Amid the undertow of a presidential campaign that could determine the future of cryptocurrency, crypto leaders at Nashville's Bitcoin Conference envision a future where the U.S. dollar is valued based on a bitcoin standard.
"What happened in 1971 is Nixon took us off the gold standard," said Brian Estes, crypto adviser to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. "So for the past 53 years we've been running an experiment, and that experiment is failing."
He says the scarcity of bitcoin, which has a fixed volume to be digitally mined, makes it a new way to ensure the value of our money.
"As humans default back into a hard money system, like we had for 3,500 years, it's my opinion that we won't default back into gold – we're not going back to gold because gold had problems, it was centralized. My opinion is that we're going to default into the new version of gold which is called bitcoin," he said.
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The value of bitcoin has more than doubled in the last year, now near its highest value ever. The momentum is fueled by a GOP party platform which promises a future where Americans have a "right to self-custody of their digital assets and [can] transact free from government surveillance and control."
"People under the age of 40 are totally knowledgeable about what crypto is, they understand bitcoin. If you talk to people over the age of 50, they don't really care," said Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, a bitcoin mining operation. "As soon as you make buying and selling crypto as easy as buying and selling a share of AT&T stock, that over 50 category will start adopting it and I think what you're going to see within the next three years is a wave of retirement accounts putting allocations into bitcoin."
The Nashville conference buzzed with speculation that Donald Trump could announce plans for a strategic national crypto reserve if he's elected to a second term.
"We have $35 trillion in debt in this country," Thiel said. "If the U.S. government holds two million bitcoin, at a price today of about $120 billion – a little over, at $20 million a bitcoin, the U.S. would have $42 trillion of value. They could pay off the national debt without having to raise taxes, without having to disadvantage any discretionary or entitlement spending. It would solve a lot of problems."
