For many people, their first sense of Bitcoin is that it is magic internet money—something easily ignored and certainly not worth the time needed to understand it. Many of the people I talk to about Bitcoin say that their “plan” is just to ignore it until it goes away. As we will learn throughout this book, that isn’t really an option. Most people also laugh when presented with their first opportunity to exchange “real money” for bitcoin. But bitcoin is real money; better money than any of us have had in our lifetimes—and it is so much more.

Both Bitcoin the network and bitcoin the digital token can be hard to define because they don’t just replace one thing and make it better. Bitcoin is the new, better version of gold from the ground and the paper dollar bill. Bitcoin is also the new, better version of your savings account and your checking account and your credit card. It is also the new, better way to send money internationally and to buy a cup of coffee down the block. Bitcoin doesn’t just replace the hard asset money and the currency, but also the payment rails, the political monetary policy, and even the central bank—all in one fell swoop. It is a completely new thing.

To truly understand Bitcoin, you must understand the thing it aims to replace: money. What is money? Oddly enough, despite its centrality to almost everything we do, we rarely pause to consider the question. But we have to if we really want to understand what Bitcoin actually is.

In the most fundamental form, money is any object that is used for some combination of the following purposes:

1. A medium of exchange (folks can buy stuff with it);

2. A unit of account (folks can reliably use it to price stuff); and

3. A store of value (folks can buy stuff with it later).

Over the years, many different objects have been used as money: sea shells, salt, large stones, gold, and the $20 Federal Reserve Note currently in your wallet. If you’re reading this book in prison, you might use cigarettes or packets of ramen as money. I encourage you to reflect on how and why people naturally converge on forms of money based on the time and circumstances they find themselves in and how technology has always played a role in the development of new money. Some things make better money than others. As we will see, the paper money and its digital copy you use every day is the latest form of money, but it isn’t the best—in fact it is far from the ideal.

To be considered a good form of money—something that accomplishes the three purposes listed above well—an object must have some combination of the following fairly intuitive properties:

1. Durability (It has to last, not spoil or deteriorate);

2. Portability (You have to be able to move it around);

3. Divisibility and Aggregability (You need to be able to buy little things and big things too);

4. Fungibility (The units need to be uniform);

5. Scarcity (If there’s a lot of something, it won’t maintain value);

6. Acceptability (People have to want it for you to use it); and

7. Verifiability (You don’t want a lot of counterfeit money).

You or I may have other properties that we think should be added to the list. For example, I think good money should be created fairly. But this is the list that economists have used for generations. In fact, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis lists these properties in the teachers’ resources section of their website¹² and uses them to argue—correctly—that US dollars are better money than a cow. A cow seems like a low bar, but maybe they only want to make the arguments they can win.

Each of these properties economists use to decide how good something is as money is measured on a scale; none of them is a binary “yes” or “no.” If an object fulfills many of these properties, it would make for a good form of money. From this list, it is trivial to see what your intuition already tells you. Bananas would make a horrible form of money and coins made of gold would probably serve the purpose well. But what about the $20 bill in your wallet? What about bitcoin?

In a head-to-head competition, the $20 bill easily beats bitcoin in category #6: Acceptability. But acceptability can change and has many times throughout history, and the gap is narrowing every year as more establishments accept bitcoin. It’s not too hard to imagine that gap closing substantially over time. On a technicality, the dollar also has a slight edge in category #4: Fungibility. But this is only a small difference that most people would not notice, and technological methods already exist that close this gap completely.

As we will see as the rest of this section unfolds, Bitcoin walks away with the lead over dollars in all of the other categories. It’s not even close. Bitcoin is not just a little but a lot more Durable, Portable, Divisible/Aggregable, Scarce, and Verifiable. These aren’t properties I cherry-picked because they make Bitcoin look good. These are the old textbook properties economists have used for “good money” forever. We can add to this list the fact that since Bitcoin is natively digital and programmable, it seems like a better form of money right now and for the future. Nor is Bitcoin just better than the dollar: when comparing Bitcoin to other forms of money (e.g., gold) it still demolishes the competition across most or all of the categories. It’s simply the best money that humans have ever created.

Before I explain why that is true, I want to pause and make sure we also understand what money isn’t. You will notice that the properties listed above for something to serve as good money do not require the item to have a physical form you can hold in your hand. Nor do the properties suggest that something used as money needs to have some other intrinsic value. Nor do the properties suggest that money must be issued by a government. All three of these things are often cited as reasons why Bitcoin cannot be real money, yet none of them really have anything to do with the actual definition of money. These are things people reference because they are important to their experience with money, but they aren’t intrinsic to that experience. Just like how what has served as money has changed over time, so too has our experience with money.

For example: It is not necessary for money to have a physical form that can be touched or held. Indeed, you have never held most of the dollars you have earned, spent, and saved in the last 20 years. They have just been numbers on a screen. Digital money, dollars or otherwise, is perfectly functional as money. And the same is true of Bitcoin; just because you can’t touch it doesn’t mean it’s not real either. Hopefully this is reassuring, since this is typically the very first argument offered by well-meaning folks when they first start to grapple with Bitcoin. But the simple fact is that you don’t need to be able to touch something for it to be a good form of money.

Nor is it necessary for money to have an intrinsic value. In fact, because money is used to communicate price information from one market participant to another, it is better that it not have other use cases. Money having intrinsic value would add “noise” to the signal and make every economic decision more difficult. Imagine having to weigh every purchase you make with your money against the value of its other uses. It would cause economic activity to grind to a halt as everyone debated whether to use the money they had for purchasing goods or this other use. Some people don’t realize that the numbers on their screens that represent the dollars in their bank account don’t have an intrinsic value either. Bitcoin’s lack of intrinsic value is another very common argument launched against it, when in fact that turns out to be a valuable feature and not a bug. The fact that Bitcoin doesn’t have some other intrinsic value means it is able to provide price information for economic decisions without noise or manipulation.

Finally, it is not necessary that money be issued by a government. For many centuries it wasn’t. People would use various media of exchange and stores of value without the government interceding in any way. It was only in the last couple of centuries that it made sense for governments to get into the money game when it was difficult to trust and verify the purity and weights of coinage. Stamping the king’s face onto a coin served a purpose at that point. Since then, the intertwining of government and money has been so complete that most folks have a hard time imagining that money can be something separate from the government. This misunderstanding has repeatedly been manipulated for the sole benefit of the government that controls the issuance of money. But despite our experience, there is no need for money to be issued by the state to be valid. Bitcoin is the best hope humanity has of severing the ties between government and money.

At the very least it will serve as a check on how the governments discharge their responsibility as stewards of monetary policy.

