In brief
- Blockstream CEO Adam Back says Trump’s presidency is accelerating government interest in Bitcoin by decades.
- Back, a veteran cypherpunk, views the shift as a departure from Bitcoin’s anti-government roots.
- While welcoming the momentum, Back warns the political embrace of crypto complicates investor confidence.
Although U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t slated to attend this year’s Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, his presence is being felt, with scheduled speakers like Vice President JD Vance and regulatory tailwinds that everyone seems excited to discuss.
For Blockstream CEO and British cryptographer Adam Back, the dynamic feels like a far cry from Bitcoin’s early days, when he and other cypherpunks worked tirelessly to undermine centralized authorities, including the U.S. government, using cryptography.
Protecting privacy and promoting free speech seemed inherently anti-government at the time. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, a new set of industry-specific challenges has emerged.
Bitcoin no longer faces the threat of overzealous regulators, advocates say. However, Trump-linked crypto ventures, such as the president’s meme coin, are overshadowing legislative initiatives on Capitol Hill and are drawing rebukes from Democratic lawmakers.
In an interview with Decrypt on Tuesday, Back said that Trump’s embrace of the crypto industry is a net positive for the space, even if that may be diluting Bitcoin’s anti-government origins.
“It’s useful to have politicians who are business and economic savvy, so that they make an environment that is conducive to making progress, but it’s a bit tricky to manage [people’s] confidence,” he said. “I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s a factor.”
Other cypherpunks, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, have warned against crypto-friendly politicians who don’t embody cypherpunk values. Even then, Buterin’s word of caution received notable industry pushback before Trump’s White-House victory last year.
At the end of the day, Back said that the Trump administration is accelerating the timeline for governments’ adoption of Bitcoin, whether that’s through prompting state-level initiatives, sovereign wealth funds, or the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
That’s beneficial, as it opens up another level of demand beyond retail investors and corporations, he said.
“The concept of governments buying Bitcoin—people probably thought that was four decades away in 2015,” he said. “But here we are.”
Back is the inventor of Hashcash, a proof-of-work consensus mechanism that underpins Bitcoin’s block generation process.
Satoshi Nakamoto cited his work in Bitcoin’s whitepaper, and over the years, his name has been routinely floated as a potential candidate for Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. Back has consistently denied those claims.
For individual investors, Back posited that they may be better off if governments accumulated Bitcoin slowly, giving them more time to purchase the asset on their own. Still, if governments ignore Bitcoin, they risk losing their economic standing and competitiveness, he said.
Along those lines, Trump’s reelection wasn’t a make-or-break moment for the digital assets industry. Even if the previous White House administration was antagonistic, advancements, including the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S., still happened.
“They were creating friction, which was really pushing innovation [and] technology offshore,” he said. “There’s still limitations, but in practice, it’s been gradually accepted and regularized.”
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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