When I lived in Brazil, I attended the wedding of the daughter of a driver my family relied on each day. In Brazil, drivers are more than chauffeurs, they are protectors, often extensions of family, anchors of safety in an uncertain world. The wedding was just fifteen minutes outside São Paulo, one of the largest cities on the planet. During the reception as a plane passed overhead, a young boy tugged at my sleeve and asked if I had ever been on one. As the questions continued, he eventually asked if I had ever been to the big city of São Paulo. His world ended just a few miles from where we stood. That moment never left me. It revealed how distance in opportunity can exist right next to proximity in geography, the gap between the developed and developing world measured not in wealth, but in access.
I thought of that boy when I heard Peter Thiel’s comments resurface earlier last week. These were remarks he first made in 2024, when Bitcoin traded around $60,000. At the time, Thiel said, “I’m not sure it’s going to go up that dramatically from here,” and reflected that “the founding ideology of Bitcoin as a libertarian, anti-centralized government mechanism … that’s what initially excited me. However, it seems it’s not functioning quite as intended.” Those quotes have gained new weight after Bitcoin’s long period of consolidation. To Thiel, the asset that once embodied rebellion has become institutionalized, traded through ETFs, sorry ETPs, embraced by governments, and absorbed into the financial mainstream. But what he sees as the end of the story may be only the middle. For billions still excluded from stable finance or fair access to opportunity, Bitcoin’s purpose has evolved: from a libertarian tool of exit to a democratizing instrument of entry, a bridge into global capitalism rather than an escape from it.
Thiel’s remarks also symbolize something broader happening beneath the surface, the quiet changing of the guard. As I wrote in “Bitcoin’s Silent IPO,” the current consolidation isn’t a failure; it’s a liquidity event. The early believers, the cypherpunks, miners, and investors who carried Bitcoin from obscurity to legitimacy are finally realizing the rewards of their conviction. They’re selling, not out of fear, but fulfillment. Thiel’s comments capture that transition perfectly: the libertarian founders who built the system are now stepping aside, passing ownership to institutions and individuals who will carry it forward. Whether it is differences in ideology or opportunity cost is irrelevant. They are moving on. Just as an IPO distributes a company’s shares to a wider audience, this phase distributes Bitcoin’s ownership to a global one. It’s how an idea born in rebellion begins to achieve stability, the moment when freedom turns into infrastructure.
From Freedom to Access
Libertarianism and democratization share the language of freedom but diverge in meaning. Libertarianism is freedom from control; democratization is freedom to participate. The early architects of the internet and crypto were libertarians at heart, visionaries who sought to dismantle gatekeepers and decentralize authority. Yet most were educated insiders, builders with the privilege and vast resources to opt out of traditional systems. They pursued sovereignty, not necessarily inclusion. The challenge that remains is how to extend that freedom to those without the tools, education, or infrastructure to use it. Democratization is what happens when freedom becomes accessible.
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and the Hardest Frontier
Long before Bitcoin, Satoshi and the Whitepaper, Timothy C. May’s Crypto Anarchist Manifesto (1988) captured the early libertarian dream of digital self-sovereignty. May envisioned cryptography, not politics, as the force that would free individuals from institutional control. He predicted a world where people could communicate and transact anonymously, collapsing the state’s ability to regulate or tax information flows. “These developments,” he wrote, “will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions.” In later writings, May warned that money would be the hardest frontier to liberate. Governments could tolerate encrypted speech, he said, but not commerce they couldn’t tax or track. “Anonymous digital cash is the most dangerous application of crypto.” Two decades later, Bitcoin achieved what he saw as nearly impossible: the separation of money and state through mathematics.
But May’s manifesto didn’t emerge in isolation, it was part of a broader current that ran through the early internet itself. The web, too, began as a kind of anarchy: open protocols, anonymous forums, peer-to-peer exchanges of information without oversight. For a time, it embodied the same libertarian ethos, information as freedom, code as law. Yet even this digital anarchy evolved. To democratize access to information, it needed usability, security, and trust. The chaos of raw networks gave way to search engines, browsers, and standards, tools that made the internet accessible to billions. Bitcoin and AI now stand at a similar threshold. If Bitcoin represented the liberation of capital, then AI represents the liberation of knowledge. Both descend from that same anarchic DNA but are maturing toward a more inclusive destiny: transforming the tools of individual sovereignty into platforms for collective empowerment.
From Libertarian Sparks to Democratic Flames
Every great technological revolution begins with libertarian sparks and matures through democratization. The printing press freed information from the Church; the American Revolution freed citizens from monarchy; the early internet freed communication from centralized media; Bitcoin freed money from intermediaries. Yet in each case, the earliest beneficiaries were the educated few. True democratization came later, when the tools became simple, affordable, and accessible.
