As I write this, a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran has been in effect for several hours. Nobody knows if it will last. The war that the United States and Israel launched on February 28 has already cost the lives of American soldiers, destroyed universities and primary schools, closed the Strait of Hormuz and provoked a shock wave across all markets on the planet. The president who promised to end wars threatened, in his own words, that “an entire civilization will die tonight.” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations called it incitement to genocide. Experts debate whether targeting bridges, railways and power grids constitutes a war crime. Children died in Tehran. This is not what we committed to.
The Bitcoin community has not rallied around a political candidate to become the new protector of the military-industrial complex. The very machine, by the way, that Bitcoin was designed to deprive of funding. Satoshi’s white paper was published in the chaos of 2008, a year when the Federal Reserve printed billions to bail out the banks while governments spent trillions waging wars most citizens never asked for. From its inception, Bitcoin was a protest against exactly that: the unlimited power of states to devalue currency in the service of violence. I want to be clear on one point: the crypto community’s natural distaste for war is not a political posture. It is a fundamental value. We believe that when governments cannot print money at will, they cannot fight wars at will. That’s the whole point. What is happening in Iran is a humanitarian catastrophe. There are reports of children killed in residential areas, of a major university being bombed, of human chains formed by young people around power plants to protect them from US missiles. These are not abstractions. This is the human cost of the very system that Bitcoin was designed to evade.
The two-week ceasefire, negotiated thanks to the intervention of Pakistan, is only a fragile respite. Iran has agreed to participate in negotiations in Islamabad starting Friday. But we have already seen what happens when diplomacy is sabotaged. The intelligence chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was assassinated in the middle of the conflict, negotiators were targeted, and this habit of setting deadlines only to push them back makes the whole process seem like a show. Only time will tell if this ceasefire will hold.
What won’t change are the numbers. Wars cost money. The money comes from somewhere. And when governments run out of honest revenue, they print money. Every dollar created to finance conflict is a dollar that deprives the people who earn it of purchasing power. Every bomb dropped on Iranian bridges is paid for in dollars. Each aircraft carrier redeployed to the Persian Gulf operates on the good faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury. Each escalation widens the deficit, increases pressure on the Fed and further erodes the dollar’s credibility as a neutral global reserve currency. Bitcoin solves this problem. Not by slogans, but by mathematics. A fixed ceiling of 21 million. No Federal Reserve. No emergency money printing. No funding diverted from wars the public never authorized. To my fellow travelers in the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies: I understand your disillusionment. Many of us believed that political commitment would accelerate adoption and protect our sector. But we should never have expected any politician to embody the values of decentralization. This has always been our job. Bitcoin doesn’t need a president. It needs users. It needs people to watch what’s happening on their screens right now and decide that they’d rather own an asset that no government can inflate to finance the next war.
If Trump’s intention, as the de facto “Bitcoin President,” is to encourage more of us to vote with our feet, to sell more US dollars for BTC, then he’s doing a hell of a job. _________________________________________________________________________
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