This is the dawning of the Age of Crypto. Again.
Number 47. The Bitcoin President. The Crypto President. The Cryptocurrency President.
But not: The Cryptography President.
Back when the word “crypto” meant “cryptography”, the personal computer and the rise of the internet were new tools of expressing freedom and power. The industry driving it was brand-new. New capabilities. New challenges. New regulations. At the center of it all was “cryptography”: a magic power that had once been reserved for secret agent missions and dapper 007 Bonds (not the financial kind). Except that it had reached the point where it was turning up in public and corporate software. The unlikely duo of corporations and freedom-fighters were banding together to usher in a new era of public empowerment through the possibilities of encrypted software and internet use. After considering the political landscape, they found their candidate that they would support to become “The Crypto President” – democrat Bill Clinton. And then he did what early polls said he had no chance of doing. He won.
And that was when all hell broke loose. Clinton betrayed them.
But what else is new? What did those voters in 1991 expect? What do we expect now? What can anyone expect other than what they’re told? It doesn’t take much for a presidential candidate to attach their name to a cause and lasso in a new group of voters and funding. For example, the newly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, walked up to a podium on May 5th, 2024 and swung his lasso with just five sentences. No policy framework. No convincing evidence. Just five sentences to tie his platform to the Crypto and Bitcoin communities.
Lesser known than this public moment is the one that happened away from prying eyes: a dinner at the home of tech entrepreneur David Sacks, co-hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya and featuring other powerful voices of Fintech & Crypto. Many of them democrats. Trump left that dinner with twelve million more dollars for his campaign. More valuable than that, he left with the anointing from a new industry looking for a political fighter to lead the way.
32 miles away and 32 years before, Bill Clinton found himself at Apple Chairman John Sculley’s house. They poached salmon alongside 135 other, heavily republican-leaning, silicon valley entrepreneurs. Clinton would leave this dinner with more funding and the backing of the burgeoning new industry. Sculley, in a message to his fellow silicon valley contemporaries would say “I am still a republican, but I am voting for Bill Clinton.” It’s at this gathering, that it was understood that Clinton was going to break the issue of encryption wide open for the industry. That the biggest restraint holding them back, arms regulations, would be removed. Clinton would go on to burnish a few other broad themes to show his support of the software and internet industries, but without any real details of the actual actions he would take to achieve these promises.
Promises about Bitcoin today are flowing from many of Trump’s “MAGAvengers” as they’ve been called. Cynthia Lummis, Robert Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Howard Lutnick, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard have all spoken on how they see Bitcoin fitting into the next administration. It’s hard for anyone watching to not be impressed by the amount of thought and uniformity of pro-Bitcoin stances that they have shared. Further, Trump has mentioned implementing a Bitcoin and Crypto advisory board to bring in even more educated voices into the government. Maybe if Trump drops the ball, we can still count on some of these other Trump affiliates to step up.
While Clinton didn’t have the MAGAvengers to back up his broad promises, his cabinet might still have been even more impressive than Trump’s. Did anyone in Trump’s group invent the internet? It’s a long-running joke about Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore. And while he most definitely did not invent the internet, by that point in time he already had years of piling up successes in legislation fighting for software and the internet’s future before it was politically popular to do so. John Podesta, after a full legal career fighting and lobbying against the very export controls that were suffocating encryption, was assigned as the head of Clinton’s transition team and then to the White House chief of staff. Podesta and Gore would bring with them a very intentional list of academics and eclectic tech experts. The length of hair and amount of sandals worn in political hallways was about to skyrocket off the charts. Cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow would describe the incoming eccentrics as “Extremely smart, conscious freedom-lovers. Hell, a lot of them are Deadheads (fans of the Grateful Dead). I was sure that after they were fully moved in, they’d face down the National Security Agency and the FBI.”
The deck was stacked. The future for silicon valley had never been brighter. And in less than a year, the computer, internet and crypto industries would see the most draconian laws laid down in the history of computing. Bill Clinton’s cabinet faced the NSA and FBI. And the NSA and FBI won.
The greatest breach of crypto freedom from Clinton’s legacy came in the form of the clipper chip and its encryption package “Skipjack”. They nearly put a government backdoor into every electronic device in the US. On top of that, it was being spun as a win for the American people. It was technically providing them with stronger encryption than they were ever allowed before. So, in a way, Clinton was delivering on his pro-crypto platform that he had promised. But like a wish from a monkey’s paw, the reality of the president making good on his promise was a reality far worse than the one Americans were already stuck in. Fortunately, there was enough public outcry that met with difficulties of production and economic incentives to leave this Big Brother timeline dead in the water. There was more regulatory overreach, whether it was other backdoor initiatives, the creation of CALEA and its dominance of electronic surveillance, funny business between the FBI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, presidential directives and executive orders targeting telecommunications and information systems, and further support of the export controls that were choking encryption in its cradle.
It wouldn’t be until the very end of Clinton’s first administration when he was running for another term that he finally caved and relaxed export control laws. And what do you know? The Phil Zimmermann and Daniel Bernstein trials had already just concluded and encryption was ruled by the courts to be protected by the First Amendment. Clinton’s move to finally relax export control laws around encryption could be seen as nothing more than a symbolic gesture following up on the power reversal that had already taken place behind his back.
The times we live in always feel unique and important. Trump’s return to presidency, the current blurring state of politics, and the rise of Bitcoin are all complex factors that will significantly impact our lives. But history is not without its rhymes. During Bill Clinton’s time in office there was a unique shift in party lines, complicated global politics with the fall of the USSR and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and a new software and internet industry that was very young and exponentially expanding year-after-year. If our storylines continue to rhyme, then we may not need to worry about “whether Trump supports Bitcoin or not”. But rather “will Trump’s support of Bitcoin do more harm than good?”. Will “good for Bitcoin” be bad? Afterall, Bitcoin’s progress up to this point has largely been thanks to a large cast of programmers that got to build it outside of the scrutiny of regulation. And if the question of “more harm than good?” lands on the wrong side of the coin, do we have a Zimmermann/Bernstein card up our sleeve to check regulatory and legislative overreach?
It’s impossible to foretell. One thing we can be sure about knowing at this point is that the age of Bitcoin building in the shadows has just ended.
This is the dawning of the Age of Crypto, bitcoiner. Again. And if past is prologue, then “good for Bitcoin” could likely mean anything but.
This is a guest post by AIS. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.