The good news is that people understand the seven properties of good money listed above on an intuitive level. In other words, people do not need to read an economic textbook to recognize “good” money. They just start gravitating toward it over time. People won’t need to know why Bitcoin is better to know that it is better. Our recent monetary experiment with unbacked paper money is only 50 years old, and paper money owes most of its success to the privileged legal status paper money enjoys through the governments that issue it. But absent coercion people will always choose a better form of money, as shown by the fact that they did for thousands of years by using gold. Before Bitcoin had been invented, Jörg Guido Hülsmann explained, in his book The Ethics of Money Production, that in the case of “gold and silver—and whatever else free men might discover and develop for monetary services . . . there is a natural tendency in the market to spread the use of the most useful monies over the entire world.”¹³ Bitcoin is better money and because of that, Bitcoin adoption is very likely to grow and spread for the foreseeable future.

This article is an excerpt from A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin: New Revised Updated Edition, available now for pre-order at a discounted price of $21 through November 15, 2025.

12 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Functions of Money,” Economic Lowdown Podcast, https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown-podcast-series/episode-9-functions-of-money.

13 Jörg Guido Hülsmann, The Ethics of Money Production (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 197.

This post What Is Money? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.

I consider myself a progressive person because I look around the world and I see that it is not just, fair, equitable, or peaceful. I have always looked for ways to make the world better, and I have always done that from within the systems I recognized as broken. For most of my adult life, I have expected the government (one example of a broken system) to make rules and laws that nudge the system closer to justice, fairness, equity, and peace. Isn’t that the best we can hope for?

One reason why I encourage you to learn about Bitcoin is so you can question the current system through another lens. Learning more about how and why Bitcoin works is only one half of the journey. Bitcoin also provides an opportunity to examine the unexamined, study the water around us, and ask tough questions about the systems we have always lived with. It presents the opportunity to ask questions we never really ask. What is money? Who controls it and how? Who should control it? Learning about Bitcoin empowers you to imagine what things might be like if we replace a structure we intuitively know is unjust but have never had the vocabulary to question before.

The idea that the monetary system might one day be all the way fixed has never seemed like a real possibility. The idea that the entire system could be replaced—the water around us that we don’t notice—has never been a possibility either. Yet while many of my liberal friends are very adept at pointing out systemic inequities, proposals for systemic change to replace the systems that cause those unfairnesses are few and far between. Certainly financial and monetary systems are systems that one doesn’t usually examine, but a better understanding of Bitcoin interestingly offers you a better understanding of the systems it seeks to replace, and why incremental change won’t fundamentally address its unfairnesses. It also allows you to imagine, perhaps for the first time, a world without those inequities.

The world is controlled by political, social, economic, and military systems that both create and depend on the hegemony of the United States dollar. Unfairness, inequity, and violence are woven into the fabric of these systems. They are inexorable parts of those systems, not just unfortunate externalities that exist on top of otherwise healthy structures. To take just one example, wealth inequality is not just an unfortunate thing that happens because some greedy people break the rules and get away with it. It is a necessary and integrated feature of a system that depends on a hegemonic United States dollar being a global reserve asset (see Chapter 7). But now, for the first time in human history, we have a potential monetary invention that could overhaul the system, not just tweak it from within to be a little more fair.

In my experience, the more a person knows about the legacy financial system, the more they dislike it. Henry Ford is credited, most likely incorrectly, with having said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”⁵ Bitcoin could be the nudge to help you learn about our banking and monetary system and start a peaceful revolution.

Want the full argument? Dive deeper in A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin New Revised Updated Edition — get your copy here.

5: “The Truth Is Out: Money Is Just Created, and the Banks Are Rolling in It,” Underground Network, accessed November 29, 2022, https://underground.net/money/the-truth-is-out-and-the-banks-are-rolling-in-it/.

This post A Peaceful Revolution first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.

The Political Awakening of Evangelicals

The presidential election of 1980 engendered an unlikely and novel political alliance in the United States that still shapes the political landscape today. 

By today’s standards, it may be hard to imagine a time during which white Evangelical Christians intentionally abstained from coordinated political activity. But in the middle of the 20th century, this was normal. While individual Christians may have engaged in civic life, there was no nationally coordinated voting bloc and any political power Christians had was diffuse and not overly partisan. It was widely held that engaging directly with politics, especially at a national level, was worldly and undignified. 

This all changed in 1980 when a small group of influential and connected leaders in the Evangelical community decided, in a move that has thus far proven impossible to undo, to align themselves with a charismatic celebrity-turned-politician running for president.

On first inspection, the political pairing of Evangelicals with Ronald Reagan seemed like a misfit. Not only was Reagan a divorced Hollywood elite, but he was ironically running against a devout Southern Baptist from Georgia — Jimmy Carter. This episode in political history raised a lot of questions: What political backdrop made this alliance feel so urgent for Evangelical leaders? What did the Evangelical community get in return for their political support? Perhaps most importantly: What did it cost them in the long run?

In the decades leading up to the 1980 election, many Evangelicals had plenty of evidence to support the feeling that their vision for America was being attacked, threatened or ignored. In 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and made abortion legal in the United States. Through the 1960s and 1970s, a new wave of feminism sought to give women the legal right to a bank account, the ability to work outside the home and new political power. This second wave of feminism was largely made possible by the introduction of the birth control pill. For a variety of legal and cultural reasons, divorce rates were on a sharp rise around the same time. The gay rights movement symbolically began with the Stonewall riots in 1969. In the 1960s, prayer was removed from public schools, while evolution was made legal to teach. In the 1970s, the IRS began revoking the tax-exempt status of segregated Christian schools, upsetting some Christians who claimed, unsuccessfully, that racial segregation was a sincerely held religious belief.

One doesn’t have to agree with the political concerns of the Evangelical community of the time to empathize with the feeling that their vision for America’s future was under attack. It is also clear why they would seek a solution to their concerns by forming a political alliance with a presidential candidate that would speak to their values and beliefs. Within this context, it becomes easy to see why a small number of leaders in the Evangelical community, like Jerry Falwell and others, formed the “Moral Majority” in 1979 and explicitly aligned themselves with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. New talking points like “family values” entered the political vocabulary as a shorthand to protest all of the rapid changes listed above. Reagan was willing to speak to these concerns and eager for the political support of a voting bloc that, to this point, hadn’t existed in any well-defined or organized way. Reagan won the 1980 election comfortably with a decisive 61% of the white Evangelical vote.

