Riding on Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” protests, Republican Senator Ted Cruz triumphantly took to the stage to embrace Bitcoin in a recent, highly publicized CPAC event. In a typically pro-Republican tirade, Cruz blasted his political opponents from Justin Trudeau and Elizabeth Warren to the Chinese Communist Party for opposing Bitcoin because of a desire to control the financial freedom and civil liberties of people.
Of course, the Canadian trucker story played conveniently to Cruz’s right-wing leanings[1]. The Freedom Convoy protests united around a common opposition to the Liberal Trudeau government’s vaccine mandates. It was also heavily associated with right-wing political figures[2] such as Tamara Lich, a member of the far-right Maverick Party. The political pressure proved too much for many, even leading private crowdsourcing platform GoFundMe to cancel a fundraiser[3] after it raised over $10 million for the truckers.
Bitcoin Is Apolitical
The only problem with Cruz’s anti-leftist spin on Bitcoin is that it is dressed in pure, partisan malarkey. Bitcoin does not care about your politics. It is not against the progressive left, or the conservative right or the political center. Bitcoin is apolitical and bipartisan. Its decentralized nature means that no one entity can alter its network unless it gains broad consensus. If Bitcoin is for anyone, it is for the individual.
As Jonathan Bier masterfully chronicles in “The Blocksize Wars[4],” countless failed attempts over the years have been made by Bitcoin activists and organized groups to unilaterally modify Bitcoin’s underlying code to incorporate larger node sizes. To highlight just one example out of many, the proposal to pass “Bitcoin Classic[5]” in 2016 and increase Bitcoin block sizes from 1 MB to 2 MB (thereby allowing faster transaction processing) failed to
