Sixteen years ago, Bitcoin ushered in the age of cryptocurrencies. The self-proclaimed digital cash promised an anonymous and immediately usable global currency that could not be corrupted from the outside, beyond the banks and away from the state.

According to Prof. Dr. Aaron Sahr, Bitcoin is therefore a "currency of freedom", as we hear on the Internet, as well as in the newspaper feuilleton or at US Senate hearings.

This promise is particularly attractive to those who suffer under the power of payment intermediaries and repressive financial authorities - and there are quite a few of them.

He asks: "But is the promise sustainable?" The lecture explains the basic principles of how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies work and explores their freedom policy ambitions in the light of monetary sociological findings and current political developments in the Trump era.

Aaron Sahr heads the research group "Monetary Sovereignty" at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
As a visiting professor at Leuphana University Lüneburg, he researches and teaches at the Center for Theory and History of Modernity on monetary history, capitalist dynamics and political economy.