> He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances
He absolutely has not. I'm sure they will continue to take hard right-libertarian stances that are common in the cryptocurrency world.
- Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago
Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.
If anything, "this kind of technology" means the opposite of exclusivity, namely that Coinbase is part of a larger system than themselves, made of multiple corporations and other entities, and the people themselves, using this kind of technology, which it is claimed together help the underserved.
Or are you trying to argue that this for-profit corporation, or all for-profit corporations, should not be aiming to help underserved people?
Just because something doesn't contradict your idea of a hard right-libertarian, doesn't mean that it is a hard right-libertarian view.
You may read it as "identifying an underserved market", but you have start from seeing the underserved as being a market to think that way.
Another reading is to think there are people currently deprived of basic rights to low levels of personal property and interactions that most folk already have and enjoy, and the corporation says it exists to make those rights available to more people in a more egalitarian fashion than the currently broken system permits. That would make it left-libertarian, albeit the market-oriented variety.
With cryptocurrencies specifically, the premise is that most poor people are poor because of government over-regulation (which is also deemed responsible for monopolies) and over-taxation, and so providing the ability to circumvent both is beneficial. It's definitely a libertarian stance, although it could be either left or right libertarian by itself. But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.
Perhaps so.
But this isn't about cryptocurrency adepts in general. Is there other context that shows Coinbase and/or Brian Armstrong have a problem with fiat money, and/or that they advocate for a limited money supply, or even that they advocate to reduce or avoid taxation?
Seems to me the corporation's activity is literally integrating fiat systems with cryptocurrency, including tax reporting, so it's not clear if Coinbase's longer term direction is towards cryptocurrency being its own separate system of ordinary transactions in the end, or towards it being just another option alongside and integrated with fiat for more options in ordinary life. Regardless of what cryptocurrency adepts out in the world would like it to be.
Also I have never in my lifetime of working with many libertarian programmers heard anyone aggressively push their libertarian views in a way aimed at changing a companies internal politics. Also never heard a conservative or even really a traditional Democrat do this.
This is almost strictly a leftist thing.