Between Aug. 1, 2018, and Dec. 1, 2021, Anglin transferred a total of $91,920.56 to Auernheimer across 38 separate monthly transactions. “We know as an absolute matter of fact that the dollar is going to collapse, and presumably every other fiat currency on the planet is going to get dragged down with it. Maybe even the stock market is better than crypto – I am not a financial advisor and I have no idea. But what we know as a matter of fact is that you want your money somewhere,” Anglin wrote in 2020 of cryptocurrency. David Gerard, a cryptocurrency analyst and author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, told Hatewatch that the cryptocurrency community denies that extremists have immersed themselves in their subculture. Thorburn also advises people in the movement on how to donate cryptocurrency to white nationalist causes without exposing their identities, highlighting one of key reasons that the assets appeal to them. The “true values” of cryptocurrencies, as King put it, depends on who you are asking, and opinions vary in the extreme.

French computer programmer Laurent Bachelier, who also donated to Anglin of the Daily Stormer and the white nationalist non-profit VDARE, gave 13.5 Bitcoin to Fuentes before killing himself through an intentional drug overdose on Dec. 8, 2020. Fuentes has claimed that the government has seized some of the money he received in donations. Both men pushed their audience toward the privacy-focused token Monero in the years following its release in 2014. Researchers cannot yet trace Monero due to its relative anonymity, as Hatewatch previously reported. Monero’s website describes their product as “a private, decentralized cryptocurrency that keeps your finances confidential and secure.” Critics note the degree to which law enforcement and other government officials so far struggle to seewhat people are doing with it. Daily Stormer published a post in December 2017 under the byline “Tim Hort” that links their interest in cryptocurrency directly to their genocidal ideology.

How Cryptocurrency Revolutionized The White Supremacist Movement

Bitcoin has somewhat infamously lost nearly all valueduring different market crashes throughout the years, only to see it skyrocket back up. In addition to investigations such as these, so-called exit scams, which prey on trusting investors, incidents of hackingand hoaxes intended to pump up prices,all point to the possibility that the profitability such early investors as Greg Johnson saw last decade may not be as easy to find in the future. This scenario would prove even more risky if extremists choose to eschew traditional banking altogether or if traditional banks choose to cut them off. Neo-Nazis promote propaganda claiming that Jewish people control the banking industry for the purpose of deliberately harming or undermining the ambitions of non-Jewish white men. They also often openly cheer for the destruction of the U.S. as we know it – portraying the collapse of the government and financial system as an inevitability. Critics of blockchain-based sites note the degree to which they operate outside of the rules of banks, despite in some cases issuing money for people and storing it.

Balaji Srinivasan, a former Chief Technology Officer for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who has developed a reputation for speaking in bullish, quixotic terms about the space, compares Bitcoin and Ethereum to a future version of gold and oil. So buy some when the price goes down again, and when you do consider donating to us here at Stormer so we can continue to fight the Jew-owned banking empire,” a Daily Stormer postfrom Oct. 24, 2017 claims. “The current price pump is artificial, and bubbles always pop,” the author Gerard told Hatewatch. Auernheimer responded to Cantwell by saying that he recently sold off some of his own Bitcoin, taking profit from it. Hatewatch identified Auernheimer as having sold off large amounts of Bitcoin roughly a month before the podcast aired – on Nov. 13, 2017. “We feel better being in a place that doesn’t hate us,” Benjamin said affectionately of DLive in the months before they suspended his account.

the Dollar Is Going To Collapse

Cryptocurrency, or a group of digital moneys maintained through decentralized systems, has grown into a billion-dollar industry. Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right. (One of the authors of this essay owns cryptocurrency, as disclosed in an author’s note at the end.) However, the far right’s early embrace of cryptocurrency merits deeper analysis, due to the way they used it to expand their movement and to obscure funding sources. It is not uncommon for far-right extremists to seek to hide their dealings from the public.

People donated to white supremacists and neofascist livestreamers in substantial amounts on DLive, as Hatewatch has previously reported. The company permanently removed a number of extremists beyond Fuentes after Hatewatch reported on them, including the antisemitic performer Owen Benjamin and Jan. 6 participant Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet. Johnson obtained the 29.82 Bitcoin on a date when prices for the asset sat between five and 10 dollars. Hatewatch found that Johnson flipped the Bitcoin from that first transaction and additional ones into over $800,000 worth of value. He has turned his website Counter-Currents into a hub for cryptocurrency discussion in the movement and solicits donations in digital tokens, or cryptocurrency “coins,” such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Tether, Cardano, Ripple, Dash, Neo, Stellar Lumens and Basic Attention Token. Either way, those who invest in cryptocurrency have already experienced price volatility in the extreme, demonstrating the degree to which funds can evaporate overnight. A neo-Nazi who purchased Monero at the time Auernheimer endorsed it on Cantwell’s podcast in November 2017 would have seen their money rise to five times its value as of May 2021, only to see it shed roughly 60% of that amount just two months later.