Power, Hypocrisy and the Cost of Political Alignment

For the Evangelicals who supported him, the alliance with Reagan was an important victory. It cemented the role of the religious right as a powerful political demographic that could swing elections. More attention was given to the concerns of Evangelicals with Reagan appointing conservative judges and changing his stance to openly oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Evangelicals enjoyed increased political power and national recognition with both fundraising and media clout. The vocabulary shifted across the political substrate to the point where Democrats like Tipper Gore would invoke “family values” while advocating for parental advisories on movies and video games in the 1990s. 

Evangelicals were able to point to many tangible and symbolic victories to rationalize their alliance with Ronald Reagan and the Republican party — but what did it cost them?

Several decades later, the number of Americans who identify as being religious is on the decline. Depending on the survey, between 35% and 45% of Generation Z identify as religiously unaffiliated. This sharp increase mirrors a broader pattern across the industrialized world. But interestingly, young Americans cite hypocrisy, political entanglement and intolerance as the main reasons they are dissatisfied with organized religion. This trend should be concerning for any group (religious or otherwise) that depends on the growing adoption of their beliefs and worldview to be successful.

The sustained and ubiquitous decline in religious affiliation, along with the explicit branding of religious ideals as belonging primarily to one political party, has been damaging to the growth of the Evangelical movement. Not surprisingly, these dynamics took decades to unfold to the point where they could be fully examined. 

For those in the Bitcoin community seeking to gain lessons from this episode in political history, while the long-term increased difficulty in gaining adoption is a distressing factor, it is not the most distressing consequence to consider. More detrimental than slowing adoption is that by shackling itself to the Republican party, the Evangelical movement suffered the slings and arrows of political (mis)fortune and has habitually been expected to compromise its ideals and cede its moral authority. 

In 1980, Reagan won a then-unprecedented 61% of the white Evangelical Christian vote. Since then, the religious right has become even more polarized; Donald Trump secured 80% of the same vote 44 years later.

Setting politics aside, Donald Trump is arguably the least Christ-like political figure we have had in America since the Moral Majority helped gain Ronald Reagan his first presidential victory in 1980. Donald Trump is a multiple divorcee, a serial adulterer, a serial fraudster, has admitted to and been credibly accused of sexual assault, has been convicted of multiple financial crimes in an attempt to cover up an affair with a porn star — and had a publicly documented social relationship with convicted pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 

Yet, he is overwhelmingly supported by the religious right. 

There are two concerning lessons for Bitcoiners from this dynamic. Firstly, aligning a movement with one political party or divisive political figure is bad for adoption. This is the more obvious concern and has been articulated by many Bitcoiners besides me. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, such a political alliance can corrupt and compromise the very ethos of the Bitcoin movement itself. In other words, Bitcoin is in danger of falling into a trap of partisan capture. 

Bitcoin’s Moment of Political Temptation

While Donald Trump could be seen as an extreme example of Christian voters compromising their principles, this trend didn’t start with Donald Trump. Republican politicians have spectacularly scandalized themselves with affairs, hypocrisy and criminality for decades, and yet the religious right has always felt the need to support them. The claim isn’t that political scandal is unique to Republicans, but that there is an extreme cognitive dissonance required to support adulterous politicians who also claim to support family values. By linking a movement to a single political party, it removes the flexibility needed to make politicians fight for your vote and uphold your values. Jerry Falwell could have never predicted that by helping to create a new political Evangelical movement, it would lead to 80% of his base supporting someone like Donald Trump. A favorable political alliance decades ago has inexorably changed what it means to be an Evangelical Christian voter in America, much to the chagrin of many in that group.

In the field of computer science, this approach of seeking out short-term benefits at the expense of longer-term success has a name: the greedy algorithm. You would witness the greedy algorithm if you ever watched a child play chess and immediately capture an opponent’s pawn without thinking a couple of moves ahead. 

The Evangelical political movement prioritized short-term gains because they were feeling attacked and ignored. Because of this, they were forced to sacrifice long-term spiritual credibility, flexibility and broad appeal. This all had a long-term cost for the adoption of their movement, but also the moral and religious integrity of their group. Could the same thing happen to Bitcoin? History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it does provide lessons to those willing to learn.

There is no doubt that in 2024, the Bitcoin community — like the religious right in 1980 — was feeling under attack. Hostile political rhetoric, criminal prosecution of software developers and an intentional weaponization of the legacy financial system to cut off bitcoin and crypto were all important factors for Bitcoiners heading into that year’s election. 

Bitcoin is often described as antifragile, meaning that challenges and obstacles not only don’t stop it, but make it more robust. 

Bitcoiners often describe themselves as having a low time preference, meaning they align their priorities and actions for the long term, choosing to deprioritize short-term gains. 

That said, it’s easy to empathize with the feeling that the Bitcoin community needed to form a political alliance with a charismatic celebrity-turned-politician running for president in order to stem the assault on Bitcoiners’ vision for America’s future. Unfortunately, the urgency that some in the community felt to create that political alliance betrayed the very antifragility and low time preference that are foundational elements of the Bitcoin movement.

Just as Jerry Falwell did with Reagan, influential leaders in the Bitcoin space, like David Bailey, decided to align themselves with Donald Trump in 2024. And, like Ronald Reagan had done with some of his positions, Trump was willing to reverse his position on Bitcoin to gain political and fundraising support. 

I am on the record opposing the choice to court Trump and have routinely referred to this decision as an example of short-term thinking and one that will have negative long-term consequences for the Bitcoin community. I had the chance to discuss these concerns in a conversation with David Bailey during an appearance on The Progressive Bitcoiner (TPB) podcast on July 9, 2024. Later that month, Donald Trump and I both, separately, took the stage at the Bitcoin Conference to talk about the ways politics and Bitcoin intersect.

Like many people, I was not impressed by Trump’s speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference, and it is worth noting that Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) spoke more fluently and with more authority about Bitcoin and its value proposition than did Donald Trump at that same event. Khanna described the power of Bitcoin’s decentralization, argued that Bitcoin is about freedom and said explicitly that he didn’t want the Federal Reserve to have a monopoly on how instantaneous payments should work. He argued forcefully about the importance of America leading in this innovative new technology and spoke about approaching Bitcoin in a bipartisan way in Congress. 

In comparison, Donald Trump was meandering, partisan and dismissive.

The distinction between Ro Khanna’s fireside chat with me at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference and Donald Trump’s keynote speech highlights an important consideration. In July 2024, there was a thin sliver of hope that the Bitcoin community could convince politicians from both sides of the aisle to engage with Bitcoin in productive ways. Bitcoin speaks to both progressive and conservative values, and there is no shortage of Republicans or Democrats willing to reconsider their approach to an issue in exchange for the promise of money or votes. 

At that moment, Bitcoiners just needed to follow their own advice and zoom out. July 2024 was our last best chance to decentralize the political support for Bitcoin among both voters and politicians. Bitcoiners could have made the long-term play to force the political parties to compete for our support. Instead, Bitcoiners largely lined up to support the most polarizing political figure in generations.

