Popular economist and author of the Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous; appeared on the most recent episode of Stephen Livera’s crypto-economics podcast. Ammous unpacked various subjects on crypto which thrilled a lot of listeners.
The show’s host Stephen Livera spoke to the fact that a full government ban on Bitcoin would have the general population realizing and pondering on the little control they had over the money in their accounts. Ammous responded to this in part by saying;
“People think that if government were to just pass a law that bans Bitcoin, then Bitcoin goes away and they get to laugh at us, and that’s the end of the story. I think it’s actually the other way around. The more restrictive governments are against Bitcoin, that means the more restrictive they generally are financially and the worse their monetary policies are”.
He went on to add;
“So if people are trying to get into Bitcoin and governments are saying, ‘If you buy Bitcoin, we’re going to throw you in jail,’ then number one, we can tell, obviously that people have a good reason to be buying Bitcoin, otherwise they wouldn’t be risking going to jail. And that government is trying to stop them from it, and the fact that it is trying to stop them means that government is imposing financial restrictions on them.
And so that ultimately is Bitcoin’s use case. Bitcoin’s use case is moving money around the world without having to report to your government. And so the more governments create restrictions like this, the more problems they create, the worse their monetary policy is, and that’s not just, you know, the governments of the west. It applies all over the world.”
In short, Ammous believes that creating and enacting laws that ban Bitcoin would serve to boost the crypto-currency rather than kill it. According to him the unrestricted nature of Bitcoin transactions means that repression would have a Streisand effect.
According to Ammous, the only way governments can kill Bitcoin is by competing with it.
“The notion that you’re just going to kill the economic incentive that exists for people to use Bitcoin by passing a law that criminalizes it, I think is fanciful – I don’t see that happening. The way for governments to kill Bitcoin would be to do the exact opposite of what the no-coiners want and the exact opposite of what the Keynesians and the people who hate Bitcoin think would work. The way for them to kill Bitcoin is for them to make the economic incentive to use Bitcoin irrelevant. To make the demand for using Bitcoin go away at the source. They need to offer a technology that is better than Bitcoin – that can obviate the need for Bitcoin”.
The renowned crypto analyst delves more into this viewpoint in an informative paper issue of his newsletter which will only cost you $50.
Image Courtesy of Pexels