When the Australian bank Westpac cut ties with Hitlerite, anti-Muslim extremist Blair Cottrell, his supporters, and many libertarians who may feel ambivalent about his hateful beliefs and simply love cryptocurrency, hyped his situationas an ideal reason for Bitcoin’s existence. These advocates suggested that if banks agree to cut ties with far-right extremists, those who are affected should respond by converting their fiat money entirely into cryptocurrency. This way of seeing the world, layered with dreams of big payoffs in passive income and understandable fears of government intrusion, has taken hold on the far-right fringe. DLive uses a blockchain-based system to distribute donations to its livestreamers, meaning it functions like an under-regulated cryptocurrency market. Sites like these, particularly those operated by ideologically driven libertarians, have become easy ways for extreme far-right figures to promote their propaganda and earn a living. Another blockchain-themed video sitethat traffics in an in-house currency is Odysee, which has in recent months given platforms to hateful propagandists banned from conventional sites, such as Fuentes, Peinovich and David Duke, among hundreds of others. Fuentes accepts payments on his site through Litecoin, a so-called fork of Bitcoin that trades at a fraction of its value per token.

• Auernheimer, who is believed to be living in Eastern Europe, has involved himself in the promotion of at least one hack-and-leak effort launched by Russian military intelligence, among other stunts.
• Less than a quarterof Americans presently own some form of cryptocurrency as of May 2021.
• As of Dec. 1, 20 of the largest and oldest Bitcoin addresses known to belong to Auernheimer pulled in payments totalling $886,345 and transferred out roughly $1,069,395.
• Auernheimer’s first known Bitcoin address issued transfers in May 2014, roughly a month after he celebrated his release from federal prisonand demanded28,000 Bitcoin from the U.S. federal government as restitution.
• Anglin has described Monero as a tool to work around “spies from the various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations.” Other far-right extremists have followed Daily Stormer’s lead.

What happens to digital currencies from here is likely to have a profound impact on the far right due to the degree to which extremists have adopted the technology relative to the population as a whole. Jay Cassano, the CEO of Cointelegraph, one of the biggest publications covering the cryptocurrency community industry and community, expressed a different point of view about the impact of regulation on cryptocurrency prices to Hatewatch. Hatewatch reached out to Tether and Binance for a comment on this story and King’s depiction of them as “price manipulators.” Tether did not reply. Two different spokespersons for Binance responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment to push back on King’s depiction of the company, calling it “absolutely false” and “wildly inaccurate.” They also noted that any investigation of Binance may not lead to official actions against them. Read more about ETH exchange here. Matt Gebert, a State Department official Hatewatch identified as a white nationalist organizer in 2019, also has contributed material to Johnson’s Counter-Currents. Explaining how he got interested in white nationalism, Thorburn said that he “went into the Stefan Molyneuxthing, where it was hardcore atheism, and hardcore anarcho-capitalism” before becoming a white nationalist. A significant number of people who started in libertarian online spaces adaptedto the pro-fascist ideology of the “alt-right” movement during the rise of Trump.

do You Know How Much I Fucking Hate The Government

The relative secrecy blockchain technology offers has become a profitable, but still extraordinarily risky, gamble against traditional banking. Auernheimer’s first known Bitcoin address issued transfers in May 2014, roughly a month after he celebrated his release from federal prisonand demanded28,000 Bitcoin from the U.S. federal government as restitution. As of Dec. 1, 20 of the largest and oldest Bitcoin addresses known to belong to Auernheimer pulled in payments totalling $886,345 and transferred out roughly $1,069,395. Anglin, who appears to have adopted cryptocurrency soon after Aurnheimer in December 2014, has moved around at least 1 million U.S. dollars in Bitcoin, as Hatewatch previously reported . In the aftermath of the violence on Jan. 6, a gaming video livestreaming site called DLive banned Fuentes. Their decision further isolated the 23-year-old extremist, who had up to that date used nightly live video appearances on the site to influence crowds of young men to attend Stop the Steal rallies.

