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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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