The other week, I made my opinion clear that I believe Donald Trump is the best candidate for Bitcoin in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Aaron responded, and after reading it, I feel he’s still missing the bigger picture. Aaron’s main points seem to be that Trump is just using Bitcoiners for their votes, and that he won’t follow through on his promises.
While I partly agree with the former point, I disagree with the latter. Contrary to what I’ve seen some Bitcoiners online say, I do not think Trump has to be a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist and cypherpunk to be a great Bitcoin president. Here’s why.
Trump needs all the votes he can get. Of course he is going to try and appeal to our voters, especially when most of us already have right-leaning political views. It makes sense for the Republican party to adopt freedom money, given they lean more towards the principles of freedom now, while the Democrats have become more authoritarian.
Voting for Trump, then, is a win-win. He gets more votes (some in critical swing states), and we get a better environment for our industry. Sounds like a good trade to me.
And that leads me into what I disagree with Aaron on. I believe that Trump will keep most, if not all of his promises he’s made when it’s come to Bitcoin. Because, well, most of the promises he has made seem like relatively easy things to implement. It’s not like he’s alone on the issue – there are now many pro-Bitcoin senators and congresspeople to hold him accountable.
There’s Senator Cynthis Lummis, who wants to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve (using BTC already owned by the government). There is Congressman Tom Emmer, who already wants to fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler and appoint someone better for the industry. You can go to StandWithCrypto.com to see the rest.
If elected, Trump would have loads of other, arguably more important issues on his plate to deal with. The fact that his policies would give Bitcoiners a friendly regulatory environment to build in, stop anti-Bitcoin politicians from continuing to attack this industry, all without Trump meddling in it, sounds like the perfect storm for innovation.
The fact that he’s done things like bring Bitcoin miners to Mar-a-Lago to better understand the industry is enough evidence to make this point.
I think many are overly critical of Trump because he said he wasn’t a fan of Bitcoin in 2019. But that was ages ago, and everything has changed since then. It doesn’t make sense to hate on people for coming around to Bitcoin after not being a fan of it. (I do, however, think it is ok to be critical of the non-Bitcoin initiatives Trump has promoted, like World Liberty Financial, but even that isn’t worth losing all the benefits of his presidency.)
So, why would Trump free Ross now when he already had the chance to last term?
In politics, as in Bitcoin, it’s all about incentives, and the incentives here are aligned.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.