Given the previous administration’s hostility toward Bitcoin, this makes some sense. Having recently relistened to my conversation with David Bailey on TPB, I can admit that many of the claims that David offered to support his decision to align with Trump have panned out. Like Evangelical Christians looking at Reagan’s support in the early 1980s, there have been some positive effects of aligning with Trump. Viewed through an appropriately narrow lens, bitcoin’s short-term benefits from supporting Trump are obvious only seven months into his term.

Bitcoin has been thrust into the mainstream political conversation within the United States. (Some other nations have also taken notice.) Trump has offered other wins to the Bitcoin community, like freeing Ross Ulbricht on day 2 and an Executive Order establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve. The regulatory environment has been more accommodating to the Bitcoin industry, which is part of the reason we have seen increased institutional adoption in recent months. Trump is a skilled marketer and can bring Bitcoin to the attention of an audience of millions. Additionally, the USD-based price of bitcoin has almost doubled since Election Day.

These are all wins for the Bitcoin community — and have been celebrated as such. They are also all things David Bailey predicted would happen through his support of then-candidate Trump.

The Branding Problem and Reputational Risks

As always, there is more to the picture. It is already more difficult for me to talk with friends, family and coworkers about Bitcoin because Donald Trump has been so closely tied to the technology since the 2024 campaign. To be fair, my friends, family and coworkers were not tripping over themselves to talk to me about Bitcoin before the election, but whenever I did get them to have a conversation, it was about Bitcoin; now the conversation is about Donald Trump. And it’s not just folks in my regular life: The same phenomenon is happening with elected officials and their staff. If you walk, like I have, into the office of any Democratic Senator or Representative to advocate for Bitcoin, you’ll spend most of your allotted time talking about Donald Trump’s ethics violations in the crypto space. Many Bitcoiners have reached out to me to share similar stories from their own experience.

Perhaps, like me, you’re skeptical of Donald Trump’s Bitcoin bona fides. From time to time, he does provide favorable talking points about Bitcoin, but these are genuinely overshadowed by his own morally bankrupt dabbling in the self-dealing and grifting scams embodied by the “crypto” industry. These are the same scams so strongly fought against by principled Bitcoiners. TrumpCoin, MelaniaCoin, World Liberty Financial all follow in a long line of self-enriching scams like Trump University and the Trump Foundation that the general population associates with Donald Trump. 

Bitcoin already had a branding problem with regular folks having trouble differentiating between the value of Bitcoin and the rest of crypto. Donald Trump’s involvement in the space has made that branding problem much worse. It is worth noting that 94% of people don’t know that Bitcoin has a supply cap of 21 million; now we’re asking that population to be able to disentangle Bitcoin from both Trump and the wider world of crypto.

Donald Trump is a known scammer who thinks that appeasing a Bitcoin audience with a few talking points copied from RFK gives him a blank check to enrich himself with crypto pump-and-dump schemes. 

It’s a conflation that does not serve the Bitcoin community. On top of this, some of the victories the community has seen since inauguration day have been symbolic at best. The establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserve has been sullied by the President’s establishment of a digital asset stockpile, which includes other cryptocurrencies and further blurs the lines for Bitcoin’s critics. At the same time, we are still waiting for the first “budget-neutral” purchase for the nation’s strategic bitcoin reserve. The president’s company, Truth Social, has chosen to build a treasury that includes bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Cardano. Trump infamously ended his speech in Nashville by ad-libbing, “Have a good time with your bitcoin, your crypto and everything else you’re playing with.” It seems like he wanted to play with crypto too.

It is likely that Bitcoin will get caught in the crosshairs of the backlash against Trump, whenever that comes. Executive Orders are as easy to undo as they are to sign. I’m not confident that the next president will scrap the digital asset stockpile — like they should — while still making Bitcoiners happy by keeping the SBR. Nor will bitcoin be spared as a talking point from the multitude of crypto-related investigations into the administration’s ethics violations when the other party eventually comes into power. 

Most damaging to Bitcoin’s reputation, Democrats will be able to tell the truth about Trump’s self-dealing scams in the crypto space and allow folks to make the connection to Bitcoin themselves. Indeed, we already see the same picture of Trump at the Bitcoin conference every time a newspaper writes about his shady dealings in crypto. Millions of people regularly read factual stories about the latest Trump crypto scam and are provided an inconvenient visual of Trump standing on the stage in Nashville with the word “Bitcoin” plastered behind him.

All of these examples highlight the very obvious reputational risk that Donald Trump poses to Bitcoin. I, and others like me, have been sounding this alarm from the very beginning. Forming a political alliance with a polarizing figure impedes Bitcoiners’ ability to educate and advocate for adoption and sensible Bitcoin policy. Sadly, the view among the general population that Bitcoin is a scam has been ossified for the foreseeable future. We have seen some short-term wins, for sure. But this entire episode will have a dampening effect on adoption that may take decades to fully play out.

Like our example of the Evangelical Christians’ alliance with Ronald Reagan forewarns, this might not even be the most serious risk from aligning with Donald Trump. What could such a myopic political alliance do to the Bitcoin community during the next 44 years?

Since Inauguration Day, we have seen Donald Trump engaged in bitter feuds with former allies like Elon Musk. We have seen him threaten to sue Rupert Murdoch for accurate but unfavorable reporting that connected him to Jeffrey Epstein. We have seen Trump go to war with his former supporters over the release of the Epstein files. Nearly every single cabinet-level official from the first Trump term chose not to endorse him when he ran in 2024, with those officials often drawing the President’s ire. All of which, if I were David Bailey, would make me very nervous. What happens if David ever feels the need to stand up against Trump to defend an important property of the Bitcoin protocol? Or even worse, what if he isn’t brave enough to do it? 

A Call for Political Decentralization

One day, Donald Trump — or some other politician in twenty years — could make a demand that threatens Bitcoin’s decentralization. What happens when a politician tells our community that Bitcoin isn’t necessary because we have stablecoins or TrumpCoin? What if the political party that Bitcoin tied itself to deems crypto more profitable than Bitcoin and wants to drop the latter completely? Could the Bitcoin community become so compromised that they cheerfully vote against Bitcoin’s best interest, the way Evangelicals have done? If we tie ourselves so strongly to one political party and completely alienate the only other alternative, it could happen without us even realizing it. Remember, it only took 36 years for Jerry Falwell’s Christians to vote for Donald Trump.

Already we have Bitcoiners abiding the President’s dabbling in crypto scams or even characterizing them as evidence he is a friend to the industry. 

