Bitcoin is reaching a pivotal turning point in the public eye today in the 2024 election cycle. Rather than ignoring it, both candidates are now actively in a battle to secure the vote of Bitcoin holders, because they realize that it’s grown to become a not-so-insignificant pool of voters these days.
How Far Bitcoin Has Come
Before diving deep into the nuance, let’s appreciate how far bitcoin has come in its 15-year history.
Satoshi Nakamoto was probably literally working on bitcoin out of their basement, with no guarantee of success, and no validation from the outside world about its creation. Nowadays, bitcoin is becoming a key talking point from both sides of the political aisle, as inflation and the economy stand at the forefront of voters’ minds.
How can we deal with our rapidly rising debt?
How can we fend off the massive inflationary surge caused by excess money printing during the 2020 pandemic?
It appears that both presidential candidates are having to face the realities of monetary action taken in past years, but as you’ll see, it’s clear that only one of them is making an effort to define specific policy points regarding bitcoin.
An Important Caveat To Understand
No matter what either presidential candidate tells us, the reality is that politicians at large can’t be entrusted to “solve” deeply rooted problems, like a fundamentally broken monetary policy. It requires drastic reorganization of society, driven by technological innovation, to achieve real prosperity for the world. History is full of examples of this. I like looking back to the Catholic Church and the printing press. No matter what the church (the state) tried to do, meaningful progress for society never came until Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the world. Its creation inevitably broke the church’s monopoly on information, and empowered the people to simply acquire the information they wanted without having to ask permission from the state to do so.
The separation of church and state was a fundamental breakthrough that distributed freedom to the world. Today, that next breakthrough in freedom that humanity is working towards comes from the separation of money and state.
The important question is: Will any political candidate have the courage to make that separation themselves?
Stated Bitcoin Policies From Kamala Harris
Much like her lack of presence in the public eye since entering the presidential race, there has been little to no policy or semblance of a plan to federally incorporate bitcoin into US policy.
There’s been talk of getting more acquainted with bitcoin, however, we have yet to see any defined policy. What we’ve seen so far are promises to develop relationships with people in the space, but so far, none of that has become public or acknowledged directly by Harris.
One not-so-great policy that she’s stated is her plan to appoint the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who notoriously delayed Bitcoin Spot ETFs in the US for years, as Treasury Secretary. And other decisions she’s made suggest that her administration will likely be hostile towards bitcoin.
- She supports Biden’s budget proposals, which includes a 30% tax on cryptocurrency mining and applying the wash sale rule on cryptocurrency sales. In the context of bitcoin, despite the fact that it is a commodity, this ruling legally treats it as if it’s different than any other commodity, like gold, oil, or wheat. Put simply: If you tried to sell bitcoin at a loss, but then bought back your same position within 30 days, you wouldn’t be able to deduct that initial loss from your taxes. The only way to get that deduction is if you acquired a “significantly changing your market position”. So this policy is yet another attempt at throttling and controlling Bitcoin holders’ decisions.
- Kamala’s economic advisor picks don’t exactly scream “bullish bitcoin” either. Brian Deese & Bharat Ramamurti are former Biden economic aids with hostile rhetoric towards the industry. Ramamurti, titled one of the White Houses’s “top crypto critics”, also has more than six years of experience working on economic policy under Elizabeth Warren, one of the most notorious anti-Bitcoin senators. Deese put out “The Administration’s Roadmap to Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Risks“, a White House roadmap that repeatedly synonymizes bitcoin and crypto at large with fraud and risk mitigation in an attempt to justify governmental overreach on what people do with their money.
One major example of the overreach I’m talking about is the shutdown of Samourai Wallet, which provided Bitcoin users with open-source privacy tools. This move cramped down on people’s ability to retain financial privacy online, and drove other freedom-promoting Bitcoin tools like Phoenix Wallet to shutter business in the US in order to avoid legal persecution.
No matter what policies Harris does end up putting forth in regards to bitcoin, we cannot forget the outright battle against freedom and privacy that the Biden-Harris administration enacted against Bitcoin privacy through weaponization of the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Stated Bitcoin Policies From Donald Trump
It’s been fascinating to watch Donald Trump slowly fall down the rabbit hole. He’s gone from a complete skeptic to an enthusiast in the span of five years. However, that doesn’t mean he’s going to revolutionize the world by ushering in hypebitcoinization into the US and throughout the rest of the world. We’re not out of the woods yet.
If we take a look back to his thoughts on bitcoin back in 2019, you can read about his negative perception of bitcoin:
However, now, in 2024, having done more homework, it’s clear that Donald Trump is rightfully seeing what’s actually threatening the supremacy of the US Dollar: rampant money printing that debases the currency’s purchasing power and erodes the savings of its holders over time.
“Those who say that bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards…Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar. The behavior of the current US government is really threatening the dollar.”
