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18/07/24
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Vitalik Buterin Expresses Concerns About Pro-Crypto Politicians
On July 16, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post expressing his concerns about people’s choice of political allegiances on the basis of who is “pro-crypto”, as cryptocurrency continues to become a critical topic in the political space.
In recent times, there has been a growing push across the cryptocurrency domain to participate more in politics, especially towards supporting candidates and political parties that seem to show willingness to exhibit leniency or friendliness to cryptocurrency.
Buterin’s arguments are against this trend based on the potential high risk of going against the values that brought people into the crypto domain. He noted that there are deeper underlying goals of cryptocurrency beyond “the centrality of “money”, and the freedom to hold and spend money (or, if you wish, “tokens”).”
He said participants within the crypto space should not “stand with crypto-as-in-cryptocurrency,” but “stand with those underlying goals, and the whole set of policy implications that they imply,” noting that “current “pro-crypto” initiatives, at least as of today, do not think in this way.”
Buterin believes that politicians lacking knowledge of those underlying goals but only in favor of people trading coins will likely not have the same conclusions as them on issues that they will care about in the long run.
He further highlighted the need to consider how a politician currently claiming to be crypto-friendly saw crypto five years ago. ”Crypto-friendly now does not mean crypto-friendly five years from now,” said Buterin.
“In particular, by publicly giving the impression that you support “pro-crypto” candidates just because they are “pro-crypto”, you are helping to create an incentive gradient where politicians come to understand that all they need to get your support is to support “crypto”,” reads the blog post.
Hence, he asked people to explore the underlying values of “pro-crypto” politicians to view what they could do if a conflict arises in the future.
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