Already we have Bitcoiners going to bat over stablecoin regulation that brings us one step closer to a CBDC. 

Already we have Bitcoiners willing to look past all of the deep character flaws and unsettling political truths just to get close to someone in power who is willing to say nice things about Bitcoin. 

What happens if and when Trump’s relationship with Bitcoin sours? A few years ago, it was impossible to imagine Trump going to war with Rupert Murdoch, but now he is. Does it seem that unlikely that he’ll one day go to war against Bitcoin?

The well-intentioned Christians who joined the Moral Majority in 1980 to support Ronald Reagan were making a calculated decision. I wonder what they would think about that movement morphing into what it has become today? Would those Evangelical Christians from 1980 recognize themselves in the president they voted for in 2024? We should be asking the same questions about the political alliance being formed with Donald Trump right now. What does the political landscape of Bitcoin look like 44 years from now?

Bitcoin’s promise lies in its neutrality and decentralization. Tying Bitcoin’s brand to a divisive political figure or a single political party will prove to be dangerous in the long run. So what can we do?

Keep talking about Bitcoin and trying to educate your friends, family, coworkers and elected representatives. This means you will have to discuss Trump, but be sure to untangle his involvement in Bitcoin from Bitcoin’s tremendous value proposition. Be sure to also differentiate bitcoin from Trump’s crypto scams. Like me, you probably didn’t ask for this burden, but now it is ours to share. Advocate for sensible Bitcoin policy — like the right to run a node or mine Bitcoin. And do all of this with people across the political spectrum. A strategic bitcoin reserve is good, but fundamentally flawed if it does not come from bipartisan legislation. A de minimis tax exemption for Bitcoin is important, but would be more protected and respected if it came from bipartisan legislation. Decentralizing Bitcoin’s political support is critical for its long-view legal status and adoption in the United States.

There are plenty of examples in the history of technology (television, electricity, internet, social media) where political lobbying was balanced and nonpartisan. And if you want that vision for Bitcoin, you should also support the nonprofit The Progressive Bitcoiner, an organization that is dedicated to increasing Bitcoin’s visibility among politicians and voters on the left. Their laser-focused mission is to help our community avoid the backlash for Bitcoin that sadly seems unavoidable now.

We should all learn from the mistakes and long-term costs of the Evangelical movement that courted Ronald Reagan. We must not allow Bitcoin to be a monolithic bloc. We must hold politicians accountable to say and do the best things for Bitcoin. We must not abide politicians self-dealing in crypto scams. We must not allow politicians to get away with conflating bitcoin with the wider crypto space. Vote for and donate to politicians — even if they’re Democrats — who can speak fluidly about Bitcoin’s value proposition and pro-social use cases, the way Ro Khanna did at Bitcoin 2024. Any politician who is willing to damage Bitcoin’s reputation by engaging in self-enriching crypto garbage does not fundamentally understand Bitcoin’s value proposition and does not deserve our support.

My preference would have been to keep Bitcoin out of presidential politics for another 8 to 12 years. This would have been enough time to develop bottom-up, grassroots support for Bitcoin that neither political party could ignore. I didn’t get my preference and almost none of us had a voice in deciding to align with Donald Trump; a few well-connected people made that choice for us. Now we must soberly assess the risks and benefits (there are both!) of that alliance and do our best to broaden Bitcoin’s political appeal in the face of extreme polarization. That work has never been more difficult or more important. When doing so, remember that having a low time preference, zooming out and embracing decentralization are all fundamental to the ethos of Bitcoin. Continue to think in the long term and try to broaden the appeal for a technology that has the potential to make the country and the world a better place. We have work to do. 

Have a good time with your bitcoin, but playtime is over.

C. Jason Maier is a math teacher and Bitcoin educator, and lives with his family in Connecticut. His book, A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin, was published by Bitcoin Magazine Books in 2023 and explores how Bitcoin is a powerful tool to help create a more just, equitable and peaceful world.

BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.

Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post When Bitcoin Picks a Political Side: Faith, Freedom, and the Fault Lines of Political Power first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.

If you weren’t there in person, it would be hard to accurately describe how long and winding the line was to see Donald Trump speak at the Bitcoin conference. The wait to even pass through security and find a seat in the auditorium was hours long and thousands of folks were scrambling to find seats at the Nakamoto Stage early in the day. As the line snaked through the expo hall, it was easy to find an even distribution of Bitcoiners and Trump supporters (some were both) all eager to hear Trump speak. There was an excitement in the atmosphere, and while I didn’t share in the excitement, it did permeate the air in Nashville. Uber drivers were quick to point out that Trump was speaking at the conference. Around the city were large images of Trump’s face next to Bitcoin symbols advertising the conference. Trump-mania surely had taken over the conference, but it also seemed to take over the city of Nashville, too.

I can’t deny that getting Donald Trump to speak at the Bitcoin Conference during an election year is a huge “get.” It is an important moment for Bitcoin and we should all appreciate this development, in some sense, as a milestone that we can all be proud of as Bitcoiners. Trump’s speech promised to lunge Bitcoin into the mainstream political conversation and thereby normalize an up and coming digital currency that most people still dismiss as “fake internet money”. It was a moment we were all supposed to remember for the rest of our lives; this was Bitcoin’s chance to be included in serious conversations held by serious people.

If Trump had shown up for his speech on time, we would have known an hour earlier that this wasn’t going to happen. Instead, we waited. Once Trump did start his speech, it didn’t take long to realize that the folks waiting for hours all day were sold a bill of goods. Trump’s speech was a rambling, at times incoherent, stump speech with a few little nods toward crypto, and… I guess… Bitcoin thrown in for good measure. The first mention of Bitcoin came about six and a half minutes into his remarks. I don’t blame Trump for speaking about crypto more than Bitcoin; most politicians do. But while he was speaking at the Bitcoin conference, I was expecting him to spend more time discussing Bitcoin than his genius uncle who used to work at MIT. Alas, sometimes you just can’t set the bar low enough.

The most concrete take away from hearing Trump speak about Bitcoin was the not-so-shocking realization that Robert Kennedy Jr. thinks more deeply about Bitcoin while he has his first cup of coffee each morning than Donald Trump has thought about Bitcoin during his entire life. All of Trump’s best moments during his speech (and there were some) were lifted, whole cloth, from RFK Jr’s keynote address the day prior. The parts of the speech he didn’t copy from RFK Jr were dismissive, arrogant, pandering and ill informed. The value in watching the speech at all is that the single issue Bitcoin voters I keep hearing about now have an easy decision to make.

