In 2024, Donald Trump did what no major-party presidential candidate had done before: he openly courted the Bitcoin and crypto community, spoke at Bitcoin Nashville, and positioned himself as the industry's champion. Millions who believe in financial sovereignty, decentralization, and the separation of money and state saw an opportunity. Many voted accordingly.
What a difference eighteen months make.
From Bitcoin President to War Architect
As I write this, a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran is hours old. Whether it holds, nobody knows. The war launched by the US and Israel on February 28 has killed American soldiers, destroyed universities and elementary schools, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and shocked every market on the planet. The president who promised to end wars threatened, in his own words, that “an entire civilization will die tonight.” Iran’s UN ambassador called it incitement to genocide. Experts debate whether attacks on bridges, railways, and power grids constitute war crimes. Children in Tehran are dead.
This is not what we signed up for.
The Bitcoin community did not rally around a political candidate so he could become the latest patron of the military-industrial complex. The same machine that Bitcoin was conceptually designed to defund. Satoshi’s whitepaper was published amid the rubble of 2008, a year when the Federal Reserve printed billions to bail out banks while governments spent trillions fighting wars most citizens never asked for. Bitcoin was, from its genesis block, a protest against exactly this: the unchecked power of states to debase currency in service of violence.
The Math That Ends War Funding
Let me be clear: the crypto community’s natural repudiation of war is not a political stance. It is a core 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. Reports of children killed in residential neighborhoods, a major university bombed, human chains of young people forming around power plants to shield them from American missiles. These are not abstractions. They are the human cost of the very system Bitcoin was created to move away from.
The two-week ceasefire, mediated by Pakistan, is a fragile truce. Iran has accepted negotiations in Islamabad starting Friday. But we have seen what happens when diplomacy is sabotaged. Iran’s IRGC intelligence chief was assassinated mid-conflict, negotiators were targeted, and the pattern of setting deadlines only to extend them made the entire process feel like theater. Time will tell if this ceasefire holds.
What will not change is the math. Wars cost money. Money comes from somewhere. And when governments run out of legitimate revenue, they print money. Every dollar created to finance the conflict is a dollar that steals purchasing power from the people who earn it. Every bomb dropped on Iranian bridges is paid for with dollars. Every aircraft carrier repositioned in the Persian Gulf operates on the full faith and credit of the US Treasury. Every escalation widens the deficit, increases pressure on the Fed, and erodes further the credibility of the dollar as a neutral global reserve currency.
Bitcoin solves this. Not through slogans, but through math. A hard cap of 21 million. No Federal Reserve. No emergency money printing. No hidden financing of wars the public never authorized.
A Call to the Community
To my fellow travelers in the Bitcoin and crypto space: I understand the disillusionment. Many of us believed political engagement would accelerate adoption and protect our sector. But we should never have expected a politician, any politician, to embody decentralization values. That has always been our task. Bitcoin does not need a president. It needs users. It needs people who watch what is unfolding on their screens right now and decide they prefer to hold an asset no government can inflate to fund the next war.
If Trump’s intention, as the self-styled “Bitcoin President,” is to further strengthen our conviction to vote with our feet, to sell more US dollars for BTC, then he is doing an excellent job.