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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.
On Nov 4, BTC was 68K, a week later it was at 88K. Depending on whether you gave Trump .5 or .7 odds, you get that BTC was expected to be 47% or 83% higher under him than if Kamala won. (Im a bit surprised that it would take this long to price in the election, but its by far the steepest rise of that length in the year, which would be quite the coincidence.)
BTC front-loaded the win, and since Jan 2025 has basically been mediocre to bad.
Whats that supposed to mean? The movement right after the election, together with the election odds, gives you the imputed market predictions for different presidents, ie what they would have used to decide whether lobbying is worth doing. Middling performance since then just means that they were mostly right so far about how good Trump would be for Bitcoin. If it hadnt been "front-loaded", that would mean Trumps benefit to bitcoin was largely unpredicated, and so would not explain political donations.
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