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Thursday non-partisan newsletter

Q: Should I be a single-issue voter?

Sure, vote however you want — depending on where you live, the odds of your vote deciding a presidential election are so astronomically long (one in 490 billion if you’re unlucky enough to live in Washington DC) that it really doesn’t matter to me.

It probably matters to you, though, because why else would you bother taking the time to do it?

This is the “paradox of voting”: You know your vote is not going to swing the election, and yet you willingly incur the opportunity cost of taking two hours out of your day to go cast it.

You may do that out of a sense of civic duty, but let’s be honest, it’s more likely because you (being human) enjoy belonging to a tribe of like-minded people. 

If so, and if “crypto” is the only tribe you care to belong to, then sure, being a single-issue crypto voter makes sense.

But you might want to consider why you identify with the crypto tribe and then make sure that how you vote is consistent with that, too. 

“Don't stand with crypto-as-in-cryptocurrency,” Ethereum tribe leader Vitalik Buterin advised in a blog post this week, “stand with those underlying goals, and the whole set of policy implications that they imply.”

I suspect most single-issue crypto voters would tell you that’s what they’re doing, as Nic Carter does here — his enthusiasm for crypto is downstream of his political views, so the “single issue” of crypto is really a proxy for his larger worldview. 

That Carter is voting Republican should be unsurprising as crypto’s libertarian ethos is consistent with the GOP’s traditional enthusiasm for deregulation and low taxes.

But I feel like this is starting to change as shifting political alignments seem to be creating some strange bedfellows.

Yes, JD Vance is pro-bitcoin and I’m sure having a pro-bitcoin vice president will be good for the crypto industry.

But his “New Right” political philosophy is statist, not libertarian and I think that should give some crypto people pause — my limited understanding of the New Right is that they are socially and economically proscriptive in a way that is diametrically opposed to the cypherpunk ethos of crypto.

So, if your pro-crypto worldview is not downstream of governments telling people what to do, you might want to reassess your tribal affiliation.

That reassessment might not change your vote, of course — we only get two candidates to choose from in the US and it would be weird to agree with everything either one of them says.

Or, you might be like WC Fields and only vote against, not for someone.

But if you’re going to incur the opportunity cost of voting, just be sure you’re voting for the right reason — even if it’s only one reason.

Q: Do you vote?

I do, mostly because my mom would be disappointed in me if I didn’t and you never want to disappoint your mom, do you.

But I also live in a swing state, so my odds of deciding the whole thing are a little better than winning the lottery, which I also sometimes try to do. 

You never know!

Q: Is JD Vance good for non-bitcoin crypto?

Probably.

I saw a clip of him saying that Gary Gensler’s approach to regulating crypto seems to be the “exact opposite of what it should be,” which sounds pretty good to me.

But then he goes on to say that what Gensler’s SEC has wrong is that it seeks to regulate tokens that have “utility” (I assume he means “securities” here) and not regulate tokens that have no utility.

He suggests he’d do the opposite, which would be 1) nonsensical (it would make the SEC the regulator of things like baseball cards and beanie babies) and 2) very bad for memecoins (if the single issue you intend to vote on is a PEPE ETF, do NOT vote for Vance).

Still, a vote for Trump/Vance is a vote against crypto’s arch nemesis, Gary Gensler, which I’m sure some people will take great enjoyment in.

But what exactly you’ll be voting for is probably more TBD than you might think.

Q: Is bitcoin “a hedge against hope”?

That’s what Larry Fink said on CNBC this week, and that struck a chord with the ex-trader in me.

Because the (perhaps counterintuitive) thing about hedges is this: You want them to lose money.

When your hedge is losing money, the rest of your portfolio is usually (not always) making much more money.

So, rooting for your hedge is effectively rooting against the rest of your portfolio. 

From that perspective, rooting for your bitcoin hedge is like rooting against the rest of your life.

If your bitcoin position is still disappointingly at $60,000 in, say 10 years time, that would mean 1) the US dollar has not collapsed, 2) the Republic is still standing (not a given at this point) and 3) the world economy has continued to grow with minimal inflation.

That is a world I want to live in!

The world I do not want to live in is the one where bitcoin is worth $1,000,000 — that way lies rampant inflation, mass unemployment and societal collapse.

As a bitcoin holder, you might be doing far better than most everyone else in that scenario — but you’ll also be doing far worse than you are now.

If you either work or invest in crypto, you of course want bitcoin to do well — and that’s not inconsistent with wanting the world to do well.

Bitcoin can probably get to $300,000 or so just by slowly taking market share from gold (the original “hedge against hope”) — no global calamities required.

But if you’ve been rooting for bitcoin to hit $1,000,000 any time soon, you might want to reconsider.

It’s fine to think it will do that, of course — but you should also hope to be wrong.

Rooting for bitcoin to go hyperbolic is a form of single-issue voting that’s not good for anyone.

— Byron Gilliam

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