While most of his commentary today is likely driven by a desire for citizens’ votes, there’s no denying that he’s ushering in a wake up call for the rest of the world that bitcoin is an essential component of any functioning nation’s balance sheet. At Bitcoin 2024, Trump pledged to form a strategic Bitcoin reserve that would keep 100% of the US government’s now 203,000 BTC.
Despite the recognition of reality, however, it’s not clear that Donald Trump has an outright mission to drastically reduce our spending, let alone end the Federal Reserve. In a lot of ways, the attitude being taken is that of throwing in the towel, and using our money printing system to try and “fix” broken federalized institutions and patch holes with band-aids wherever possible.
For example, take a look at the top 20 agenda items Donald Trump posted to social media:
Maybe some sound good, to others not so much – but what I take note of here are items #3 and #13:
- “End inflation”
- “Maintain the US Dollar supremacy”
On paper, both of these sound pretty good to a presidential candidate deeply entwined in the political system. However, the reality is that these two statements are not congruent with one another.
We can either end inflation or maintain the US Dollar supremacy, but not both. And focusing on the latter outcome would only result in dramatically worse conditions for the US and the rest of the world.
The problem is that killing inflation effectively is only possible through uprooting and ending the Federal Reserve and central banking network entirely – and thus the government’s control over the monetary system. It requires a relinquishment of power that, based on his other statements, Trump is not prepared to make. If you want to maintain US Dollar supremacy in the world, that requires keeping the money printer going, but that in turn results in inevitable hyperinflation of the world’s strongest currency, followed by a plunge into economic catastrophe around the world.
It’s a choice between the lesser of two evils. Does Trump want to make the correct, but societally challenging decision to end the Federal Reserve and embrace bitcoin’s newly engineered economic model for the world, or does he want to maintain pride in the American dollar, only for it to inevitably drive the US and the world into complete economic breakdown. On the dollar’s current path, that’s where we are headed anyway. What’s necessary is a complete restructuring of monetary policy – the “policy” being to rely on bitcoin and give up on humanity determining monetary policy entirely.
The World’s Dilemma
Humanity has a very difficult choice to face in the 21st century. Do we recognize the flaws in our way of economic life and put in the hard work necessary to reorganize society around a Bitcoin standard? Or do we keep our eyes shut and push on with inflationary monetary policy, in hopes that the laws of physics magically decide to redesign themselves? The former decision is more painful in the short term, while prosperous in the long term, while the latter decision offloads the pain for the long term to enjoy “comfort” in the short term.
What the economic world needs is a cure to its chronic illness. The illness being inflation, or a requirement to debase value over time in order for things to “work”.
The Bitcoin Standard author Saifedean Ammous framed this idea perfectly in a response to skepticism about bitcoin:
“Life is not supposed to have such easy shortcuts. But [saving in bitcoin] only seems spectacularly easy because we’ve spent a century using money that’s optimized for government criminals to rob you & getting gaslit into believing life just has to get more expensive & saving is futile. You must keep working harder forever AND become a part-time hedge fund manager just to keep the wealth you’ve already earned from work. If it wasn’t for fiat larceny, everything would be always getting cheaper & saving would be an effective way to provide for your future. It isn’t that bitcoin is too good to be true, it’s just that it kills fiat parasitism and that is the world’s biggest problem.
If you & everyone you knew spent your entire lives sick from parasites, an antiparasitic pill will seem like a magic pill. If parasites could write your textbooks & newspapers, they’d call the anti-parasitic pill an unworkable utopian fantasy.”
Everyone understands that curing chronic illness is no simple feat. And on a global scale, eradicating it inevitably leads to social unrest and confusion in the short term. Unfortunately, millions, if not billions, of people are unprepared for a world that revolves around a neutral, trustless monetary layer. Our civilizations have been built around outdated monetary architecture – how can we expect an uprooting of that to go over smoothly with the people?
It just goes to show that life is not fair, equal, or decent to humanity. A lot of the time, the best decisions are painful ones, and if inflation proves anything, it’s that people will sacrifice what’s “right” for comfort and security in a heartbeat, at the expense of getting repeatedly caught in traps that this mindset inherently creates.
Ultimately, however, the pain that ridding the world of fiat monetary policy causes will be dramatically less than the systemic pain that society at large endures today. It’s time to rip the bandaid off.
Final Thoughts
Bitcoin breaks the cycle of economic turmoil that civilization has always lived with throughout history. It offers a world in which we don’t have to design our way of life around volatile business cycles with booms, busts, bubbles, and crashes. If we can achieve more stability in the bedrock of our economy – the money we use to lubricate it – then we can achieve more stability in the working lives of everyday people within that economy.
While each of the presidential candidates have their own vision for how to fit bitcoin into today’s political and economic standards, there still lies a problem in them trying to make it “fit” at all. What the world needs is a movement from the complete reverse mentality: We need to “fit” everything else around bitcoin, not try to incorporate bitcoin into an already broken system.
There are plenty of ways to go about this, and it starts by orange pilling your closest friends and family around you. The more localized communities we have operating on a Bitcoin standard, the quicker we can expand these communities out to the rest of the world.
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