Black, Red, and Orange

Anarchists spent two centuries asking how to run an economy without a state controlling the money. The answer arrived in 2008, and the wrong people claimed it.

Black, Red, and Orange makes the libertarian socialist case for Bitcoin. Proudhon proposed mutual credit and was crushed by the banks. Kropotkin wanted to abolish money and never solved coordination at scale. The syndicalists tried labour vouchers and rebuilt a planning bureaucracy. Every anarchist tradition ran into the same wall: how do you coordinate economic life across a global supply chain without a state, a boss, or a central bank? This book argues that the tool anarchism has been waiting for already exists, and that Bitcoin’s association with right-libertarianism is an accident of who showed up first.

Inside the book:

What we actually mean by capitalism and anarchism. Why Bitcoiners and libertarian socialists use the same words for different things, and why that single confusion has kept two natural allies apart for over a decade.
What’s wrong with fiat money. The Cantillon Effect, the money monopoly, and how the state manufactures artificial scarcity in the one thing everyone needs to participate in economic life.
Bitcoin as a commons. Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for governing shared resources, and why Bitcoin fits them better than any nationalised or privatised alternative.
Sound money is workers’ money. Proof of work as fair reward for fair work, and why inflation functions as a wage cut nobody votes for.
The energy objection, answered honestly. What Bitcoin mining actually consumes, what it embarrasses, and where it funds renewable capacity that would otherwise go unbuilt.
The two hardest objections from the left. Bitcoiners are all right-wing cranks, and the wealth distribution is terrible. Both taken seriously, neither hand-waved.
Anarchism in practice. Circular economies from El Zonte to Kibera, censorship resistance and mutual aid, self-custody, and building the new world in the shell of the old.

Author Benjamin de Waal has been an anarchist far longer than he has been a Bitcoiner. He works in Bitcoin as a builder and consultant.

Its companion volume, Orange, Black, and Red, makes the same argument in reverse: libertarian socialism explained to Bitcoiners. Read either first.

If you’re an anarchist, libertarian socialist, or anti-authoritarian who dismissed Bitcoin because of who was holding it, this is the argument you haven’t yet heard.