Interview with ViaBTC CEO HaiPo Yang: Is the Essence of Blockchain a Libertarian Experiment?
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Interview with ViaBTC CEO HaiPo Yang: Is the Essence of Blockchain a Libertarian Experiment?
Where can freedom truly go when trust no longer relies on centralization?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
After enduring multiple bull and bear cycles—and narrative revolutions—the crypto industry is entering a more complex phase: it is accelerating its mainstream adoption while simultaneously experiencing a steady retreat of imagination. ETFs, stablecoins, and institutional capital are making blockchain increasingly resemble part of the financial system; yet market enthusiasm for “disrupting everything” rapidly fades with each cycle. Precisely because of this, now may be the ideal moment to revisit a fundamental question: What *is* blockchain?
To explore this question, we held an in-depth conversation with Yang Haipo, CEO of ViaBTC. As one of the earliest participants and builders in the crypto industry, his answer is neither “next-generation infrastructure” nor “cutting-edge technology,” but rather a sharper definition: blockchain is a hardcore libertarian experiment—one that, over more than a decade, has continuously tested an enduring question: *How far can freedom go when trust no longer depends on central authorities?*
Q: After multiple market cycles, many users have become disillusioned with the narratives around “blockchain” and “decentralization.” Standing at this juncture, how do you view blockchain today?
Frankly, most people’s understanding of blockchain was off from the start. They assumed it was like AI or cloud computing—something enterprises could procure and governments could insert into PowerPoint slides as “new infrastructure.” But blockchain has never been merely a technology. Its *means* is decentralization; its *end* is freedom. Historically, it is a hardcore libertarian experiment.
We all know the 2008 global financial crisis caused a segment of the population to lose complete faith in centralized financial systems. Satoshi Nakamoto embedded the famous headline from *The Times*—“Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”—in Bitcoin’s genesis block. This was not just a technical detail; it was also a striking political statement.
Yet Bitcoin did not appear out of thin air. Prior to it, the Cypherpunk movement had been brewing for two decades: from David Chaum’s DigiCash, to Wei Dai’s b-money, to Hal Finney’s RPOW—a group of cryptographers and programmers persistently attempted to realize personal privacy and financial freedom through technical means. Nostalgia for the gold standard, Hayek’s theory of competing currencies, the technical groundwork laid by the Cypherpunks, and the collapse of trust triggered by the financial crisis—all these threads converged in 2008, crystallizing into a testable proposition: *What happens if we replace trust with cryptography, institutions with protocols, and law with code?*
This is, in essence, one of libertarianism’s core assumptions—that individuals, without a Leviathan to back them up, can self-organize, self-govern, and self-account. Blockchain, for the first time, placed this question into large-scale real-world testing: no lab, no ethics board, with the centuries-old traditional financial system as the control group, real people as subjects, and real money as the stake.
And there’s another frequently overlooked point: blockchain is inherently financial. Decentralization is extremely expensive and inefficient—identical data must be redundantly stored and repeatedly verified across thousands of nodes globally, limiting throughput to single digits per second. Such a slow, costly system would never be used to store videos, run AI models, or power social apps. The only domain truly willing to bear the high cost of decentralization over the long term remains finance—because finance’s core is trust, and the cost of trust vastly exceeds that of computational power. Bitcoin’s whitepaper title states it plainly: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” From day one, this has been about money.
Q: What, then, has this “libertarian experiment” validated—so far?
It has validated that both the *benefits* and the *costs* of freedom are real.
First, the benefits. One of blockchain’s most essential capabilities is censorship resistance—and this is not an abstract concept, but something repeatedly proven in reality. In 2010, WikiLeaks suffered a comprehensive financial blockade: Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal all severed its funding channels, stripping it of the ability to receive donations. Bitcoin became the sole channel impossible to block.
Stablecoins represent another validation—on the demand side. Their importance lies not in how elegant their underlying philosophy appears, but in the fact that real people genuinely need value-transfer channels that are harder to control. For Argentine households, USDT is the most convenient hedge against local currency depreciation; for merchants in sanctioned countries, it is the only gateway into global trade settlement; for Afghan women, it offers a way to bypass familial control and preserve personal savings.
Yet here lies a critical paradox: the most successful product of this libertarian experiment so far relies precisely on *incomplete* decentralization. USDT is centrally issued by Tether and can be frozen. In other words, stablecoins’ success reflects a compromise with the experiment’s foundational premise—users don’t necessarily demand pure decentralization; they seek a conduit relatively insulated from local authority. Whether the other end of that conduit remains centralized matters less to many users.
