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Now that crypto seems to be firmly on one side of the Culture War, in that Trump and co. are actively promoting it, what do we see as the future of crypto under a Trump presidency?
Personally I am only just getting into the space, but continue to be surprised by just the sheer amount of money and energy behind a lot of these projects, and communities. For instance right now in the Solana meme coin market, AI agents on twitter and other areas are a huge point of interest.
What fascinates me is the fact that the crypto ecosystem seems to offer an alternative way to get funding for startups, especially in "hot" areas like AI. Instead of going the VC route, a creator can just go straight to twitter and create an automated agent, then make a meme coin off of that agent and potentially make millions of dollars.
For some examples of this, we have @truth_terminal, which is I believe the most popular AI agent on the site which sort of started the entire wave. https://x.com/truth_terminal. The fascinating thing about this account is that it asked for $50,000 to start making money, and Marc Andreessen actually gave it the money, which it then took and became a millionaire from crypto.
More recently, there are all sorts of projects coming out around meme coins and AI. A ton of them are just general slop, porn bots, et cetera, but some seem to have real creative vision / potential behind them, like for instance @pillzumi, which seems to be like a blend of AI agents + an AI-generated anime series, or something like that.
All this to say that while many see crypto as nothing but scams and a waste of time, in my opinion some of the most genuinely novel and interesting projects are happening there.
To bring it back to the culture war - almost all of crypto and these AI innovations seem to be swinging heavily right wing. Same with the broader VC / tech environment. How will the left respond? Do you think democrats will begin to be more friendly to crypto, or will they double down on trying to lock it out of traditional financial systems?
Do you think Trump will actually make significant progress in regulating crypto and integrating it in the financial system of the U.S.? What would be the main blockers? How much political capital will he really need?
Man, I got into Bitcoin around 2017. It's been remarkable to see the bitcoin maxi's proven more or less right so far. At least not proven wrong yet. Their whole thesis was basically that fiat was doomed as soon as there was a viable offramp, a viable "defect" button. People can complain about the bitcoin not being a currency because it's transaction capacity is too low. Or that it lacks the easy of use that cash has. But if anything the environment that necessitates crypto has only gotten better. The weaponization of the USD can never be undone, nations view it as being in their critical national security interest to move away from dollar dependence. Debts have exploded around the world above and beyond what seemed to be the already impossible sums when bitcoin was created, at an exponential rate. I don't think fiat is going to vanish, but there is going to be a significant race by states to shore up their balance sheets with bitcoin, to help give their fiat credibility.
I don't think big D Democrats can possibly become crypto friendly. They are too corrupt and obsessed with control and manipulation. They are the party of operation chokepoint, debanking, regulating industries that don't donate enough out of business, etc. For them to become crypto friendly would require the party be gutted by a populist coup and rebuilt from the ground up. And I mean, it's not impossible. Look what happened to the Republican party. You think the party of Bush, Romney or McCain wouldn't have behaved exactly the same way towards crypto that the DNC is currently?
Bitcoin isn't a currency because it's wildly deflationary. A $300K mortgage in ~2012 bitcoin would presumably mean the holder now owes a value equivalent of $3 billion. Would the value be pegged to whatever it was when the mortgage started, so back then you "owed" whatever, 30K bitcoins and now you owe 3?
At this point much of my hatred of bitcoin is fueled by resentment and a shitty education that didn't include things like "hedging one's bets" and "EV," but I thought it was a stupid idea then and a stupid idea now. I undervalued how much alpha there will always be in betting on stupidity.
My objection is that you just defined "deflationary" in terms of its U.S. DOLLAR VALUE.
Bitcoin is Deflationary due to the fixed supply and the halving rate of release over time, regardless of what its value vs. the dollar does.
But a mortgage taken out in 2012 Bitcoin would mean the holder now owes the same amount of BTC w/interest as they did before.
The holder of the note isn't exactly in a good position either, since their remedy for failure to pay is to foreclose on the house, and they ain't getting that 3 billion.
Ok but that’s just what deflation means- the value of the currency went up by more than the value of the asset.
Yeah, but you're using a second currency to denominate the value of the asset. Not the currency it was actually purchased in.
