinity with political traditions that value education, cooperation and public access to knowledge.

But that affinity depends on institutions able to turn technical openness into effective participation.

Transparency, participation and accountability

The possibility of consulting the public records of certain blockchains is often presented as a guarantee of transparency.

On public networks, transactions can be verified by anyone with access to the right tools.

This feature can help make operations auditable.

But technological transparency should not be confused with institutional transparency.

A record can show that a given address transferred funds to another without necessarily revealing who is responsible, the economic purpose of the operation or whether it complies with legal obligations.

Nor does it guarantee that the data entered into a system matches reality.

False information remains false when it is recorded immutably.

That is why applications related to managing collective resources need to combine technological tools with mechanisms of accountability, verification and social oversight.

In certain circumstances, smart contracts can help execute previously approved rules.

An organization could establish, for example, that money from a collective fund may only be moved after a recorded deliberation and the authorization of designated people.

However, the democratic quality of that structure would depend on who takes part in decisions, how proposals are presented and what avenues exist to contest them.

Code can execute a rule. It does not, by itself, determine whether that rule is legitimate.

This distinction also matters for public policy.

Using blockchain in government records or in carrying out certain procedures does not automatically improve transparency.

In some cases, conventional public systems, backed by independent audits and access-to-information mechanisms, can do the same job at a lower cost.

In others, the need to share records among different institutions may justify studying distributed architectures.

The decision requires technical criteria and an assessment of the public interest.

For the left, the possible convergence lies in the concern with institutional accountability and citizen participation.

Technology can offer additional tools. Democracy still depends on people, rights and institutions.

The environmental question cannot be ignored

The relationship between cryptocurrencies and sustainability is one of the most important points of disagreement in this debate.

Bitcoin uses a consensus mechanism known as proof of work, which depends on computational activity and energy consumption.

This consumption has environmental consequences that vary with the source of the electricity, the location of operations and the features of the infrastructure used.

Other networks use different mechanisms, such as proof of stake, with different energy profiles.

So it is not appropriate to treat all cryptocurrencies as if they had the same environmental impact.

It would also be inappropriate to ignore the energy use of certain networks, or to assume that any use of renewable sources automatically cancels their effects on power systems and communities.

An environmental assessment needs to include energy use, emissions, equipment, electronic waste and possible local impacts.

In regions with unequal access to energy infrastructure, the discussion takes on a distributive dimension.

Who benefits economically from the activity? Which costs fall on the community? Are there effects on tariffs, energy availability or the use of natural resources?

These questions are part of a socially responsible analysis.

Environmental concern, present in different currents of the left and of the ecological movement, does not have to lead to an indiscriminate rejection of all blockchain technologies.

It can help set more demanding criteria for evaluation.

Innovation should not be considered desirable just because it is technically possible.

Its benefits need to be weighed against the resources it consumes and the effects it produces.

Where the convergences meet their limits

It would be intellectually dishonest to gather only the features of cryptocurrencies that seem close to progressive values and ignore the deeper tensions.

Bitcoin, for example, has a programmed monetary policy, with issuance capped by the rules of its protocol.

This feature is valued by currents that defend restrictions on monetary discretion.

But different economic traditions of the left assign the State and monetary authorities important roles in stabilizing the economy, funding public policy and responding to crises.

The existence of an asset with a limited supply does not resolve these disagreements.

Likewise, valuing individual ownership of digital assets can clash with projects that prioritize collective mechanisms for distributing resources.

There is no automatic compatibility between monetary scarcity and social justice.

Nor is there any guarantee that rising crypto prices benefit lower-income people proportionally.

When assets are bought in very different amounts, price increases can widen wealth inequalities among holders.

The initial concentration and later distribution of assets need to be considered.

Decentralized finance raises other questions.

Lending, trading and liquidity protocols can operate through smart contracts, reducing certain intermediation functions.

However, these systems can involve leverage, automatic liquidations, programming risks, dependence on oracles and speculative incentives.

Automation does not remove the need to protect users.

A liquidation correctly executed by a smart contract can have serious financial consequences for someone who did not understand the risks they took on.

There are also challenges around accountability when failures happen.

The absence of a traditional custodial company can make it harder to identify who has obligations toward users.

These problems must be part of any serious analysis of the sector.

The convergences between the left and crypto do not require denying these contradictions.

They require recognizing that technologies can have features useful for certain goals and, at the same time, produce risks incompatible with others.

The assessment needs to be made case by case.

Why this conversation matters to the left

There is a reason to handle this discussion with care and some sensitivity.

Many people who identify with the left built their convictions from concrete experiences of inequality, economic hardship and the defense of rights.

