D.L. White

Most conversations about Bitcoin are identity fights—pro, anti, or exhausted. I’ve written a lot about Bitcoin in other venues. Here I’m mostly interested in a narrower use: Bitcoin as a stress test for monetary arguments that usually remain implicit.

Bitcoin forces a few questions into the open:

• Which parts of “money” are technical, and which are institutional?
• How much monetary order depends on enforcement and compliance infrastructure?
• What does “exit” mean when most people live inside thick administrative systems—employment, banking, taxation, surveillance, credentialing?
• What changes when a monetary rule-set is less discretionary—less available to ad hoc revision—even if the world around it remains discretionary?

This is not a claim that Bitcoin “solves” politics, or that it replaces institutions. It’s a claim that it clarifies them. It makes the plumbing visible. It forces you to separate the moral story from the operational story.

That is why my earlier book, The Great Realignment, exists as a reader-facing bridge: it frames power and money as incentive systems, then uses Bitcoin to sharpen what is usually waved away. I’ll keep returning to Bitcoin here, but in that register: not tribalism, not prophecy—just a tool for thinking clearly about monetary design, enforcement, and the boundaries of autonomy in practice.

Well, I might still cheer lead once in a while too. It’s pretty cool tech.