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I mean, there is no shortage of people telling stories about wishing they hadn't spent their bitcoin on weed back when BTC was less than $100. All the same it seems who whom the whole way down. Yeah, it sounds absolutely retarded to borrow bitcoin to buy a house, and then attempt to pay it back in bitcoin. It also sounds retarded to try to store wealth in a currency that will be worth less than 1/10th what it was when you first earned it over the course of your working life. If you are lucky!
There is no single foolproof solution to this problem, and many false paths. Most people give up and accept that they'll be on the job until they drop dead. Can't blame people for making an attempt to escape.
This math on inflation is super wrong. 1.02^50 is about 2.6. 1.03^50 is 4.4. What inflation rate do you suggest is normal?
Pull up an actual historical inflation calculator. 1973 to today shows, 51 years, shows about 7.5x inflation, not 2.6 or 4.4. Turns out a few really bad years every now and again really compound.
And I make no proposition about what rate of inflation is "normal". Because nothing about how inflation is created follows any sort of natural law. Its man made and manipulated from top to bottom. What is normal is desiring the value you derive from your labor to not be virtually wiped out over the course of your lifetime.
Fair point on actual inflation, but 1/10th still seems like a major overstatement of what "will" happen (especially because 50 years is also a pretty long assumption for a career). More broadly, inflation is more or less inevitable for a healthy economy; someone keeping their money in cash under a mattress is just very foolish to not put it into an asset like bonds, stocks, gold, real estate, bitcoin, etc.
Sure, but what is a foolproof strategy that doesn't require a financial advisor to utilize all those assets to preverse the value of your labor? And why is bitcoin obviously worse than gold, bonds, stocks or real estate? None of those are foolproof.
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Ok, I’m willing to believe bitcoins rise is inevitable- is this a good time to buy, or no? It seems like a bubble right now.
My advice is the same advice I got in 2017. Buy bitcoin every month with whatever money you are willing to lose. Store it in a hardware wallet like a Trezor. Wait 10 years.
If Bitcoin had gone to zero over the last 7 years I'd be out low to mid five figures. Probably less because presumably I'd have stopped at some point. The upside has been significantly more than I could have lost. But it's still an amount I would have been fine losing. Oh I would have been upset. Probably had a few drunken nights to ease my sorrows. But ultimately I'd have been fine.
Stay away from anything that's not bitcoin. Don't touch alt-coins, ICOs, NFTs. Don't invest in mining companies, don't invest in exchanges, don't try to earn interest on your bitcoin, don't try to take out a loan against your bitcoin. Put it on a hardware wallet, backup the seed, put it in a safe.
I have actually made bank off investing in COIN, but do as I say, not as I do.
That's really the unspoken truth about the market as it stands.
The exact type of person who would throw a bunch of money into this thing AND could manage to store it long term without losing it to scams or hacks AND would have the discipline to HODL through massive swings AND would resist YOLOing into meme coins or other moonshots/boondoggles trying to 100x their money... that's probably a rare combination.
So many folks lost funds to scams, blew it on shitcoin plays, or the exchange they traded on blew up, or they panic sold in one of the various crashes, or lost their keys or fat-fingered a transfer to a dead address. Those folks aren't going to advertise their failures. Some might have bounced back.
I can't think of many known whales who were around since the beginnings and are clearly riding high on their wise decisions over the years since then.
Even Mr. Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver managed to fuck himself by pissing off the IRS.
Yeah, all that is true. Which is why a little advice can go a long way. It's actually kind of sad, but I've noticed a lot of the wisdom from when I got started has completely vanished. I think in large part because participating in those discussions makes you a scam target.
Yep. As I recall it, the "HODL" meme came into existence as simple advice to keep people from panic selling AND from jumping from onto non-bitcoin coins (shitcoins, mostly) and thus from avoiding the biggest risks to your Sat stack, your own emotional decision-making.
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Yeah I 100% agree. I was on the fence but earlier this year seeing the insanity of Covid spending it finally tipped me over into getting in. I'm glad I did.
Yeah this is a persuasive argument. At this point the democrats would need an almost entire restructuring of their party if they were going to promote something like crypto, which is inherently decentralized.
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