Anarcho-capitalism is the position that functions performed by the state — including law enforcement, adjudication and the issue of money — could and should be performed instead by private contract and market provision. It sits inside the wider libertarian movement documented on the libertarian-movement page and is distinguished from it by rejecting the minimal state rather than seeking to shrink it.

The cryptocurrency overlap

The overlap with cryptocurrency is real and is best shown from the primary document rather than asserted.

The Bitcoin white paper, published in 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, states its design goal as allowing “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”. A system for transferring value that requires no trusted intermediary is a direct technical expression of this current’s political premise, which is why the two communities overlapped so heavily.

Two cautions belong with that. The paper is a technical proposal, not a political manifesto, and it makes no political claim. And the fact that a technology suits a politics does not mean the technology was built for it or that its users share it.

What was removed

The previous version carried a four-phase chronology from 2008 and asserted specific relationships between two presidential campaigns, particular subreddits and YouTube channels, and the cryptocurrency boom. None was sourced.

The founded field, which read 2008, has been removed. 2008 is the date of the Bitcoin white paper; the political position is decades older, and dating the movement to a technology inverts the relationship between them.

Sources

  1. 01.

    Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The founding technical paper of the project this current is most closely associated with. Cited for its stated design goal — payments "sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution" — which is the specific point of overlap with this movement's politics. The paper is published under a pseudonym; that is stated here rather than obscured.

    bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  2. 02.

    Doherty, B. (2007). Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. PublicAffairs. Narrative history of the wider movement this current sits inside, written by a participant. Existence and bibliographic details confirmed from the Crossref records for two published academic reviews (DOIs 10.5860/choice.45-2786 and 10.1111/j.1468-0270.2007.00792_8.x); the book itself has no Crossref record.