Yes, I know, you’re here to let the hate flow.
You’ve bought all the rhetoric. Donald Trump likes crypto. He is embracing DeFi. He has his own shoes, and coins. He’s going to fire Gary! Like Polymarket in October, you think Trump is boo-llish.
Unfortunately, you’ve bought a lot of another kind of bull.
To unpack this, we have to understand what the Crypto 4 Trump initiative really is – and that’s an alliance of largely public U.S.-based mining firms and exchanges that have come together to spend aggressively to end their mistreatment.
They are tired of being sued and harassed, and otherwise chased out of America. As well, they have every reason to be.
But alas, the industry Bitcoin is not. This was the same argument made to justify the Fork Wars, and let’s just say for summation, that this ended terribly. If U.S. miners are forced elsewhere, mining will continue elsewhere, and decentralizing the hashrate, as we saw in the case of China’s mining ban, is quite simply: Good For Bitcoin™.
Sure, ASIC manufacturing may remain consolidated in a few international firms. Maybe it will take even longer to rebuild. But other countries will take advantage, and the Bitcoin network will carry on. Bitcoin may be our best opportunity to topple all of the current superpowers, and to empower the developing world. If that means leaving the U.S. behind, so be it.
Now let’s address the donkey in the room. A Kamala presidency will mean more enforcement of U.S. securities laws, not a referendum that allows millions of alts to proliferate.
A Trump victory almost certainly ensures only one outcome for our industry, and that is that the SEC gets defanged, and that means “coins beyond Bitcoin” will get a “level playing field.”
By contrast, continued enforcement of the SEC’s securities laws on the industry will rightfully make clear the difference between Bitcoin, which was distributed via proof-of-work (the only known way to circumvent securities sales), and all of the many centralized variants.
Simply put: It’s “crypto assets” that require a regulatory framework to survive, not Bitcoin, which is sufficiently decentralized.
Forcing the crypto industry’s builders to abide by these laws will doubtless benefit developers seeking to extend these capabilities to Bitcoin, the only major crypto with regulatory clarity. Are we actually going to argue that encouraging millions of developers to put their technology on Bitcoin (as opposed to Ethereum or Solana) would be a bad thing?
If there is a coherent thread to Bitcoin maximalism, it’s the assertion that everything outside of Bitcoin is either 1) a scam or 2) can be built on top of its blockchain. A continued crackdown on crypto will push the market to more thoroughly investigate the second point.
Undoubtedly, it would also boost Microstrategy’s stock, MSTR, as it would remain one of the few widely accessible plays to get legitimate beta on Bitcoin.
Sure, maybe the taxes from your Bitcoin gains will be higher, maybe spending will continue to be penalized. But anon, I thought you were HODLing anyway?
So, remind me, of all the supposed pro-Bitcoin policies of a Trump presidency, what is it that you expect to get, other than state-sanctioned degeneracy and block propagation in the heartland?
If you’re a single issue Bitcoin voter, shouldn’t that mean voting for an option that makes Bitcoin more decentralized, and less reliant on U.S. government policy?
Allow me to reintroduce you to Madame President Harris, a bullish choice for Bitcoin.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.