My biggest regret in the Bitcoin space is not that I haven’t stacked more sats. (What is enough really? I’m trying to embrace the concept.) No, my biggest regret in the Bitcoin space (“…so far,” Bart) is that I hadn’t done more, earlier, to help educate progressives, the Left, BIPOC, basically anyone who is not a Right-leaning, cis, white, male, tech bro—or who otherwise might be considered a ‘minority’ in the colloquial sense.
Because the more you really grok Bitcoin, the more you understand that, yes, Bitcoin is undoubtedly going to reshape global power. Already is. Already has, frankly. (And also, might it be our last chance to shake up this order for the better? Will the state of things then essentially be cemented for generations to come?) It’s reasonable to ask with concern, “What will the world look like if the wealthiest have primarily one political bent? Or come from one part of the world?” Bitcoiners ARE going to be the new aristocratic class, so cue up that famous quote by Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. You know it, I need not repeat it here, I’m sure. (I’ll just allude to it in the next sentence.)
Alas, in my desire to strike a balance between anonymity and participation in a fast-moving and uncertain space, perhaps I have abdicated too much of that great responsibility while prioritizing the former. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin Right has since done a fine job of becoming the loudest voices in the proverbial room. And just as the Democrats have long been playing defense to the Republican’s control of narrative and framing (don’t miss George Lakoff’s, Don’t Think of an Elephant! for more on that), here, we—the Left—find ourselves once again, playing catch up …no thanks to me. I’m sorry.
Still, few in number though we may feel, we progressives know that when we remove biased framing from our policy discourse, most Americans in fact actually agree with us on simply affordable healthcare, affordable housing, and affordable higher education, on the civil rights of others (neighbor and stranger alike), and the frustration of absurd wealth inequality (which Bitcoin doesn’t solve, BTW) or the unchecked power of corporations and billionaires. And of course, reasonable gun safety measures lest we disclaim student safety and trauma. (Or hell, how about the wellbeing of just literally anyone?) Oh, and how dare we desire a clean and habitable planet? These notions are far from radical. We must not forget that behind biased framing in discourse, most Americans (nay, most people of the world) are absolutely with us. They are with us because they just literally are us.
There is certainly a Far-Right in the United States of America in 2025. Absurdly, we have actual Nazis—or, in the very least, Nazi sympathizers—in significant positions of unelected and even elected power. There is, however, no Far-Left. That’s not a thing; this is a gaslighting attempt at false equivalency. Supporting tenets of the Left mentioned in the paragraph above might just be called being a decent human being.
Similarly, in the Bitcoin space we may feel drowned out by the loudest BT Conservatives or obnoxious, toxic, and plainly dumb Pepe the Frog memes, but as Troy Cross points out in the Nakamoto Project’s 2024 American Bitcoin Survey Report, a not-insignificant percentage of Bitcoiners are, perhaps surprisingly, Left-leaning.
So hope(.com) may not be lost yet if these loud Right-leaning Bitcoiners may be merely that. Anecdotally—just in reflecting on my own experience (and the crux of this article)—this makes total sense to me, as I, for one, have been deep in Bitcoin since 2014—when I was looking for a way to save $40 in bank fees remitting money from South Korea—and yet I’ve barely made a public peep.
In a perhaps interesting parallel to the ethos of the cypherpunk movement itself—and though, yes, most of the cypherpunks were Libertarian (unsurprising of a group who sought to develop cryptography to empower the individual over the State)—some cypherpunks also clearly considered themselves Liberals and activists. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption inventor extraordinaire himself, Phil Zimmermann, was an anti-nuclear protestor who was arrested twice for his role in demonstrations (Dexheimer, 1993). (Sidenote: I wonder what he thinks of the advances in nuclear power safety today? …I digress.)
We progressive Bitcoiners know that Bitcoin is not political. Of course it is political in the sense that everything is political, but it’s not political. Technology is apolitical. Saying, “Bitcoin is a Right-leaning thing” would be like if in the ’90s, we said, “Email? Oh, that Republican breakthrough?” Obviously ridiculous (then and now)… similarly, in another 30 years, Bitcoin too will be clearly understood—most certainly sooner.
