Is Russia asking the US to dance?
2024-12-26 15:28:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Depending on how you read the title of this post, you might be thinking I’m being provocative. But I’m not. Hear me out.
I wrote yesterday about the recent announcement that Russia is impossing a ban on crypto mining while simultaneously Putin is saying Bitcoin is great for international payments:
It’s a very interesting posture. It's like he’s saying 'you know about bitcoin, we know about bitcoin, would you like to dance?'. This might be the perfect time for western nations to head out onto the dancefloor.
Sometimes contradictions are a sign that something else is happening, a sign of opportunity. The really bizare thing is that in a way, if such a thing were to unfold, in a way we would all be part of this dance. It’s a strange world we enhabit.
And so with these somewhat esoteric ideas in my head, I thought the following piece from a recent Sam Callahan interview on the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast [18:01] was quite apropos. He’s talking about some ideas he first heard discussed by Luke Growmen:
Bitcoin similar to what we did with oil in the 1970s, they pumped the price of oil to maintain dollar dominance, and so Bitcoin could actually rise, because increase in demand for stablecoins, there’s a relationship between stablecoin supply and Bitcoin’s price, and then increasing stablecoin supply, increases demand for treasuries. And so it can kind of maintain that dollar dominance in the world.
At the same time though you have Putin coming out and saying Bitcoin can’t be stopped, and so we’re going to Bitcoin to escape dollar dominance, whereas maybe the US at the same time is adopting Bitcoin to increase dollar dominance.
Can both of those ideas be true at the same time? Kind of [...] how do you maintain the dollar and manage the debt problem at the same time? [...] Both of these things that seemingly are not compatible are actually happening because Bitcoin has all these different use cases.
I don’t want to trivialise this too much, it’s likely going to be difficult and strange, but we can also simultaneously have a positive optimistic vision. Though we haven’t danced this dance before, many in their own unique way, have been dancing their own version of it for years.
We’ve had worse. Who knows, it might be the start of something quite beautiful. #