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@ Brain User
2025-05-08 16:38:23Bitcoiners won big in the 2024 elections that saw Trump take the White House and Republicans control both the House and the Senate. Not because Trump and his Republican teammates are God's gift to the US or because they're all Bitcoiners, but because they're not the version of the Democrats we saw during the previous four years.
If you're reading this I'm sure you're well aware of the hostility the previous administration had towards Bitcoin. It was obvious at the time that individual actors like Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler were acting against Bitcoin, but after Trump's victory, plenty of Bitcoiners and people in the "crypto industry" felt comfortable enough to speak out about the specific lashings they took from Biden and crew. Chokepoint 2.0 went from a conspiracy theory toan accepted truththat the administration was working to slow Bitcoin anyway they could. It was a mind numbing stance that certainly opened the door for Trump to gain a non-negligbile amount of votes pretty easily. He got on stage at Bitcoin 2024 and treated it like any other rally, ranting on and on about how great he was and how bad the Democrats were with a few crypto lines sprinkled in. He, almost teasingly, said "Have fun playing with your Bitcoin.", walked off stage, and that was it. That's all it took for him to secure the vote of anyone with a hair of their networth tied up in "crypto".
I'm not suggesting Trump is a nothing for Bitcoin, he's pushed the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve forward and certainly given air cover to other Republicans in power at the state level to push positive Bitcoin legislation, but the big win for Bitcoiners is that he isn't the other guys.
On top of the SBR at the federal level, New Hampshire and Arizona have passed state level SBRs at the time of this writing with many others having bills trying to make their way through the system. There are alsoplenty of other billsat the state level that have already passed or are on their way to passing that defend things like the right to self custody and other protections for Bitcoiners.
These bills are all great news and I don't want to act like the elite purity test Bitcoiners and pretend the largest government in the world being Bitcoin friendly isn't a big deal - it is. But, at the end of the day with the way politics seems to work as of late, everything can be changed with the swipe of a pen by the next guy in power. These should be treated as four year promises at best.
Political power works like a seesaw. Right now the Republicans have the juice, but come next election cycle that's likely to change. The issue is the system is burning and there's nothing that politicians can realistically do to put out the flames. All the real solutions, like eliminating government programs such a social security and medicare/medicaid, are political suicide and anyone running on that platform wouldn't sniff a seat in office. So every four years Americans look back on the previous four and go "Man, that guy really sucked. Things are worse than they were before. The other guys can save us!" Of course, the other guys suck too, but the current guys sucking is just fresher in the minds of the public. There is nothing any politician can do to put out this fire because all they can afford to wield is a garden hose or they won't get votes. So, we all just watch this fire grow larger and larger and pick a different guy with a different garden hose every four years because the last guy didn't work and the only move we've got is to pick the other guy.
So, if all these executive orders, working groups, bills, and laws can just be evaporated by the other team next time around why was the Trump win so big for Bitcoin? The answer is that it buys Bitcoin time to soak into every crevice of the financial system. If the next political team in power decides they hate Bitcoin and want to reverse every positive thing done by Trump's team it's going to be a lot harder for them to do that when a serious portion of the financial system has an incentive to fight for and vote in favor of Bitcoin.
Just a handful of examples of how Bitcoin is soaking into the financial system:
iBIT is currently Blackrock's 11th largest ETF by AUM. FBTC is Fidelity's largest ETF by AUM. Wisconsin and Michigan state pensions both hold Bitcoin ETFs. CalPERS holds shares of MSTR.
There's a point where so many different entities that affect so many different individuals hold Bitcoin, or investments centered around Bitcoin, that a politician attacking Bitcoin from a regulatory perspective just isn't realistic in the same way regulation against Gold isn't feasible. These regulatory attacks on an asset with deep roots in the financial system would be poltical suicide just like threatening to delete Social Security. No longer is attacking Bitcoin a move against a few hundred thousand internet dorks, it's an attack on anyone with a pension, anyone who owns the stock of a company holding bitcoin, any private business holding bitcoin, plus a few hundred thousand internet dorks.
While the Bitcoin bills catch all the headlines, the real signal is watching bitcoin soak into private holdings of people in power, pension funds, public company treasuries, etc. We've got four years to for Bitcoin to become so ingrained that no politician could attack it.