And then, of course, there’s Peter Thiel.

The Paypal and Palantir cofounder is a self-identified libertarian, despite his recent association with Donald Trump. As he wrote in a blog post for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank:

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.” But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

Immortality-mongering aside—Thiel really, really wants to live forever—this could be read as a mission statement for the foundations of cryptocurrency: an economic utopia that celebrates the individual. ”Crypto is libertarian, AI is communist,” he said in a recent debate with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. (Hoffman countered that cryptocurrencies are “anarchy” and artificial intelligence is “the rule of law.”) Thiel has said that bitcoin will be the “online equivalent to gold” and has been stocking up since 2012, when the price of the original cryptocurrency was a fraction of what it is today.

Where to from here? Because of the individualist nature of both communities, it’s a little hard to tell. When wealth and power become untangled from central oversight, and people are free to roam as they please, it comes down to the principles of the individuals pushing their doctrines forward. “Bitcoin is an open source protocol with no ideology, and only people hold these types of values,” writes Jamie Redman in Bitcoin News. “So, in the end, the choice of what bitcoin will ultimately disrupt will be in the hands of the users.”

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This story is a part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.

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