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If bitcoin is dead, then the President didn’t tweet about it
Governments have officially recognized bitcoin as a threat to the modern financial system. In an article from The Daily HODL, Congressmen, French Hill and Bill Foster, wrote a letter in September urging the Fed to “consider creating a national digital currency as the rise of crypto and projects like Facebook’s Libra threaten paper money.”
The open letter revealed the following
- Belief that the US dollar risks getting left behind as digitization sweeps the globe and governments around the world move to modernize their monetary systems and reinvent how they transfer, distribute and create money.
- concerns about the status of today’s US dollar, a decidedly old instrument that is one stop in a long line of early colonial currency and paper money known as Continental currency that was first issued by Congress roughly 240 years ago.
- governments are facing the emergence of a massive project that can scale instantly, that can cross borders without banks and onboard a built-in userbase of billions to send money around the globe as easily as email (AKA bitcoin)
- The revelations are forcing lawmakers to rethink how to tackle the threat to the US dollar. Instead of assuming that the technologies underpinning digital assets will suddenly disappear
- many are devising plans to create competitive products to mitigate the risks of obsolescence or significant loss of leverage of traditional currencies.
To this last point, it’s inevitable that their efforts fall short. The whole point of bitcoin is to be decentralized and free from a trusted, single point of failure. While having the feds run a digital currency of their own, (to quote Hillary Clinton), “what difference does it make?”
Truthfully, there’s literally no difference because it’s not backed by a hard currency, which is why Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin in the first place.Unless they decide to back fiat by a crypto hard cap, we’d all be suckers to take them at their word of proposing such a solution.
Unfortunately, such news didn’t get as viral as a tweet from everyone’s favorite tangerine. The President of the United States of America himself, Donald J. Trump, tweeted that he was not a fan of bitcoin. Even if Trump doesn’t fully understand how bitcoin works, he understands well enough that bitcoin would threaten his monetary policy of keeping interest rates low and continuing trade wars with China.
However, what Trump did/didn’t say about bitcoin or how he said it is irrelevant. His tweet is a prime example of the Streisand effect, the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. The point is, if bitcoin wasn’t on your radar, it is now.
No doubt the average Joe started talking or thinking about bitcoin, even if they had no idea what it was. Regardless, now grandma and the whole world knows of its existence.
But, you know. Bitcoin is dead.
