Can You Link QAnon To Bitcoin?

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Last Updated on 26 November 2020 by CryptoTips.eu

Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / [email protected]
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As a somewhat seasoned author of articles on business and politics, it felt nostalgic to see one of the Financial Times journalists this week (try and) make the link between the best known cryptocurrency Bitcoin and the fringe alt-right conspiracy group QAnon, and then describe the latter in the same manner that Rolling Stone magazine once used to describe Goldman Sachs in 2010.

A decade one and another mainstream media platform uses the same tentacles metaphor to describe an evil force in the world. As Bob Dylan said it best, the times they are a changing.

Yes, the business newspapers this week did their best to cover the growing interest in the QAnon conspiracy theory propagators, and one of them even tried to link it directly to Bitcoin.

Advertentie.

Baking versus Mining

Only problem is that the Financial Times didn’t get very far.

Whereas QAnon’s messages, which are called Qdrops, are being “baked”, Bitcoin is, through it’s blockchain, still being mined.

I will agree that among the alt-right in the US (before Donald Trump got elected President in 2016) crypto was quite widespread because of its anonymity, and that some of them even made a nice profit with the ICO crypto bull run of 2017. However, by now, people like Zerohedge, Lauren Southern and Mike Cernovich have all switched to PayPal to get their sites financed as they prefer payment in dollars.

Their entry into crypto and the profits that they made during the 2017-2018 Bitcoin bull run is also described in the new 2020 book Ghostwriting for QAnon, which tells you the origin story of QAnon, 4Chan, 8Chan and 8Kun and also shows that crypto was only used as an anonymous means of payment by this lot.

Crypto-fascists

The only remaining link between crypto and QAnon supporters therefore is their nickname which they receive during social media outbursts when they’re called crypto-fascists.

Whereas crypto is nowadays finding acceptance from the world of finance this year through investment funds such as the one set up by Fidelity earlier this week and is close to finding mass adoption, the alt-right conspiracy theory of QAnon has been named as a domestic terrorist threat by now. Not exactly linked then.

It is therefore my opinion that the Financial Times tried to link the two together for the sake of defending their own readership (mostly classic finance and business) and possibly pushing the can of Bitcoin down the road just a bit.

However, in the end, just as Bruno Maçães, the famed author of political books such as Belt and Road and The Dawn of Eurasia already stated, I fail to see interesting similarities between the two, and simply believe that the author tried to obtain a lot of hits with this one.