For them, the debate about money is not an abstraction.

It is tied to the ability to support a family, work with dignity, access public services and build some material security.

When cryptocurrencies appear associated exclusively with financial speculation, individual enrichment or the rejection of public institutions, it is understandable that they provoke resistance.

That reaction should not be ridiculed.

It reveals legitimate concerns about the social effects of the economy.

At the same time, it would be important for those concerns not to prevent the study of technologies capable of changing forms of economic organization.

The left has a tradition of reflection on work, property, collective participation and the distribution of power.

These questions remain present in the digital economy, even as they take on new characteristics.

Studying blockchain does not require abandoning a commitment to public policy. Knowing about Bitcoin does not mean rejecting the role of the State. Investigating decentralized organizations does not imply that democratic institutions are outdated.

Nor is it necessary to turn every innovation into a promise of social transformation.

Political maturity lies in the ability to tell real possibilities from commercial talk, recognize limits and formulate our own questions.

A community interested in bringing the left and crypto together can contribute precisely here.

Not as a space meant to convince everyone to invest in digital assets, but as a place for study, debate and knowledge production.

A place where it is possible to talk about cooperativism and smart contracts, monetary sovereignty and stablecoins, privacy and oversight, social rights and new financial infrastructures.

These conversations can bring together people with different economic positions.

Disagreement need not prevent the building of knowledge.

On the contrary, a technically informed and politically plural discussion can help identify problems that would go unnoticed in spaces where everyone shares the same convictions.

There is also a responsibility of language.

The crypto world often uses technical terms that make it harder for beginners to take part.

Wallets, protocols, smart contracts, liquidity, governance and tokenization are concepts that need explaining.

Democratizing knowledge does not happen when language becomes a tool to separate experts from beginners.

It happens when complex subjects can be understood without losing precision.

For a political tradition concerned with education and popular participation, this dimension deserves special attention.

The discussion about technology should not be limited to those who already have technical training or the money to try its products.

It needs to be accessible to workers, students, teachers, researchers, small business owners and people who simply want to understand the economic changes around them.

A connection that does not require agreement

The relationship between the left and cryptocurrencies cannot be reduced to a shared set of principles.

There are important differences about the role of the State, the nature of money, private property, the distribution of wealth and the mechanisms of economic organization.

These differences do not disappear when a technology uses open code or allows transactions without intermediaries.

But there are also shared questions.

• The concentration of power worries different progressive traditions and appears as a relevant problem in the study of digital networks.
• Cooperativism offers historical experiences of collective governance that can dialogue with new coordination tools.
• The defense of open knowledge finds ways to express itself in free software projects.
• The search for financial inclusion can guide research on payments and digital services.
• The protection of individual rights helps frame the discussion of privacy, self-custody and the limits of oversight.
• And concern for sustainability offers criteria to assess the environmental costs of technological infrastructure.

None of these connections automatically turns cryptocurrencies into progressive instruments.

Their meaning depends on the conditions of use and the interests involved.

The history of technology itself shows that similar tools can serve very different ends.

That is why the most relevant aspect of this conversation may not be finding an ideological identity for Bitcoin.

It may be recognizing that the debate on decentralized technologies involves economic and social questions the left has known for a long time.

Who controls the resources? Who takes part in decisions? How are the benefits distributed? Which rights need protecting? What forms of collective organization are possible?

These questions predate the creation of cryptocurrencies.

They will remain relevant regardless of the future of any digital asset.

What has changed is the environment in which they need to be asked.

The digital economy introduced new infrastructures, new intermediaries and new possibilities for coordination. Some may expand economic alternatives. Others may reproduce or deepen relations of dependence.

Understanding that difference requires research, public debate and a willingness to face questions without simple answers.

The left does not need to accept the premises of every movement associated with cryptocurrencies to take part in this inquiry.

Nor does it need to consider a technology incompatible with its values simply because certain political groups started to champion it.

Critical thinking should not work by association.

It requires examining structures, consequences and power relations.

It is on this ground that the connections between the left and crypto can be studied seriously.

Not as an attempt to artificially reconcile different economic views, but as an effort to understand how new tools can serve, or fail to serve, concrete social goals.

Technology does not replace politics. And politics should not do without knowledge of technology.

Between these two dimensions there is a space for inquiry that deserves to be occupied by researchers, institutions, social movements and citizens with different worldviews.

The future of digital infrastructure will continue to be built through technical, economic and institutional decisions.

The more people understand those decisions, the greater the chances of submitting them to public debate.

Technology does not belong to an ideology. Its uses, its limits and its social consequences are matters of collective interest.