The President of the United States acknowledged Bitcoin as a competitor to the US dollar, the Chairman of The Federal Reserve Compared Bitcoin to Gold, and yesterday the Treasury Secretary gave a green light for cryptocurrency activity and exchanges so long as they weren’t dark web and played by regulatory oversight rules.
That, I think, is probably the most impactful sentence I’ve ever shared regarding cryptocurrency, so let’s break down a little more what’s actually happening, why you should care, and what no one is talking about.
So right off the bat, we need to address Trump tweet and why out of the blue, he’s suddenly talking about Bitcoin.
If you’re not already, I’d highly suggest getting on our free daily insider report where, just yesterday, we talked about 4 separate and different takeaways from Trump’s tweet. The sign up is down below and takes just seconds to get yourself better informed about what’s actually happening and what actually matters in this space.
So here are those fours takeaways:
- Trump’s tweet affected the market by legitimizing the space, placing Bitcoin as a direct competitor to the USD and getting more people to talk seriously about crypto. There might be short term volatility in response, financial dinosaurs jumping on the Bitcoin bashing bandwagon try to suppress the price, etc. But the thing is, after this week I don’t think anyone can reasonably say that digital assets and currency don’t compete with physical assets or traditional currency.
- Trump’s tweet predicates a stronger government response on unregulated blockchain technology, as Trump’s real target was Libra and the slipping notion of the USD as the world’s reserve currency. We saw the Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act introduced last week in an attempt to prevent the consolidation of big tech taking over big finance with consumer data being the ultimate prize. Furthermore, there’s a certain irony in the sense that recently the USD has been increasingly weaponized for the purposes of trade wars, tariffs,& threats which have increased the risk to the USD position of Reserve Currency. A Reserve Currency must be low risk to survive and the harder the US government tries to retain that role the faster it slips away. Resistance to change only grows it faster
- Donald Trump just made Bitcoin a 2020 election issue. You might hear election issue and roll your eyes because politics have become very distasteful in recent years, but I want you to recognize that election issues represent what the public care about & what people are talking about. With a couple of tweets, Crypto is now a presidential/global policy issue. People everywhere will start to talk and embrace a mix of sovereign and non-sovereign digital currency. As Andreas Antonopoulos foretold, the future will be a three-way battleground of government-issued currency, a corporate-issued currency like libra, and the decentralized currencies like Bitcoin.
- Trump’s tweet changed this space forever. A sitting president mentioned cryptocurrencies at all. That’s incredibly important to legitimizing this space. More importantly, the tweet marks a symbolic victory in capturing some of that public conversation around money and policy. It also marks the starting point in a massive battle over the destiny of our global monetary system.
That, I believe, is the conversation that people are not having enough of right now.
Here’s a question for you: what do you feel is the purpose of this space?
What is the obtainable, tangible goal we’re striving for?
User adoption? Redefining money? A new world order? Acting as the antithesis of what caused the 2008 financial crisis? Sticking it to the banks by allowing people to be their own banks?
Digital gold? A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System like Satoshi said?
I think all of these have value, and I think that’s the beauty of this space. There isn’t a concrete objective here, other than to question and to build a better system.
But, if we look at the human aspect here. I think, in my opinion, the goal of the crypto space, the goal of blockchain and distributed ledger technology, is to allow the people of the world to reframe their relationship with money in the new digital economy that is quickly approaching.
Let’s unpack that.
First, I do believe it’s presumptuous to believe that some magic internet money is going to change the world and make people’s lives better.
After all, that’s the first thing you see of Libra’s website; Reinvent money. Transform the global economy. So people everywhere can live better lives.
Ok, but why? Why is there is this inherent impetus for us to reinvent money and somehow cause the world to change?
For one, I think that line of causality is broken.
Money doesn’t run the global economy, nor does reinventing it stand to transform finance.
We do.
We use money.
Money is a tool. Money’s purpose, its use, and its role in our lives are based on very human aspects.
Like any tool, making it work better allows for a greater range of possibility, so long as we deign to seek it.
1.7 billion adults globally remain outside of the financial system with no access to a traditional bank, even though one billion have a mobile phone and nearly half a billion have internet access. Indeed, access to financial services is limited or restricted for those who need it most — those impacted by cost, reliability, and the ability to seamlessly send money.
All over the world, people with less money pay more for financial services. Hard-earned income is eroded by fees, from remittances and wire costs to overdraft and ATM charges.
As we know, blockchains and cryptocurrencies have a number of unique properties that can potentially address some of the problems of accessibility and trustworthiness
But again, bringing them into the fold of global finance and modern financial services has to be done for the sake of more than just envisioning people in third world countries being able to pay their bills.
A worldwide economy, egalitarian in nature, the new digital economy, will be built with all of us in mind.
After all, we’ve seen the impact of the internet as an agnostic tool of information and communication. What happens when our financial system resembles the same? That is my vision for the new digital economy, blending the emerging technologies blockchain, automation, AI, big data, internet of things, biotechnology, 5g, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and many more have a role to play in this technological revolution.
The new digital economy will never be able to be built upon government-issued currencies or corporate-issued data harvesting vehicles trying to resemble cryptocurrencies.
That’s the implication of our current discourse —our financial system needs an upgrade because we’re stuck in conventions that cannot implicitly grow.
Trump’s tweet is a weathervane for the change to come. Libra is a weathervane for the fight to come. Bitcoin and the other emerging technologies are the future to come.
Carlota Perez (2009): Technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms
What distinguishes a technological revolution from a random collection of technology systems and justifies conceptualizing it as a revolution are two basic features:
1. The strong interconnectedness and interdependence of the participating systems in their technologies and markets.
2. The capacity to transform profoundly the rest of the economy (and eventually society).
I think that’s where we are.
To look at Bitcoin and blockchain as an isolated, highly speculative venture is folly. Better yet to see the bridges being built, the overlapping efficiencies being explored, and the failures of the current system.
And truly, how fitting it is to be able to see that in 140 characters.