Riding on Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” protests, Republican Senator Ted Cruz triumphantly took to the stage to embrace Bitcoin in a recent, highly publicized CPAC event.
The political pressure proved too much for many, even leading private crowdsourcing platform GoFundMe to cancel a fundraiser after it raised over $10 million for the truckers.
The only problem with Cruz’s anti-leftist spin on Bitcoin is that it is dressed in pure, partisan malarkey.
As Jonathan Bier masterfully chronicles in “The Blocksize Wars,” countless failed attempts over the years have been made by Bitcoin activists and organized groups to unilaterally modify Bitcoin’s underlying code to incorporate larger node sizes.
The work of various authors and annual events like the Black Blockchain Summit are but a few examples of progressive efforts to spread awareness on the potentials of Bitcoin to empower black and minority communities, in ways where the incumbent financial system has excluded them.
How about rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran? Cut off from the global financial system, these rogue states have both used Bitcoin to alleviate the economic impact of crippling sanctions.
But suffice to say, his insatiable need to strike the iron of political opportunism while it’s hot would not permit him to pitch his political tent as far as white supremacists, or the BLM movement or North Korea — all of whom he has condemned publicly on record.
Born out of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the same year Bitcoin’s pseudonymous author Satoshi Nakamoto penned its white paper, Bitcoin’s philosophy is steeped in its radical neutrality because it simply cannot be centrally controlled.
Cruz himself is one of the lead cheerleaders in the anti-Big Tech crusade, loudly championing the need to bring Facebook, Twitter and Google under the regulatory gamut of the federal government.
Bitcoin is not “good” because it improves the economic freedom of persecuted minorities .
There is perhaps one aspect that Bitcoin can be somewhat politicized.
Second, these products are relatively attractive because setting up a digital wallet to store bitcoin is still unfamiliar to the average person.
By fixating solely on how Bitcoin is harnessed by bad actors, she overlooks its potential for economic liberation of people of color who have been historically marginalized.