The greatest Bitcoin explanation of all time
According to Donald Trump, the “greatest Bitcoin explanation of all time” occurred on October 11, 2018.
On that day, during an open session hearing of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Coin Center’s Peter Van Valkenburgh delivered a six-minute speech.
Last night, Trump posted Van Valkenburgh’s speech to Truth Social, along with his effusive praise and Van Valkenburgh acknowledged the endorsement.
During his testimony, Van Valkenburgh introduced Bitcoin as the world’s first public blockchain network and cryptocurrency. Within seven sentences, he explained its core value proposition: the ability to without send money over the internet “without the need to trust a middleman.”
For dozens of paragraphs, Van Valkenburgh focused on Bitcoin’s functionality without any company, bank, executive, or trusted intermediary.
No other function of Bitcoin is particularly valuable, he explained, without its simultaneous performance without trust in any intermediary.
Indeed, Van Valkenburgh dedicated the vast majority of his speaking time to this single characteristic of trustlessness.
Over and over again, he explained to senators how the network permits peer-to-peer payments without trust, unlike a bank-intermediated remittance, telecom-intermediated phone call, or broadcaster-intermediated airwaves message.
He pleaded for the US government to prioritize Bitcoin as the world’s first globally accessible public money, saying “there should not be a single point of failure” in this newly discovered, trustless payments network.
“Vulnerabilities are inescapable in systems that have single points of failure,” Van Valkenburgh concluded.
Trump blesses Bitcoin explanation
Nearly seven years later, the speech continues to impact leaders in federal government.
Trump has promised to make the US “the undisputed Bitcoin superpower” and to end the Democrats’ alleged “regulatory war on crypto and Bitcoin.”
Indeed, he’s signed executive orders creating a sovereign Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR).
Trump called that SBR a “digital Fort Knox,” despite it mostly consisting of temporary seizures and civil forfeitures that might be returned to victims pursuant to court orders.
Read more: Trump confused by Strategic Bitcoin Reserve he just ordered
He’s also ordered his secretaries of treasury and commerce to audit government bitcoin (BTC) holdings and propose budget-neutral ways to acquire additional BTC.
Neither of the secretaries has made those deliverables public.
Van Valkenburgh remains at the same post he held seven years ago, serving as executive director of Coin Center, a political think tank.
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