Usually I’m a big fan of David Stockman’s Contra Corner, but this piece went just a little over the line for me.  Given the searing amount of hypocrisy oozing from the right side of the political sphere, this article seems like it is seeking anything that it can to smear a politician who has run independently, earnestly, and seemingly with a deep regard for the average working American.

Since Bitcoin has quite a lot of libertarians in it, I can see the letters coming now complaining of Sander’s socialists roots. To that, I have a couple of responses. The first is that the right is not a libertarian party – it is a party of oligarchs and plutocrats. The second is that a little socialism is a good thing – it can give us roads, police, libraries, and teachers. It can also give us a safety net to make sure that no person need live on the streets. Sure, there are huge problems with that vision. But that vision is better than seeing the poisoning the water of a city to save a few dollars, as has happened in Flint, Michigan, or to letting the hundreds of thousands of homeless folk wandering our streets be victims of police harassment instead of municipal charity.

How does Bitcoin fit into this? There is a real complaint in the article: the government can waste our money in sweetheart deals that benefit politicians and their cronies. Bitcoin is not anonymous, as if often said. Every Bitcoin address is known – only the identity of the people who own them is not necessarily known. As a matter of fact, I have an address on the donation page of this site – so anyone paying attention knows that I own that. By knowing that, they easily guess some of the other addresses that I own. If we reach a point where the government is forced to use Bitcoin for its finances, and that all official addresses be known, we could audit, in real time, what the government is spending our money on. We could know that it’s going to the police, the libraries, and the schools, instead of trillion dollar boondoggles.