7/18/24 Roundup: Momentum Builds Ahead of Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville

On Monday Donald Trump announced his pick of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance is best known for his book Hillbilly Elegy, which explores the challenges faced by working class Americans in the Rust Belt — the deindustrialized former manufacturing hubs of Northeast and Midwest states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, all key battleground states in this November’s presidential election.

Vance is a former venture capitalist who started his career at Mithril Capital, a VC fund founded by Peter Thiel. In addition to his background in tech and finance, Vance has expressed pro-crypto views and been critical of SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s approach to regulating the industry. Vance disagrees with Gensler’s hostility towards utility tokens while taking a more lax stance on other tokens such as digital commodities and memecoins.

In particular, Vance thinks that the use of blockchain technology and utility tokens for verification will potentially be important for nascent social media networks to compete with incumbents. Vance has cited control of the flow of online information being largely in the hands of two companies (Facebook and Google) as one of the country’s largest threats and has championed pro-competitive policy to loosen their stranglehold on online media.

Vance is reportedly working on crypto legislation to be introduced in the Senate as soon as this month. The bill will likely serve as direct competition to the FIT21 Act which recently passed through the House with bipartisan support. However, some bitcoiners have urged caution in supporting FIT21 as it would grant sweeping new CFTC oversight to regulate the spot bitcoin market, potentially imposing enhanced KYC/AML requirements on all bitcoin companies and entrenching incumbents. Vance’s legislation is hopefully more thoughtful and robust than FIT21, and it will certainly have more juice now with the VP nomination.

I couldn’t find much Vance has said specific to bitcoin, but it has been reported that he owned between $100k-$250k of bitcoin in 2022. We will have to await the details of his legislation to see how it might impact bitcoin, although it seems the focus will be on a framework to regulate the rest of the crypto-industry.

It isn’t a surprise that most new crypto legislation is not focused on bitcoin, but rather the “rest,” as that is where there seems to be the most confusion and uncertainty. Bitcoin, in relative terms, is simple and easy to understand because it is unique among all cryptocurrenices. It is money, while arguably every other token is still searching for product-market fit.

On the macro and monetary front, Vance has cited the US dollar’s reserve currency status as a contributing cause to the hollowing out of America’s industrial base. This suggests a potential Trump Administration would be focused on a weaker dollar and increased re-shoring efforts which, all else equal, many would argue is a bullish environment for domestic inflation, commodity prices and hard-money assets.

Vance, 39, is also the first Millennial to find themselves on a US Presidential ticket. As younger generations come into more leadership roles in government, it is likely that policy begins to reflect their culture and values. Multiple surveys have found that cryptocurrency ownership is concentrated among the age 18-44 cohorts: