I have the other week made my opinion clear that I believe Donald Trump is the best candidate for Bitcoin in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Aaron respondedand after reading it, I feel like 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 keep his promises.
While I partially agree with the first point, I disagree with the latter. Contrary to what I’ve seen some Bitcoiners say online, I don’t think Trump needs to be a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist and cypherpunk to be a great Bitcoin president. This is why.
Trump needs all the votes he can get. Of course he’s going to try to appeal to our voters, especially now that most of us already have right-wing political views. It makes sense for the Republican party to adopt freedom money, as they now lean more towards the principles of freedom, while the Democrats have become more authoritarian.
So voting for Trump is a win-win situation. He will get more votes (some in critical swing states) and we will have a better environment for our industry. Seems like a good trade to me.
And that brings me to where I disagree with Aaron. I believe Trump will keep most if not all of the promises he made when it comes to Bitcoin. Because, well, most of the promises he’s made seem relatively easy to implement. It’s not like he’s alone on this issue: there are now many pro-Bitcoin senators and congressmen calling him to account.
There’s Senator Cynthis Lummis, who is a strategic Bitcoin reserve (using BTC already owned by the government). There’s Congressman Tom Emmer, who already wants that firework SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and appoint someone better for the industry. You can go to StandWithCrypto.com to see the rest.
If elected, Trump would have a host of other, perhaps more important, issues on his plate. The fact that his policies would give Bitcoiners a friendly regulatory environment to build in, and deter anti-Bitcoin politicians from continuing to attack this industry, all without Trump getting involved, 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 centuries ago and everything has changed since then. There is no point in hating people for coming to Bitcoin when they are not fans of it. (However, I think it’s okay to be critical of the non-Bitcoin initiatives that Trump has promoted, like World Liberty Financial, but even that isn’t worth losing all the benefits of his presidency.)
So why would Trump release Ross now, when he already had a chance at a final term in office?
Politics, like Bitcoin, is all about incentives, and the incentives here are aligned.
This article is a To take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.