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Notes -
My response to Scott's post “Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds”.
Scott Alexander argues that Marc Andreessen’s ‘crypto PAC’ was a success and validates his thesis that donors should donate more. But the evidence of success is lacking, and it's way premature to say he and other crypto donors succeeded.
In fact, something interesting and unexpected happened instead, which runs counter to scott's thesis and premature victory lap: those who donated the least, nothing, or originally opposed Trump and his supporters, got the most and the biggest embrace by Trump. They got actual taxpayer-funded bailouts and other initiatives, but crypto donors got little to nothing. No taxpayer-funded crypto purchases.
So what to make of this? I would say that this again shows why donors do not donate more. There is no assurance of success. Crypto donors wanted Trump to make crypto a priority, and at best it has been pushed to the backburner compared to AI, chips, quantum and other stuff.
You can't just compare outcomes to determine the success of an intervention unless you know the counterfactual outcomes would otherwise be the same! Semiconductor companies were not at risk of the U.S. government banning CPUs, while cryptocurrency companies were at serious risk of the government banning or heavily restricting key features of their business.
Imagine a lobbyist for a criminal justice reform group was bragging about his campaign's success. He thinks they did pretty well: they got rid of a 3-strikes law, reduced minimum sentences, and made more people eligible for parole. But a veterans' lobbyist hears this and responds "Parole? I'll have you know that my lobbying is so effective that they don't throw people in prison for being veterans at all!".
But was crypto at much risk of being regulated out of existence? Bitcoin had gotten as high as $70k when Biden was in office and the 2024 election uncertain. In fact, bitcoin was as high as $60k in early 2021, when Trump was not even seen as a contender due to jan 6th, and it was assumed Biden would be reelected. In 2021, NFTs and other stuff thrived as well, only to collapse in 2022, not because of regulation, but the inherent unsustainability of paying $300k for a picture. The original bitcoin ETFs were approved under Biden no less. Those were highly controversial. Meanwhile , approval for the XRP ETFs under trump was delayed repeatedly https://www.tradingview.com/news/coinpedia:8424cad94094b:0-ripple-s-xrp-etf-misses-another-deadline-are-they-facing-rejection/.
Of course, the counterfactual would be worse under kamala, but how much is that worth when you don't get any of the other stuff, e.g. a reserve funded by purchases? This was a main selling point; in fact, donors rolled out the red carpet for Trump in 2024 on that promise https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trumps-plan-to-hoard-billions-in-bitcoin-has-economists-stumped/ So he signed an executive order for a stockpile, which is not a reserve, and it has sat unfunded as $ goes to Ai and chips, which donated nothing, and there is no evidence to suggest any additional progress will be made. This sounds like a disappointment to me.
As a crypto purist, comments like this make me shake my head.
One of the core tenets of crypto is that it can't be regulated out of existence. To stop the transfer of bitcoin between parties, you'd have to shutdown the internet. And I don't mean firewalls or clever ways to knock down VPNs. I mean ripping up the sea cables and shooting down the satellites.
Permissionlessness is a feature, not a bug.
The threat that regulation poses is that it will dissuade people from using crypto which would then, perhaps, reduce the size of the network. Ultimately, if no one is using BitCoin for anything, it has no value (that's not a universally agreed upon point, but whatever). More to the point, however, I think that rubicon was passed once Bitcoin hit about $1000. Call it $10,000 to be safe. Millions of people are seriously using BitCoin and other crypto assets for real reasons all over the world and they won't stop.
Are you shaking your head at my comment or the parent comment? I agree BTC cannot and was not at risk of being regulated-away. I was making a rhetorical point that it was unlikely.
Parent comment. Didn't disagree with what you wrote.
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Doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the same sort of limits here that other decentralized protocols do, though? I'm not particularly aware of the link layer details, but mining requires a relatively consistent link (not high bandwidth, but minimal latency) to discover blocks mined by others. And issuing a transaction requires getting that data to enough of the miners to get it into a block. Offhand I'm not sure if both of these operations are generally "decentralized" today like DHT torrent links, and how robust those are --- it's been a while since I looked, but I think "absolutely distributed" is still an open research topic.
I will concede that's probably hard to block absolutely, but a sufficiently advanced adversary could at least make using it more painful.
One of the nice things of the technology is that if things get too crowded or expensive on the base chain, you can settle multiple transactions on another smaller and less expensive blockchain and only use the base chain to settle the start and end state of those transactions. From what I understand that's how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin (I'm more familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem).
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Providing you don't release goods or services until the payment transaction is confirmed, Bitcoin itself retains its core security properties even if transmission of messages is unreliable. You just wait longer for transactions to confirm. Bitcoin at rest are even safe in the event of a 51% attack (though transactions are not).
The Lightning network becomes insecure if the network is unreliable - if the owner of Bitcoins in a payment channel can't reliably broadcast a slashing transaction to the blockchain then their counterparty can steal them. And in the event of a 51% attack this can be engineered maliciously.
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