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In Defense of the Single-Issue Cryptocurrency Voter

Financial Block Staff

Published

6 months ago

on

In Defense of the Single-Issue Crypto Voter

Vitalik recently published a reflective post arguing that voters do not choose their political affiliation based primarily on whether that party or politician is “pro-crypto.”

I do not agree.

Today’s voters should carefully consider a party’s or politician’s stance on cryptocurrency when deciding how to vote, so that future voters can select candidates who further promote the values ​​and technologies our community values.

My mission is to promote economic freedom in the world, and cryptocurrency is the best way to do that. Economic freedom leads to higher incomes, better healthcare and education, lower infant mortality, and many other things we all want for society. There are few technologies in the world that can rival cryptocurrency in its promise to improve humanity, and almost none of them are in as precarious a position as cryptocurrency.

For cryptocurrencies to be successful in the future, we need to take the first step now and elect pro-cryptocurrency candidates.

The fact that there are even concepts of “pro-crypto” or “anti-crypto” is already ridiculous, and our first goal should be to eliminate this distinction. Being anti-crypto today is like being anti-internet in the 90s.

Unfortunately, being anti-crypto is a slogan and a strategy adopted by some parties, politicians and regulators. They have worn it with pride and brandished their hammers to attack the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Everything from core technologies like validators and protocols to law-abiding companies, user applications, and tokens. Many have already denounced its crippling effect on the industry, but I would go even further: Anti-Crypto Advocates Are Managing to Put the Industry on the Wrong Path.

I would like to give some examples:

SEC regulation through enforcement of legitimate projects is directly leading to a degeneration of innovation in the industry. Good players like Uniswap, Solana, Filecoin and many others are being targeted with poorly defined and unreasonable criteria that label them as securities.

How does the industry respond? With memecoins; they have no ecosystem, no builders, no users, no products, no nothing.

Another example is “useless” governance tokens. Why do they exist? Because they lack the key feature that enables a virtuous flywheel: the ability for token holders to receive a share of the revenue generated by the protocol. This is the obvious step to make these protocol ecosystems self-sustaining. The main reason protocols don’t add this feature is the fear of their token being mislabeled as a security.

The result is that developers and consumers are losing faith in the ability of tokens to serve as a governance mechanism for decentralized protocols, which is false and immensely damaging to our industry.

We use the term pro-crypto, but in reality it is not that; what we want is for the parties, politicians and regulators to be crypto-neutral.

We need to get back to a level playing field where good, fair laws and regulations can be passed that judge cryptocurrencies on their merits, not based on partisan agendas. The pro-crypto bills that have been proposed or passed are not advocating for the U.S. Treasury to buy Bitcoin, they are common sense legislation like creating sensible regulations for stablecoins, allowing institutions to hold cryptocurrencies, and enacting consumer protection laws.

The cryptocurrency community demands the bare minimum, which is fair treatment under the law, and I strongly advise everyone to become a single-issue voter to elect pro-crypto politicians who believe that our industry has a right to exist and that our technology can improve the world.

Once we are back on a level playing field, we need to take the second step: elect the best candidates from around the world.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity before us. This is the first time in human history that we have seen people all over the world succeeding at the same time, holding very similar ideals and a shared value system. At any other time, successful people in countries like America, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, and so on were very different from each other and these differences were reflected in their governments and their priorities.

As Vitalik said, Cryptocurrency is not just cryptocurrencies and blockchainIt encompasses a family of technologies and a belief system about the world: the right to self-sovereignty, self-custody, permissionless innovation, privacy, freedom, and so on. That’s why we’re all here and why we’re fighting so hard for cryptocurrencies to have their fair chance.

It is now up to all of us in our respective countries to become politically active and elect candidates who reflect this shared belief system in the policies and laws they write, from keeping e-wallets KYC-free to preserving the ability for users to leverage privacy-preserving protocols for their health records, identities, and payments.

The fight for cryptographic technologies and values ​​on a global scale has a multiplier effect, as it increases collaboration between countries on these important issues.

My mission is to promote economic freedom not only in my country, but around the world, and working together to defend and grow cryptocurrencies is the best way to achieve this goal.

Victor Bunin is a protocol specialist at Coinbase and a GP at Credibly Neutral.