Daily Stormer interpreted his words as a call to first destroy the financial system and then kill Jewish people. (Hatewatch obtained leaked video of Molyneux calling a monologue he filmed at that time his “white nationalism speech.”) He never responded to a request for comment about that incident. By “altcoins,” King refers in a general sense to cryptocurrencies that are not Bitcoin, running the gamut from more universal tokens such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, to much more obscure offerings. His point of view runs contrary to the propaganda churned out on a regular basis by the cryptocurrency industry, which has become notorious for publishing quixotic assessments of their space. He mentions two potential looming dangers for cryptocurrency prices in Tether and Binance. Less than a quarterof Americans presently own some form of cryptocurrency as of May 2021.

the Dollar Is Going To Collapse

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Odysee’s parent company LBRY, not for issues related to the hateful content promoted on their site, but for offering unlicensed securities. The SEC claims that LBRY promoted their cryptocurrency as a security without being licensed to do so. National Justice Party founder Michael Peinovichis among a group of extreme, far-right fringe activists who now install a system called BitPay that automates the creation of new Bitcoin walletsto coincide with each new transaction. So does Nick Fuentes, the pundit whose vocal support for the Stop the Steal movement generated large crowds of young white nationalists and neofascists at events in the runup to the violence on Jan. 6. Hatewatch found that an anonymous “mega-whale,” someone who controls thousands of Bitcoin tokens, gave large donations from that sum to multiple wallets in 2020, including one operated by Molyneux. On Oct. 11, this anonymous individual doled out 50 Bitcoin in total to such causes as the Ron Paul Institute, the Free Software Foundation and the American Institute for Economic Research. Whoever operated the account held onto their Bitcoin since 2010, underscoring Molyneux’s importance to Bitcoin’s community of early adopters and libertarian devotees. Hatewatch could not determine how Johnson generated just shy of 30 Bitcoin on that Thursday in January 2012 – whether he mined it or purchased it, or someone merely sent it to him – but the date falls just a year-and-a-half after the first known commercial cryptocurrency transactiontook place.

“Just transfer the from your exchange account to another wallet you control, and later move the from that wallet to the donor’s address. This creates plausible deniability because you aren’t sending the directly from your exchange account to a publically known nationalist,” he wrote for Johnson’s site in a post published on Nov. 26, 2020. The publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has already taken stepsto remove some extreme far-right users from its service, which could become a larger trend if politicians pass regulations on the industry. “Regulators want to crack down on fraud,” financial analyst Jacob King told Hatewatch of the cryptocurrency space. “While this is great news in the long run, it will have a disastrous impact on the price of Bitcoin and many altcoins as they are dependent on price manipulators like Tether and Binance. Auernheimer publicly described his enthusiasm for Monero on a podcast with embattled white supremacist Christopher Cantwell in December 2017. Auernheimer, who is believed to be living in Eastern Europe, has involved himself in the promotion of at least one hack-and-leak effort launched by Russian military intelligence, among other stunts. A judge sentenced Cantwell to 41 months of prison in February on charges related to extortion and threats made against a fellow extremist. White supremacists embraced cryptocurrency early in its development, and in some cases produced million-dollar profits through the technology, reshaping the racist right in radical ways, a Hatewatch analysis found.

But those numbers increase substantially within fringe right-wing spaces, according to Hatewatch’s findings, approaching something much closer to universal adoption. Hatewatch struggled to find any prominent player in the global far right who hasn’t yet embraced cryptocurrency to at least some degree. The average age of a cryptocurrency investor is 38, but even senior citizens in the white supremacist movement, such as Jared Taylorof American Renaissance, 69, and Peter Brimelowof VDARE, 73, have moved tens of thousands of dollars of the asset in recent years. Anglin has described Monero as a tool to work around “spies from the various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations.” Other far-right extremists have followed Daily Stormer’s lead. The white supremacist group National Justice Party, which is linked to a pro-Kremlin propagandistwho relocated to Moscow after attending the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, accepts donations on their website in only two cryptocurrencies today – Bitcoin and Monero. In Hatewatch’s analysis of Daily Stormer’s Bitcoin transaction history, we found transactions that resemble the types of payments employers give to employees. Cryptocurrency wallets known to be controlled by Anglin regularly transferred Bitcoin, worth a market rate of between $2,000 to $3,000 U.S., into Auernheimer’s most active wallet on the first or second day of every month.