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A Kamala Presidency Could Be Just as Bullish for Bitcoin

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Yes, I know, you’re here to let the hate flow.

You’ve bought all the rhetoric. Donald Trump likes crypto. He is embracing DeFi. He has his own shoes, and coins. He’s going to fire Gary! Like Polymarket in October, you think Trump is boo-llish

Unfortunately, you’ve bought a lot of another kind of bull.

To unpack this, we have to understand what the Crypto 4 Trump initiative really is – and that’s an alliance of largely public U.S.-based mining firms and exchanges that have come together to spend aggressively to end their mistreatment. 

They are tired of being sued and harassed, and otherwise chased out of America. As well, they have every reason to be.

But alas, the industry Bitcoin is not. This was the same argument made to justify the Fork Wars, and let’s just say for summation, that this ended terribly. If U.S. miners are forced elsewhere, mining will continue elsewhere, and decentralizing the hashrate, as we saw in the case of China’s mining ban, is quite simply: Good For Bitcoin™.

Sure, ASIC manufacturing may remain consolidated in a few international firms. Maybe it will take even longer to rebuild. But other countries will take advantage, and the Bitcoin network will carry on. Bitcoin may be our best opportunity to topple all of the current superpowers, and to empower the developing world. If that means leaving the U.S. behind, so be it.

Now let’s address the donkey in the room. A Kamala presidency will mean more enforcement of U.S. securities laws, not a referendum that allows millions of alts to proliferate. 

A Trump victory almost certainly ensures only one outcome for our industry, and that is that the SEC gets defanged, and that means “coins beyond Bitcoin” will get a “level playing field.”

By contrast, continued enforcement of the SEC’s securities laws on the industry will rightfully make clear the difference between Bitcoin, which was distributed via proof-of-work (the only known way to circumvent securities sales), and all of the many centralized variants.

Simply put: It’s “crypto assets” that require a regulatory framework to survive, not Bitcoin, which is sufficiently decentralized.

Forcing the crypto industry’s builders to abide by these laws will doubtless benefit developers seeking to extend these capabilities to Bitcoin, the only major crypto with regulatory clarity. Are we actually going to argue that encouraging millions of developers to put their technology on Bitcoin (as opposed to Ethereum or Solana) would be a bad thing?

If there is a coherent thread to Bitcoin maximalism, it’s the assertion that everything outside of Bitcoin is either 1) a scam or 2) can be built on top of its blockchain. A continued crackdown on crypto will push the market to more thoroughly investigate the second point.

Undoubtedly, it would also boost Microstrategy’s stock, MSTR, as it would remain one of the few widely accessible plays to get legitimate beta on Bitcoin.

Sure, maybe the taxes from your Bitcoin gains will be higher, maybe spending will continue to be penalized. But anon, I thought you were HODLing anyway?

So, remind me, of all the supposed pro-Bitcoin policies of a Trump presidency, what is it that you expect to get, other than state-sanctioned degeneracy and block propagation in the heartland?

If you’re a single issue Bitcoin voter, shouldn’t that mean voting for an option that makes Bitcoin more decentralized, and less reliant on U.S. government policy?

Allow me to reintroduce you to Madame President Harris, a bullish choice for Bitcoin.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.



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Michael Saylor

Upside Down World: Spooks are Heroes, Heroes are Spooks

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This space is suffering from a problem of inverted perceptions. What makes Bitcoin valuable in the first place is its decentralized nature. The fact that it is a distributed system, with no central point of control, no central point of influence, not even a central point of interface for its users. This is the source of its resiliency and reliability. Without this property, without the ability to simply download a piece of software and start interacting with it, there is really no value to be found.

It’s fundamentally no different from a bank database at that point. No one can be guaranteed access when someone (the operator) wants to take it away, no core properties like the supply cap or inflation rate can be guaranteed when someone (the operator) can change them at a whim.

Many people in this space cheer on the erosion of these properties at this point. They champion solutions like ETFs and other custodians as a pathway to pumping the price and increasing their own fiat denominated net worth. They attack those working towards and advocating for solutions that don’t compromise the core value propositions of Bitcoin, painting them as spooks “risking what makes Bitcoin valuable.”

It is a complete inversion of reality. The Spooks are Heroes, and the Heroes are Spooks.

Saylor is literally defending custodians as a superior path to adoption than self custody. He is comparing people building and selling tools for self custody to FUDsters and fear mongers, or “paranoid crypto anarchists.” Painting the people who are building the tools necessary to defend and maintain the core properties of Bitcoin that give it value in the first place. He totally ignores the dynamics that led to gold and its role as a sound money to melt away over time as governments interfered and manipulated it.

They accomplished this because all of the gold was held by custodians, no one held it themselves. No one directly used it, everyone choosing to use paper substitutes disconnected from the precious metal itself instead. Bitcoin can very much suffer the same fate. Whether through paper bitcoin diluting market demand, or custodians outright gaining influence over the consensus process and outright changing rules to suit their own needs and wants.

Bitcoin is a social consensus system, its nature is defined entirely by actors who participate in the system. The scale of those actors, their own individual nature(s), the vulnerability to government interference, how many of them make up the majority of economic activity (more being better, less being worse), all of these things factor heavily into how Bitcoin will evolve and exist as a system.

Many people in this space are cheering on short term actions that compromise its resilience in the long term as a neutral and decentralized system for perceived short term benefits in the form of price appreciation and economic gains. Developers working diligently and with little gratitude to maintain those core properties that give it value are attacked as spooks and government agents, while corporate suits and actual spooks attacking those properties are cheered on as heroes.

The world in this space is upside down. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.



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Opinion

The Fed’s Rate Cut Trajectory Remains Intact, Boosting the Crypto Outlook

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The Fed’s Rate Cut Trajectory Remains Intact, Boosting the Crypto Outlook



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Market Maker

It Takes a Fake Token to Catch a Volume Faker

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The other interesting detail: The FBI worked on its own fake token, with a real contract you could track on-chain, called NexFundAI. Its website, which now features a massive “FBI” banner, looked remarkably legit – that is to say, like a lot of other AI-focused crypto tokens making vague but extravagant promises.



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