No doubt, there are plenty of Bitcoiners who love Trump and loved his speech. But there are also a surprising number of folks that see all this for what it is: a politician pandering for money and votes and an insecure Bitcoin community pandering for some borrowed legitimacy. Having a leading presidential candidate discuss Bitcoin has some positive effects, but the most serious people I know in the space also recognize there are some risks and dangers involved, too. Chief among these dangers is that by cozying up to Trump, the Bitcoin community risks alienating itself from pre-coiner audiences for the foreseeable future. This seems to be a point, I think, that is hard to comprehend if you already like Bitcoin or already like Trump. Try to remember, most people don’t fit into either category.

I’ve publicly been in the Bitcoin space long enough to appreciate the massive cognitive dissonance that exists among many Bitcoiners. Some of these people are Libertarians who are fully committed to individual freedom, but are unwilling to respect a person’s gender identity. Some of these people are Conservatives who want to see the government get smaller while that same government polices what books get banned and what healthcare people are allowed to receive. Some of these people are Bitcoiners who want to see the government disintermediated from the financial system while they cheer uproariously for a politician promising to buy Bitcoin on behalf of the United States Government. If I can see the cognitive dissonance, why is it so hard for a community that prides itself on being heterodox, skeptical and don’t-trust-verify?

I consider it a personal responsibility to orange pill as many people as I can, and I have been serious about doing that. This means, I want to expose the 57% of Americans that don’t like Trump to Bitcoin as a force for good in this world; my job is hard and since Nashville, it just got harder. Let’s be real: Bitcoin is the perfect combination of “internet” and “money” that should make anyone skeptical. There is no shortage of FUD dismissing Bitcoin as pretend money or a scam or a ponzi scheme or money for criminals. Experienced Bitcoiners may not be worried about any of that, but the pre-coiners I know certainly are hyper aware of the reputation. If my job is to convince them to take a second look, that gets harder when Bitcoiners are falling over themselves to align with a known con artist, philanderer, fraud, and convicted felon.

To be sure, Bitcoin will attract its share of con artists, philanderers, frauds and felons. Bitcoin is for them, too. But we shouldn’t capitulate and rebrand Bitcoin as something Trumpian. This is simply bad marketing. The most compelling argument I’ve heard in support of seeking out Trump’s approval is that it will force other politicians to support Bitcoin and his policies would force other nations to take Bitcoin seriously. This could prove to be true, but it is just as likely that the opposite will happen. Normie pre-coiners, if they are paying attention at all, will so easily be able to hold up the “scam” Bitcoin next to the “scam” Trump and walk away from the whole thing and sleep easily. Meanwhile, Trump will have no genuine affinity toward Bitcoin after the votes are counted.

After so much effort going toward ensuring Bitcoin is non-partisan, bi-partisan and non-political, it was our community (really a handful of influential and connected Bitcoiners) that sought out an alliance with the most polarizing political figure in generations. It would be one thing if Trump found Bitcoin on his own, but that’s not the case. We committed this unforced error ourselves, or more accurately, we allowed the leaders in our leaderless movement to err on our behalf.

I can hear you screaming “Well, what’s your solution? Vote for the other guys?!” Fair question. Here’s my solution: Walk away from politicians and walk towards voters. Meet them where they are and educate them about the ways Bitcoin solves the problems they care about. That’s really it. The rest will take care of itself. Tak
e a low time preference and it will happen from the ground up, without having to sacrifice your principles. This is the best way to promote Bitcoin adoption, protect the marginalized people Bitcoin can help, and attract policy makers who truly and deeply care about Bitcoin and eschew “crypto”. If you do get to interact with politicians, advocate for protections for self custody, de minimis tax treatment so Bitcoin can be easily spent, and consumer protections imposed on exchanges and brokerages.

For those that think Trump is now one of us, he isn’t. He will drop our community the moment it serves him, and we will be worse off for it. Zoom out. One week after Trump appeared in Nashville, he sat for a disastrous interview with the National Association of Black Journalists. This, it turns out, did not make him a Black journalist. Nor did showing up in Nashville make him a Bitcoiner. We would, all of us, be well served to remember that.

This is a guest post by Jason Maier. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Trump and the Future of Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.

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A PDF pamphlet of this article is available for download.

I have taught teenagers mathematics for my entire career. More recently, I also found great joy in teaching people about Bitcoin. Among the lessons I have learned through the years is that in order for a student to truly learn a new and challenging concept, they need to feel comfortable and have a voice in their learning process. Today, the most effective teachers are able to foster a dynamic community of engaged students that have agency in what and how they learn. But this wasn’t always so.

In Paulo Freire’s foundational book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he established a framework of teaching and learning that he called the “banking model of education”. It will not surprise Bitcoiners to learn that Freire’s use of banking is meant as a pejorative. Written in the late 1960s, the book compared the era’s dominant teaching method to a teacher filling an empty vessel with deposits. The bank — in this case, a piggy bank — is the student. Under this model, the teacher embodies the active role of deciding what gets taught and what constitutes true knowledge. He or she serves the agenda of the oppressor — even if unwittingly — by choosing what and how much knowledge the students will receive. At no point can the teacher give enough information or encourage enough critical thinking to threaten the world created by the oppressor. By contrast, the student is a passive receiver of knowledge. The student has no agency and can make no decisions about their learning. The student receives deposits, but is unable to do anything with them. Success for both individuals in the relationship is defined and measured by the deposits made into the bank.

Freire explains: “The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are” (page 72). The key to this framework is to understand teacher and student as opposites. The teacher is the authority and the student is an object to be manipulated. In this old system, the teacher issues directives and makes deposits, while the student is passive and has no ability to question authority or be involved in their own learning process. It is important for me to note that in 2023, thanks in large part to Freire’s work, this is no longer how most good teachers operate or measure their success. This is not how I run my classroom. As a Bitcoiner, I’m not sure I could.

Moving beyond the classroom, it seems apropos to extend this bank metaphor about education to banking itself. Outside the classroom, most people trying to learn about the legacy financial system have at some point felt like the meek vessel receiving deposits that were chosen by someone else. What people learn about how the banking industry works, how much they learn, and the opacity of the lessons all seem to be decided by someone in a position of authority, acting — even if unwittingly — for the benefit of the oppressor. Banks are far too profitable to allow regular folks to learn too much about them. In Freire’s language the banking industry is serving the role of the teacher and oppressor, while regular folks are the passive vessels. The students. The piggy banks. The oppressed.

The main trouble with the banking system of education is poignantly summarized in the book: “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed” (page 73). It is hard not to read such a sentence and think critically about how our financial system — something we interact with everyday — is taught to people. The dominant forces working within the financial system have no desire to have regular folks understand the role of the central bank, how money is created, why inflation happens, the details of fractional reserve banking, the relationship between government and banks, or the boom-bust business cycle and what causes it. The way finance is taught simply serves to “annul” our creativity and “stimulate” our credulity. The ability (or even the desire) to question the system is eroded. Those in power have no interest in revealing their world or having it transformed.

