Blockchain adoption is the purest form of colonialism that renders the Global South as a problem to be “solved” with cryptocurrency

Brett Scott, “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?,” working paper at United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, pgs. 8-9

There is also a more political critique though. Those that position Bitcoin is a life-raft currency implicitly seem to suggest that it is desirable to “escape to the internet” rather than seek more fundamental solutions to a country’s underlying problems on the ground. Advocating that a vulnerable country adopt Bitcoin is at best likely to be a short-term solution, and at worst just distracts countries from strengthening already fragile institutions. It is one thing to use Bitcoin to provide a counter-power to the powerful cartels of banks in nations like the United States, but in a country like Zimbabwe the real need may be to strengthen the integrity of the banking system, something that can only be achieved by hard, long-term political battles.

Escaping weak local institutions might help individual people, but does little to empower the broader social majority who remain reliant on the existing systems. Those who are most likely to seek escape are, perhaps, social elites with high education, access to technology and capital to protect. The rhetoric of cryptocurrency superiority—often articulated by cryptocurrency start-ups—even has neocolonial tinges: are local elites within fragile countries being encouraged to buy into a “forget your local systems, rely on our technology” narrative articulated by Western tech gurus?

In the minds of such technologists—whether hard-edged businesspeople or progressive Silicon Valley tech optimists—technology is often viewed as a market-driven force for pragmatic problem-solving. Viewed through such a “solutionist”20 lens, the world appears in apolitical terms as a series of things that have been solved and things that remain to be solved with technology-driven enterprises. This “technology-as-saviour” narrative is essentially top-down in nature—it is imagined that the problems of people in “poorer countries” would be solved by the optimistic entrepreneurial drive of American Stanford graduates. It is sometimes exemplified in generic ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development) imagery of marginalized Masai people huddled around a computer in a village, or a Vietnamese rice paddy farmer smiling at a smart-phone.

Technology solutionism can be contrasted to more holistic anthropological perspectives concerned with understanding the socially embedded use of technology in particular political and cultural settings. Technology does not operate in a vacuum, and Bitcoin systems do not just descend on “poorer countries” for the empowerment of all. The solution gets sold by particular people and adopted by particular people within particular contexts.