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The other week, I made my opinion clear that I believe Donald Trump is the best candidate for Bitcoin in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Aaron responded, and after reading it, I feel he’s still missing the bigger picture. Aaron’s main points seem to be that Trump is just using Bitcoiners for their votes, and that he won’t follow through on his promises.

While I partly agree with the former point, I disagree with the latter. Contrary to what I’ve seen some Bitcoiners online say, I do not think Trump has to be a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist and cypherpunk to be a great Bitcoin president. Here’s why.

Trump needs all the votes he can get. Of course he is going to try and appeal to our voters, especially when most of us already have right-leaning political views. It makes sense for the Republican party to adopt freedom money, given they lean more towards the principles of freedom now, while the Democrats have become more authoritarian.

Voting for Trump, then, is a win-win. He gets more votes (some in critical swing states), and we get a better environment for our industry. Sounds like a good trade to me.

And that leads me into what I disagree with Aaron on. I believe that Trump will keep most, if not all of his promises he’s made when it’s come to Bitcoin. Because, well, most of the promises he has made seem like relatively easy things to implement. It’s not like he’s alone on the issue – there are now many pro-Bitcoin senators and congresspeople to hold him accountable.

There’s Senator Cynthis Lummis, who wants to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve (using BTC already owned by the government). There is Congressman Tom Emmer, who already wants to fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler and appoint someone better for the industry. You can go to StandWithCrypto.com to see the rest.

If elected, Trump would have loads of other, arguably more important issues on his plate to deal with. The fact that his policies would give Bitcoiners a friendly regulatory environment to build in, stop anti-Bitcoin politicians from continuing to attack this industry, all without Trump meddling in it, sounds like the perfect storm for innovation.

The fact that he’s done things like bring Bitcoin miners to Mar-a-Lago to better understand the industry is enough evidence to make this point.

I think many are overly critical of Trump because he said he wasn’t a fan of Bitcoin in 2019. But that was ages ago, and everything has changed since then. It doesn’t make sense to hate on people for coming around to Bitcoin after not being a fan of it. (I do, however, think it is ok to be critical of the non-Bitcoin initiatives Trump has promoted, like World Liberty Financial, but even that isn’t worth losing all the benefits of his presidency.)

So, why would Trump free Ross now when he already had the chance to last term?

In politics, as in Bitcoin, it’s all about incentives, and the incentives here are aligned.

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

​ Trump would allow a friendly regulatory environment for Bitcoiners to thrive in. 

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This interview on the Danny Jones Podcast episode 263 both felt like it was being channeled from my own brain while also hitting me with an overload of new information. It hit the spot, as someone who has long held the opinion that all modern wars and psychological operations are symptoms of easy fiat money, and that the government is simply the biggest criminal cartel that grows large enough to self-legitimize its racket and assumes the role of moral authority. Kruse postulates that the goal of globalist transhumanists is to replace the U.S. Constitution, a document that is designed to protect individuals from government, with the U.N. Charter, a document designed to usurp it and provide tyrannical power to proxies of the industrial military complex.

“I would sit down with, probably, Adolf Hitler before I would sit down with Sergey Brin.”

I wasn’t expecting to hear about Bitcoin when I started listening, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear him bring it up early and often, framed as a kryptonite to the transhumanists he portrays as his “mortal enemy”.

“The reason why Bitcoin content gets removed is because DARPA is not interested in Bitcoin. Their energy to fuel their whole process is cheap fiat money.”

Uncle Jack hits on topics like Kleiber’s law, allodial wealth, DARPA, MK-ULTRA (and it’s subsequent versions), the Stanford marshmallow experiment, JFK’s assassination, sunlight medicine, SV40, cancer, COVID and the jabs, and even invisibility, somehow connecting it all subtly to Bitcoin, with a ‘fix the money, fix the world’ subtext.

“There’s a pattern with the Industrial Military Complex. When they want to do something, they don’t ask for forgiveness, they don’t ask for permission either, they just do it.”

The main ingredient was essentially that the Federal fiat system is a big Ponzi scheme, citing Roth IRAs and retirement funds specifically. And that there is a mortal war waged on us by The State to make sure enough of us die through cancers, wars or otherwise so that we aren’t all performing a bank run.

The Industrial Military Complex is a machine that is powered by cheap money: fiat money. Kruse aligns Bitcoin as a solution to the fiat war machine, which is preaching to the choir for me, but exciting to hear on a non-Bitcoin show with a large audience like the Danny Jones Podcast.

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

​ A self-proclaimed Bitcoin pleb and actual brain surgeon, Dr. Jack Kruse, has the sauce and I want everyone to try it. 

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Bitcoin will not become more widely adopted as a result of intellectual curiosity or because it’s theoretically the best form of money ever. Instead, people will begin to use it because it solves pressing problems in their lives.

So, if you’re looking to foster greater Bitcoin adoption, show someone how they can use Bitcoin to solve an issue their facing.

Hermann Vivier, co-founder of Bitcoin Ekasi, a Bitcoin circular economy in South Africa was given this advice from Mike Peterson, Director of Bitcoin Beach, the world’s first Bitcoin circular economy, and it continues to inform his work.

The broader problem that Bitcoin solves for underserved South Africans is that it provides them with a means to save in an environment in which many don’t trust banks or have much access to other investments. Part of the reason they don’t trust banks is because they’re often charged hidden fees from both the banks themselves as well as local merchants.

Vivier told Bitcoin Magazine that many in the community often purchase goods via layaway programs (buy now, pay later) and are often duped by stipulations in the fine print of the deals.

“You can go in and buy something today, not pay for it at all, take it home and then the merchant starts charging you after the second or the third month,” explained Vivier.

“These credit schemes are quite exploitative. The fees would go up over time as interest accumulates and the residents give the company the right to just draw the money from their bank accounts, but the buyers don’t understand what they’re signing away,” he added.

“After a year, they see there’s still money going out of their account, but in their mind, they’ve already finished paying for this thing, yet they’re still paying for it and they don’t know why.”

Vivier went on to explain that the simple fact that money cannot be automatically withdrawn from a Bitcoin wallet like it can from a bank account provides Bitcoin Ekasi community members with more of a sense of control over their funds.

Rich Swisher, founder of Motiv, an NGO that develops Bitcoin circular economies and helps members of unbanked communities in Perú become more financially independent, also uses Bitcoin to help the financially disadvantaged have more control over their money.

Swisher told Bitcoin Magazine that residents of the communities with whom Motiv works can’t save cash in their homes because of the high likelihood that they’ll be robbed. And many don’t use banks because they charge fees that these residents can’t afford to pay (That’s if banking services are available at all.) Bitcoin provides them with a way to bank themselves, which serves as a financial base for them to start their own enterprises.

“With Bitcoin, they can start a small business that they can run out of their home and run off of their phone,” Swisher told Bitcoin Magazine.

“Over time they see that they can be financially independent. Then, they start seeing that not only do I have a good path going right now, but if it was all taken away from me tomorrow, I have the know-how to redo it,” he added.

“None of this happens without Bitcoin.”

So, does that mean you have to run out and start a full-on Bitcoin circular economy in an underserved community if you want to see more Bitcoin adoption? Absolutely not.

But how hard would it be to show your friend who runs a non-profit how to accept bitcoin for international donations so to save on wire transfer fees or to show a family member how to send an international remittance using Bitcoin instead of Western Union, which charges high fees for its service? Not that hard.

If you want to see more people using Bitcoin, quit the habit of explaining to those around you how great it is, and start showing them what problems it solves.

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

​ Follow the lead of Bitcoin Ekasi’s Hermann Vivier and Motiv’s Rich Swisher.