The libertarian builds the door; the democratizer hands out the keys. Bitcoin’s whitepaper promised freedom from gatekeepers, while AI promises freedom from intellectual and institutional barriers. Both started as libertarian experiments in sovereignty but realize their greatest potential when they become tools of inclusion. The challenge ahead is ensuring this cycle, innovation, consolidation, revolt, democratization, ends not in new forms of capture, but in enduring empowerment.
The Bridge Technologies: Compromise That Scales
No revolution reaches scale without compromise. In crypto, that bridge is stablecoins, digital dollars that link the decentralized and traditional worlds. To purists, stablecoins are heresy, pegging blockchain technology back to government money. Yet to billions, they are the most practical on-ramp to global finance. Stablecoins are to crypto what HTTP and SSL were to the early internet: the pragmatic layers that made complex systems usable and trustworthy.
The same dynamic unfolded in the 1990s. Early internet libertarians dreamed of an unregulated digital commons, but it was companies like AOL, Netscape, and Amazon and eventually Google, Apple, Meta etc, commercial intermediaries despised by purists that made the web accessible to ordinary people. The real breakthrough wasn’t ideological; it was technical. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption allowed credit cards and personal data to be transmitted safely online, unlocking e-commerce. Compromise is how freedom scales. Stablecoins and user-friendly exchanges perform the same role for crypto: imperfect bridges that transform philosophy into participation.
Adoption as the Engine of Democratization
Every major technology begins as an act of rebellion but fulfills its promise through adoption. As Marc Andreessen put it, “Innovation that doesn’t scale is a hobby.” The goal isn’t just to build systems that resist control, it’s to build systems that reach people. Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz captured the same truth when he said, “The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.” Real change happens when the toy becomes a tool, when the ideals of a few evolve into the infrastructure of many. The internet, mobile phones, the cloud, and now Bitcoin all followed that arc. Each began with libertarian energy, open, permissionless, decentralized, yet each achieved democratization only when it became usable, trusted, and accessible. This is not a binary choice between anarchy and control; it’s a continuum. To help eight billion people, technology must evolve from ideology into inclusion from resisting the system to upgrading it.
Democratization of Education: The Truest Libertarian Freedom
If libertarianism’s highest ideal is individual sovereignty, then the democratization of education is its purest realization. True liberty is not just freedom from control but freedom to understand, create, and participate. AI extends the same ethos that animated Bitcoin’s creation, decentralization of power through code. Where Bitcoin broke the monopoly of banks over capital, AI is breaking the monopoly of institutions over knowledge.
About six years ago, I spent an afternoon with Michael Milken discussing the future, and one thing he said has stayed with me ever since when thinking about Bitcoin and the OGs. I had been making the case that the dollar had to weaken over time, and he stopped me and said, “Don’t think of the dollar in terms of its potential demise based on what you read from economic history books, think of what it represents.” He told me that if you opened America’s doors tomorrow and let everyone in, there would be a line of seven billion people waiting. His point was simple but profound: the dollar isn’t just a currency; it’s a symbol of access, opportunity, and the belief that education and mobility are possible. That conversation connected a dot for me, back to my days in Brazil and that boy at the wedding who had never been to São Paulo. He didn’t lack intelligence; he lacked access. As Milken often said, “Intelligence is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.”
The future of equality won’t come from redistribution; it will come from expanding access to capability. Bitcoin gives people the freedom to participate in capitalism without permission. AI can do the same for education and entrepreneurship. Together, they move us closer to the kind of freedom that Milken described, one built not on wealth, but on the universal opportunity to learn, build, and belong.
The New Definition of Upside
Peter Thiel may be right that Bitcoin’s price upside is limited, but its human upside is just beginning. The same holds true for AI. The early libertarian builders created systems for those who wanted to opt out. The next generation is building systems that allow everyone to opt in. What began as rebellion is evolving into inclusion.
Libertarianism gave Bitcoin its spark; democratization gives it its scale. Network effects are the invisible bridge between the two and proof that freedom grows through participation.
For that boy outside São Paulo who had never been on a plane or seen the city fifteen minutes away, the true upside of Bitcoin and AI isn’t theoretical. It’s a doorway into a world where proximity no longer defines possibility, where knowledge and capital flow without borders, and where technology’s greatest promise is not escape from the system, but entry into it. This is why I call Bitcoin the purest AI investment.
It has been quite something getting to know you through Pomp and now as a subscriber to substack. Your ideas regarding the markets in general and Bitcoin in particular cut true and deep. Thinking of bitcoin as an IPO was particularly insightful. Thank you
Great piece. The irony is beautiful: institutions joining Bitcoin may be the final step in its democratization. Power adopts what it can’t control — and in doing so, spreads it.