Still, a squeaky wheel gets the grease; there’s a time to be loud. Or rather, there’s a time not to be silent. I’m grateful to find you others here. Not uncommon in this space, my Bitcoin journey too has been a some-might-say interesting and globe-trotting, yet still lonely road in my real life. Meandering paths to “success” sometimes are.
I had the idea for a Bitcoin podcast through a Left-leaning lens in 2015, but I did nothing at all to make it happen in public. I recorded a few voice notes to my phone while in Cambodia to which I’ve never gone back to listen (though now I am curious…). I don’t say this to boast that the Progressive Bitcoiner was my idea, not at all; I did nothing to bring it to life. Thinking of a podcast is quite a different thing from making it happen. (I’m sure there are funny memes for this.) No, my nomadic vagabonding brought other priorities, so I’m quite glad Mark and the growing team here finally did and I applaud them for their ongoing effort. I just regret that I didn’t do all that much earlier to help prevent a Right-leaning narrative from taking hodl.
I did, however, swim through a torrent of Right-leaning bias as I listened to tens of thousands of hours of Bitcoin podcasts, finding myself both agreeing and, of course, disagreeing at times. And if you’re reading this, you likely have too. (I still do, all the time.) And yet, as a Left-leaning person, I have no qualms in admitting that the Right is spot-on correct about Bitcoin and the shortcomings (to put it kindly) of our current monetary system.
If our political spectrum was a circle rather than the typically depicted Left / Right straight line of the graphic above, perhaps Bitcoin could indeed close the loop on our respective grievances. Living in Australia during the 2016 election, it struck me how absolutely batshit insane Aussies thought we Americans looked from the outside; and I certainly could not disagree. Back then, I said that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were two sides of the same coin of frustration felt by working- and middle class people. However, it is obvious that only one of them actually genuinely cares about people, while the Grifter-in-Chief just clearly manipulates his base toward his own ends. (Had the DNC not screwed him us all (the first time), Bernie would have destroyed Trump, given a fair primary process in 2016. He still would. And Trump refuses to debate him, not surprisingly.)
After sharing only one Bitcoin Instagram post in 2016 and sporadic defenses in Facebook comments over the years (which I later deleted, prioritizing anonymity), I decided to finally start educating more widely about Bitcoin again in 2020, albeit privately within my own circle. Upon my return to Zambia in 2022, I connected with Anita Posch and jumped into the growing Bitcoin Zambia (formerly Bitcoin for Fairness) community there, online and—when I could make the 15-hour bus ride on roads you can imagine—in person. We presented to a group of journalists to help “educate the educators” and I started the Bantu Bitcoin podcast in both Bemba language and English.
Regrets can be a hard thing. Most all of us won’t get out of this experience (read: life) without at least a few of them in some manner. Only in the best cases may we ever find ourselves with the choice to course-correct or even attempt to make amends. (And where you can, I might now implore you to at least try—if for only yourself; actually, only for yourself.) But in those other cases? Well, as we age we are left to find that there are some laments that we will just have no choice but to grin, bear, and take to our Hippie, compostable, tree-planted graves. No doubt, Bitcoiners are going to be taking quite a few secrets to our respective final resting spots; regrets of this sort need not be one of them.
To wrap up in a predictable way, I’ve just now donated to The Progressive Bitcoiner. I’m happy to be able to, but I would note that giving money to ease regret is likely not your optimal path and doesn’t absolve inaction. Expect more from me.
I wrote this intending to be more a call to action and engagement (primarily for myself to share more) rather than a fundraising pitch, but to close without fumbling the easy alley-oop (while mixing sports ball metaphors), if you value the effort of TPB also, I’m sure your donation would be much appreciated as well and put to good use. Having just become an official 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit, the crew here has an ambitious vision for TPB, Inc. Stay tuned and join us! Your money is helpful, but your active participation is better (take it from one who is learning the hard way).
#StudyBitcoin. UPGRADE YOUR DENOMINATOR.
More posts by @5atoshiNakamoto
@5atoshiNakamoto is a longtime book editor, new article proofreader here at TPB, and was host of Bantu Bitcoin—a Bitcoin-only education podcast from rural Zambia, in Bemba and English—when he served as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer.