In Freire’s framework, the banking system of education is so pernicious because the tranquility of the oppressor “rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it” (page 76). We saw earlier this year how impactful it is to question the systems that the banks have created. Bank runs, like the one that devastated Silicon Valley Bank in March, serve to question the world of the oppressor. Among many other things, a bank run is a challenge to authority and an explicit refusal to trust. Once relegated as a relic of the past, apparently bank runs are very real and can cause an unsettling recalibration of one’s understanding about how a bank works. And as we saw in March, the bank run at SVB wasn’t contained and was barely controlled. There were immediately contagion concerns about the regional banking industry. Indeed, this is the threat to tranquility that the banking sector does not want. Regular folks who have never needed to question their bank began to do so, even though they weren’t supposed to. To be clear, the oppressor’s industry isn’t being transformed by a bank run; it is being revealed.

Taking your money out of a bank is just one of the ways that us regular folks (students in Freire’s framework) can take agency and control of our learning and understanding of how money works, both within the old system and likely new ones. At the heart of a bank run are the very foundations of Bitcoin’s ethos; self-custody, don’t trust, verify, and question authority. It is no surprise to Bitcoiners that banks don’t want you thinking like this. It is far more profitable to keep people ignorant. To trust the banks is to continue giving them low-interest loans with which they can take risks to reap huge profits while our government serves as their backstop. To trust the banks is to not understand that your “money” is really the bank’s liability. Folks rushing to withdraw their funds from SVB were asking dangerous questions, perhaps for the first time. These people are Bitcoiners that just don’t know it yet.

Bank runs are just the beginning of this next stage. As we students wake up to our power and agency, the cracks in the old system grow. Whether it is a bank run or orange pilling a friend, we have the power to question the old system. Indeed, questioning the old system is all that is needed to topple it. Each new Bitcoiner is another leak in the dam. The people in charge of the legacy financial system will try to distract and redirect, but once you see the inevitability of the dam breaking, there is no unseeing it. Learning about Bitcoin is a self-directed, interdisciplinary journey in which people need to take responsibility and control over their learning process. Bitcoiners are decidedly lifelong learners. This is precisely what Pedagogy of the Oppressed advocates in respect to the “banking system of education”. People should learn about things that are important to their lives and have agency about how they learn. I see this happening in every corner of the Bitcoin community.

And what is your role? My role? It is certainly not to be a “well intentioned bank-clerk teacher” that unwittingly promotes the facts that the oppressor wants promoted. The most impactful thing we can do is to encourage curiosity within our pre-coiner friends and have them take control of their learning journey. By learning about Bitcoin in any serious way, one will necessarily learn about the legacy financial system and all of its flaws and exploitation; in many ways, it is better for the person you care about to discover that on their own. As a Bitcoiner, your role is to provide resources, kindle creativity, keep an open mind, and learn as you teach. And, perhaps most importantly, your role is to meet people where they are in their journey. As Freire correctly points out, “one does not liberate people by alienating them” (page 79). It is critically important to provide resources and guidance that empowers learners and makes them feel motivated to discover more.

It is painfully clear that we, as a society, do a horrible job of educating people about the financial system. This is no coincidence and no mistake. The oppressors cannot maintain their system while also encouraging the students to ask why it exists or what it accomplishes. Bitcoin provides a better pedagogy, one in which the student is empowered to take an active role in their learning and explore the how and why for themselves. I believe this Bitcoin pedagogy is the new pedagogy of the oppressed, a way of teaching and learning that is designed, from its inception, to liberate people. And we need you. If you are reading these words, you should be thinking about yourself as a teacher-learner for Bitcoin, and you are just in time. This new pedagogy, and your involvement in it, is of paramount importance as we enter the “then they fight you” phase in Bitcoin’s journey.

Each week we are faced with damning new narratives about Bitcoin. It’s unsettling for those who have done the hard work of understanding the best monetary technology the world has ever known. These damning (and false) narratives are simply deposits being made into regular folks by the banking industry, the media, and politicians. These entities are deciding what constitutes true knowledge and how much of it you are allowed to have. They are acting, even if unintentionally, to dull your ability to question the old system. Each attack on Bitcoin is really meant as a defense of the profit-making system the oppressors have created. As Freire notes, “the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them” (page 74). This remains fundamentally true today in the relationship between banks and their customers.

Referring to the oppressor-teacher attempting to stifle any threat to a profitable system, Freire says “thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties” (page 73). Indeed, powerful forces are currently using the old banking system of education to react against bitcoin as an experiment in money. This is because Bitcoin, undoubtedly, stimulates the critical faculties and encourages people to question the authority of the old system. The threat to their system is not just that bitcoin is better money, but it is also that it encourages better learning about money.

As you continue to teach and learn about Bitcoin, remember that the oppressor does not want you in charge of your learning. They don’t want you to be able to question their system. They do not want their world revealed or transformed. They want you and everyone you care about to be piggy banks and remain oppressed.

Bitcoin, of course, doesn’t care about what they want.

References

1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, thirtieth anniversary edition. ed., trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993).

C. Jason Maier

cjasonmaier@gmail.com

www.BitcoinProgressive.com

This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Withdrawal Issue”. Click here to subscribe now.

A PDF pamphlet of this article is available for download.

This is a guest post by Jason Maier. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Bitcoin And The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.

This is an opinion editorial by Jason Maier, a teacher and author of “A Progressive’s Case For Bitcoin.” Disclaimer: This book was published by Bitcoin Magazine.

Does Bitcoin need progressives?

The simple answer to this question is no, Bitcoin doesn’t need progressives. We can all quote the memes by heart: Bitcoin doesn’t care. Tick tock, next block. Bitcoin is inevitable. Bitcoin can’t be regulated. I believe each of these mottos are true, in their own ways, in the long term. But recently, I have devoted a lot of energy to answering the converse of this question, namely: Do progressives need Bitcoin?

My book answers this more intricate question thoroughly in the affirmative. And while it’s easy to conclude, with confidence, that Bitcoin doesn’t need progressives, it might be interesting to consider why you should care at all that I’m on a mission to orange pill as many progressive liberals as I can. It’s true that Bitcoin doesn’t care. But I think you should.

Shortening The Long Run

As clear as it is to me that Bitcoin will ultimately succeed, it is also clear that the support of liberals and those on the left of the political spectrum, while not an absolute necessity, is important nonetheless. Even if Bitcoin is inevitable in the long run, there is an awful lot of time between now and the end of that long run. That time can be filled with growing adoption, innovation and promoting freedom money across the planet. Or that time can be filled with political fighting at every level of every government across the globe. Plenty of people reading this may not care, or they may even welcome the fighting. But in the long run, I’ll be dead and the world would be a better place if more people understood and used Satoshi Nakamoto’s innovation before my stack of corn gets passed along to my children.

There are Bitcoiners who do not align with me politically, but nonetheless support my work. These folks like to remind me that Bitcoin is money for enemies. This is not only true, but actually an important property of all “good” money. Furthermore, it is also critical to remember that, in this narrow sense, no Bitcoiner is your enemy, regardless of how they align themselves within the legacy political system. While left and right may fight about everything else, it is imperative that we unite when it comes to Bitcoin, because doing so provides our best opportunity to replace our current system before the end of the long term.

Overhaul The System

Like many people, my vision of bitcoin is that it is money for everyone. I also see it as the best tool we have to replace the corrupt, opaque and regressive global financial system which we have all inherited. At some point, the people who control the current system will actually start to fight Bitcoin and when they do, they will fight hard. The current environmental fear,uncertainty and doubt (FUD) and the recent closing of fiat onramps to crypto exchanges will look quaint in comparison. Powerful interests from Washington, D.C., to High Street will be able to pull their levers to make it difficult for any non-expert to learn about bitcoin, gain access to it or store it securely. Each of the players in the current game are incentivized to keep it running as long as possible and they have access to tremendous resources to help make that happen. Perhaps, for the first time, the issue isn’t powerful interests trying to make more money, it is the very definition of money itself. It will be a war and they will pull out all the stops.

Some Bitcoiners confidently claim that Bitcoin bans don’t matter because people are able to move to places where Bitcoin isn’t banned. If Bitcoin becomes illegal in some countries, or even some states within the U.S., we might have a chance to see how difficult jurisdictional arbitrage is in practice. Those with wealth and connections may be able to move to a different country that embraces Bitcoin. Those struggling to get by will be left behind. Even Ted Cruz was dismissive of the idea when he quipped to a Bitcoin audience recently, “How many folks here have your El Salvadoran passports?”

I don’t often agree with Cruz, but he is right. It’s hard to see how the emergency plan of everyone moving to El Salvador can fulfill the promise that “Bitcoin is for everybody” within my lifetime.

But perhaps the goal of those currently in power won’t be to make Bitcoin illegal, but instead to just keep us fighting about it from our entrenched and polarized political viewpoints. Since their goal is to protect the current system, they likely won’t start by outlawing their competition, but instead they would just keep people arguing about it.

The best outcome for those seeking to maintain the status quo is for the public to see Bitcoin as a right versus left issue, something else to divide people while those in charge continue to benefit from the current systems. And there is every reason to think that this will happen. Currently, there are a small number of liberal politicians who regularly attempt to win political points by bashing Bitcoin. If the tactic proves successful over time, others will add their voices to the chorus. On the flip side, some conservative legislators have rushed not only to support Bitcoin, but also highlight that the politicians on the left don’t. Eventually, all of the FUD, roadblocks and political fighting could reach a crescendo, at which point Bitcoin would start feeling a lot less inevitable.

Make The War Impossible

The window to get in front of this narrative is small and rapidly closing. My strong belief is that the secret to our collective success isn’t in convincing the politicians in power that Bitcoin is a force for good, but instead it’s in educating the citizens that vote for those politicians. We still have a chance to do so. Most pre-coiners just haven’t thought about Bitcoin a lot. I have seen that once people are given an opportunity to learn and ask questions, they are often convinced of Bitcoin’s value proposition. However the converse can also be true. If we get to the point where the government tries to ban Bitcoin, there will likely be a large swath of the population that will conclude that it must be bad. If public sentiment turns from “bitcoin is pretend money” to “Bitcoin is a bad thing for bad people,” it will be hard to unring that bell. Such an outcome doesn’t make Bitcoin’s success any less likely in the long run, but it can push back adoption, innovation, the building of infrastructure and education by decades. This would not only lock us in an outdated system, but also delay the real-life benefits that Bitcoin offers to the people who need this technology now.

Because of Bitcoin’s superior monetary properties, it will eventually win and become a preferred method of storing and transferring value among the world’s citizens. We know those currently in power are incentivized to fight Bitcoin. If given the chance, they will. But, even though we could win their war, we still have an opportunity to make such a war politically impossible in the first place. Doing so should be considered an imperative. Cory Klippsten makes a similar argument, employing Nassim Taleb’s framework of “The Intransigent Minority.” Klippsten’s claim is that if Bitcoin reaches 10 million supporters in the United States, that small but unmoving minority will make it practically impossible to fight the technology.

Even if imperfect, the schematic holds some intuitive value. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Klippsten’s 10 million number is correct. It would be foolish to think that we will reach that goal (in “The Race To Avoid The War”) without intentionally expanding the scope of our target audience. So far, progressives remain a fairly-untapped option for such an expansion. Further, our coalition of 10 million will be stronger and more antifragile if it is heterogeneous across the political spectrum. A robust coalition of Bitcoiners that spans the political spectrum will be impossible to ignore and harder to fight. This is why I, and many others like me, are bringing the case for Bitcoin to progressive people however we can. I think that should matter to you.

Bitcoin Doesn’t Care, But You Should

The world needs us to orange pill progressives. I very much want to reach Klippsten’s 10 million target and see the intransigent minority of Bitcoiners shape the future of money. The good news is that there is a growing catalog of Bitcoin educational resources offered through a progressive lens. There is also a growing and vocal progressive community within the Bitcoin space. Thanks to these tools, we have an opportunity, however fleeting, to reach more people and convince them of Bitcoin’s promise. And we need your help.

This is a call to action. Don’t shy away from conversations about Bitcoin with a liberal colleague, in-law or neighbor. Try to reach those people where they are and explain how Bitcoin addresses the unfairness they care about in the current system. Many progressives will respond well to an informed discussion about how and why Bitcoin addresses wealth inequality or gives property rights to marginalized groups of people. You may have more success than you think. If you’re unable to convince them yourself, direct them to appropriate books, podcasts and articles so they can continue their learning.

There is no doubt that we will eventually reach the tipping point when Bitcoin becomes inevitable. When that happens, it will be critical to have a variety of political ideologies represented in our coalition if we are to find the greatest success. The only unknown that remains is if we will act quickly enough to reach that tipping point before the war. I am optimistic that we will, and to that end I will continue to orange pill as many progressives as I can. I hope you will join me in that work.

This is a guest post by Jason Maier. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Bitcoin Doesn’t Care About Progressives, But You Should first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Maier.