Highlights of the 2024 Bitcoin Conference

Trump, RFK, Dave Smith and Ron Paul!

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with almost unbelievable details about the shooting being revealed (nearly all of them making the Secret Service look absolutely terrible). Soon after, the strange saga of Biden’s ‘withdrawal’ from the 2024 presidential race — and the subsequent coronation of Kamala Harris into his spot — took up all the oxygen in the room.

But for a few days, the cacophony of the election has subsided into a dull roar — which I think is as good as it’s going to get until November. This allowed me to take some time to pay attention this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville. Far from being just a hangout for libertarian nerds, this year’s conference is a hangout for libertarian nerds AND big names in politics — Donald Trump, RFK Jr, Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as Rand and Ron Paul all participated in the festivities.

Being (at this point) a long-time Ron Paul geek, I’ve been interested in the inner workings of our monetary system for a while. Many of you have probably heard me say something to the effect of “When the money is fake, the rest of the economy (and society) is doomed to follow.”

This is something Dave Smith mentioned during his roundtable discussion, and it’s the first highlight of the conference. (Apologies for the audio on some of these clips. It was a problem with the direct livestream source — I’ll replace them if I can but I’m not hopeful. The first line here is “When your money is fake, your entire world is fake.”)

Later, Smith provides some concrete examples of how the money being fake affects us in very real ways:

I’m sure that somewhere, there’s an issue I disagree with Dave Smith — but I haven’t found it yet.

RFK Jr spoke for roughly 45 minutes, but I was most impressed with this passage explaining how Nixon took us off the gold standard (made the money fake), and how that’s directly led to the loss of purchasing power of the dollar. (Unlike what Nixon promised.) This affects the poor the most, notes Kennedy.

That last part is very important. The economy isn’t just some lines on a spreadsheet that the government can tweak without consequence — ‘the economy’ is shorthand for the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, the business environment, etc. All of these things directly affect the well-being of Americans — meaning that when the economy is bad, it can literally lead to increased rates of death. (These are called “Deaths of Despair”.) This is why I always hate hearing “You value the economy over peoples’ lives!” — tanking the economy doesn’t stop the pain, it just shifts it around to places where it might be more difficult to see. (We obviously saw this during covid!)

When Donald Trump took the stage, he spoke for roughly 50 minutes. While his speech mostly sounded like a campaign pitch with a very slight bitcoin bent, he did have a forceful line about the possibility of a Central Bank Digital Currency in the US:

Overall, I wasn’t too impressed with Trump’s speech — I’m still not even 100% sure he understands why Bitcoin exists or why it gains value. In the course of a few minutes, he went from (correctly) noting that government spending fuels inflation, but then says that when he cuts government spending, the price of Bitcoin will rise. (Cutting regulations could HELP the price, but first and foremost I believe that Bitcoin is a bet against the dollar. IMO, a sane monetary policy would get people OUT of bitcoin and into dollar-denominated opportunities.)

Still, it was awesome that Trump showed up, and more awesome that he once again committed to commuting the sentence of Ross Ulbricht.

Today’s last clip is from the GOAT of awakening people to the clusterfuck that is our current economic system: Ron Paul!

So that’s what I was up to this weekend. What did you guys get yourself into?

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