Libertarians: ‘Bitcoin’s Biggest Threat’?

On December 9, investment writer Martin Tiller wrote for NASDAQ that the biggest danger to Bitcoin comes from libertarians who will ‘hurt the very cause that they are championing.’
He argued in the article, entitled ‘The Biggest Dangers to Bitcoin Come from Proponents, Not Opponents,’ that those who speak out against Bitcoin aren’t the ones who hurt it. We all know the ‘tired objections’ about ‘bad actors’ who ‘latch onto’ Bitcoin, he says. If the digital currency fails, it will be due to those who support it:
‘What is probably the greatest danger to the future of Bitcoin, and maybe even to the blockchain: politics. … The decentralized, non-governmental nature of digital currency makes it particularly appealing to those of an extreme libertarian bent. When those voices are the only ones heard, it makes wider adoption and acceptance less likely.’
He would like libertarians, who have worked with such passion to spread Bitcoin’s adoption, to believe that they now inhibit its growth.
Roger Ver, for example, learned of Bitcoin while listening to the libertarian talk show Free Talk Live in 2011. He invested heavily, and since then, he has been perhaps the most influential libertarian to single-handedly spread Bitcoin’s adoption and success.
He calls Bitcoin ‘the most important invention in the history of the world since the internet.’ His company, MemoryDealers, became ‘the first mainstream business to accept bitcoin as payment,’ and he has been ‘the most prolific Bitcoin-related startup investor,’ funding the seed rounds of about a dozen major companies, including the Bitcoin Foundation, Blockchain.info, Ripple, Kraken and Coinapult.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2014-12-17.