Then there are the costs. Freedom has never been a free lunch. The flipside of this experiment is a dark forest devoid of police, courts, or insurance companies. Luna is the most iconic case study. The Anchor Protocol promised an annualized yield of 19.5%, while U.S. Treasury yields stood below 4% at the time. That return did not originate from real economic activity, but instead relied on token emissions and capital from later entrants—essentially a classic Ponzi structure, merely cloaked in the language of “algorithmic stablecoins.” Within three days, $40 billion evaporated. Then came Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, and FTX—one after another collapsing.
An industry touting “decentralization” is, in practice, highly interconnected, highly centralized, and highly fragile. SBF received a 25-year sentence; Do Kwon, 15 years; the Celsius founder, 12 years—the industry’s most prominent founders are collectively writing footnotes to the *cost* of “freedom” behind bars.
Q: Why does an experiment launched in the name of freedom inevitably evolve into speculation, centralization, and narrative mania?
Because technology can change rules—but cannot automatically change people. Many hold overly optimistic expectations about blockchain, assuming that once the underlying protocol achieves sufficient decentralization, a free order will naturally emerge on top. Reality doesn’t work that way. As long as participants remain human, markets will inevitably generate new narratives, new centers of power, new authorities—and wave after wave of emotionally driven speculation.
From altcoins, ICOs, DeFi, NFTs, to MEME coins, a clear trend emerges: each cycle’s technical substance diminishes, while its speculative purity intensifies and its duration shortens. In some sense, MEME coins are the most honest—they barely disguise themselves anymore as “technological revolutions” or “paradigm shifts.” People buy them not for assets, but for participation, belonging, and the emotional experience of “being there.”
A bull market is, fundamentally, a process of amplifying consensus. The halving provides the initial spark—but what ultimately determines how long the rally lasts is how much new capital remains willing to enter the same narrative. Across past cycles, narratives have grown lighter, speculation faster. This signals that markets often trade not genuine technology, but narratives, identity, and raw emotion itself. And thus, an experiment explicitly designed to bypass centers, authorities, and institutional intermediaries still inevitably spawns new centers—and new frenzies.
So the most revealing aspect of blockchain isn’t whether it realizes some pure utopia—but how thoroughly it exposes a simple truth: *On top of decentralized protocols, humans will inevitably re-create centralized beliefs and speculative structures.*
Q: Where do you see this libertarian experiment ultimately heading?
I’m not pessimistic—but neither do I believe it will become the universal “infrastructure of the future,” as many imagine.
The demand for blockchain is real—but its ceiling is far lower than the market imagines. How many people need to circumvent capital controls? How large is the market for anonymous transactions? What share of the global population needs to bypass traditional financial intermediaries? This is a real, but limited, market. Those who truly need it are already using it.
A major misjudgment the industry made in the past was treating a niche—but authentic—demand channel as if it were general-purpose infrastructure meant to rebuild the entire world. Billions of dollars poured into payments, social apps, and gaming often rested on a flawed assumption: that ordinary people universally need decentralization. The truth is, most ordinary people don’t. They prioritize convenience, safety nets, and low barriers to entry—so far more people willingly use Alipay than manage private keys themselves.
That doesn’t mean blockchain lacks significance. On the contrary, solving even a subset of real problems makes it profoundly important. Just as the printing press undermined the Church’s monopoly over knowledge, and the internet undermined traditional media’s monopoly over information, blockchain’s true disruption lies in undermining financial intermediaries’ monopoly over value transfer. For the first time at a global scale, blockchain has turned the ability to store and transfer value without reliance on any single institution into something accessible to ordinary people. The full consequences of this shift may take decades to unfold—but the direction is irreversible.
In a world where bank accounts can be frozen, currencies infinitely diluted, and financial institutions arbitrarily impose restrictions, the mere existence of a value-transfer network that no one can fully shut down carries intrinsic meaning. It may not belong to everyone—but its existence permanently redraws boundaries. Once this door opens, it can never be closed again.
Q: One final question—what advice would you give to ordinary participants?
True freedom isn’t owning a decentralized wallet—it’s owning a mind unshackled from herd mentality. This industry lacks neither fervor, nor scams, nor self-congratulatory idealists and bloodthirsty speculators. Most projects will go to zero, most narratives will be forgotten, and most participants will lose money. In a market with no cash flows, no clearly defined intrinsic value, and no measurable margin of safety, what you’re ultimately investing in is rarely a specific project—but your own judgment.
Every deep read, every forced moment of reflection, every internal dialogue you refuse to avoid—broadens your capacity to resist being swept away by narratives. In cryptocurrency—and all rapidly evolving domains—the one thing that truly survives cycles isn’t a particular story, but the ability to remain unmoved by stories.
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