# On single-issue voting in crypto This article is a response to Vitalik's blog *[Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto"](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html)*. I posted a [longer thread on X/Twitter](https://x.com/eawosikaa/status/1813652205754614051), but thought I'd convert to a blog post for those who hate to read > 280-character posts on X. Enjoy! --- Vitalik's [post](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html) makes a ton of sense IMHO. Getting rugged by a politician like Trump is something I've [talked about before](https://x.com/eawosikaa/status/1789317958751125979). It's usually straightforward to see how politicians (known for being serially untrustworthy) can do a reverse and become hostile--after promising sweet policy heaven to all crypto people (it's not like we'll impeach them). However, while Vitalik's post focuses on the incentives people have to describe themselves as pro-crypto, but doesn't really say anything about why people would be fanatically anti-crypto. Methinks people wouldn't go out of their way to suck up to pro-crypto candidates if select candidates didn't use "anti-crypto" as a dogwhistle to rally voters. So what you really have is two set of powerful incentives at play: - Politicians who want to be known as explicitly pro-crypto - Politicians who want to be known as explicitly anti-crypto Both can be dangerous (the former for reasons described in your blog post), but the latter can even be *more* dangerous. When you say you're against something, there's usually no sense of "Okay, this might be good for some reason". [Molly White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_White_(writer)) who self-describes as a "cryptocurrency skeptic" and has made a career of being the loudest anti-crypto person on the Internet is going to find it difficult to reverse and say "Alright, I think this stuff might be useful in some cases". This has to do with how political discourse works (at least to the best of my knowledge). When you're on one side of a political debate, you simply cannot accept arguments from the other side--no matter how much you want. Political doctrine says you must be all-in in your position and always enact/support policies that support that position. Here's how Eliezer Yudkowsky describes it: > "Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back, providing aid and comfort to the enemy." > — *Eliezer Yudkowsky, [Politics is the Mind-Killer](https://www.readthesequences.com/Politics-Is-The-Mind-Killer)* Now, imagine you belong to a political party and this party's position is publicly "anti-crypto". This naturally demands that you be anti-crypto in spirit and in action. You might think crypto is useful for paying families in high-inflation countries, but saying so publicly might mean losing your seat. So you never say it and instead continue to support anti-crypto policies. The incentives can get even weirder. If someone (e.g., [Elizabeth Warren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren)) decides to make being "tough on crypto" a point of discussion at rallies and in interviews, you get an ultimate-level bad boss who will do nothing at killing crypto for a simple reason: it "inspires" confidence among partisan voters and increases the odds of reelection. This is a classic game people have played and continue to play: you'll see politicians claim to be tough on climate change, AI, environmental protection, jobs, etc., because they need a way to rally voters. When you have strong incentives for politicians to be anti-something, the dynamics change a little bit. This is where people start a "war on X" ("War on Drugs", "War on Crypto", "War on Big Tech"), etc. It's no longer just about regulation and policy anymore as much as it is about keeping up your promise to make life a living hell for whichever industry you've decided to target. All gloves come off at this point and politicians become the equivalent of medieval warriors fighting to vanquish an imaginary enemy (one they helped creating). If you support the "something" that some politician has decided to be against for political reasons, this puts you in a difficult position. You *could* try to complain about the relative unfairness of it all and try to name-and-shame an administration into rolling back targeted attacks on your industry/group/community. A good old-fashioned campaign where you slam an administration of "a clear, unconstitutional bias against X" can be effective, for example. But that doesn't always work, especially in a partisan world where you have more ROI from sticking with one extreme of the political divide (e.g., anti-immigration vs. pro-immigration) than being the levelheaded centrist that weighs up both sides of the debate and say something like: "Both pro-immigration and anti-immigration proponents have valid points". It's not a coincidence that the "hottest" and most influential people in US politics are also the one who take their party's rhetoric to the extreme (think [AOC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez) for democrats and Trump for republicans). It also doesn't work when it's fashionable to be ambivalent or prejudiced on a particular issue. If I ran an ad that faulted a democratic presidency for asking people to pay *regular* taxes (not "tax the rich" stuff), no one--even republicans--would blink an eye because the unspoken social contract is that "everyone should support taxes" (we just disagree on how *much* to pay in taxes). For a long time, crypto has been in this weird place where people don't care about it or think it's useful--so they hesitate to put their political careers on the line for a minority cause. This means the anti-crypto people have largely gotten a free rein because not that many people decided it was worth the time and effort to fight anti-crypto policies...at least until now from what it seems. It also means social shaming campaigns have been largely ineffective: you can't ask people to stop voting for anti-crypto candidates if they don't think crypto is useful to begin with. That puts you--a person whose livelihood--depends on crypto policy in a tougher situation. First, you have very ambitious politicians who plan to score seats by being aggressively anti-crypto (Elizabeth Warren comes to mind). Second, everyone else is quite ambivalent to your cause and have few incentives to go against popular opinion on your behalf (e.g., years ago, supporting Ethereum would have been controversial because Proof of Work was "bad for the environment"). This means you need to start going down the slippery slope of explicitly "aligning" yourself with certain people and creating incentives for politicians to support your pro-crypto cause. At this point, you're already treating crypto policy as an existential issue and searching frantically for a way out (the same way any animal backed into a corner behaves). That leads to the interesting pro-crypto alliances that display a lot of "scratch my back, I scratch yours" dynamics. Neither party enters the agreement for altruistic reasons: - The crypto people know the political candidates need votes and funding - The political candidates know the crypto industry needs boots on the ground and people willing to defend the interests of Big Crypto. "Why would anyone be explicitly pro-crypto?" becomes an easier question to answer when you look at things this way. *** The elephant in the room, however, is that "should you rate a politician's revealed preferences on crypto higher than any other factor when choosing candidates?" Normal logic says you shouldn't--you want to understand their views on other things (immigration, open-source tech, etc.) before choosing to align with them. This is the "don't be a single-issue voter" argument (e.g., many think Trump makes for a bad candidate because of sexual abuse allegations and public statements on immigration). But then, people only have finite computing power. You'd expect that Alice should be able to track what Bob thinks about immigration, open-source tech, AI, etc. However, Alice will likely narrow down on the small part that concerns her (e.g., "Bob's views on crypto assets") and use that to inform a decision to support/oppose Bob. Alice can do better, but Alice is human and *may* be forgiven for strictly optimizing for survival. This is usually a source of coordination failures because everyone's optimizing for their own piece of the pie. We can blame Alice for doing so, but how about the people who've also decided to optimize for survival by choosing to play nasty with the issue Alice cares about? In a world where no one got any benefits (e.g., political power, election funding, etc.) from being anti-crypto, there would be no need for pro-crypto candidates. The other important thing to note is that a person's position on one issue will often reflect their position on other things--so, for example, democrats who think monetary policy should be handled exclusively by the Federal Reserve will often be in favor of heavily regulating crypto projects (to the detriment of innovation imo). When you have spillover effects like that, "single-issue voting" becomes a viable strategy to navigate murky political waters. We can dig down and say "Is crypto worth sacrificing your other values for?" This is a hard question and there are no straightforward answers in all honesty. For example, if you care about democratizing financial prosperity and lifting people out of poverty, maybe supporting a pro-crypto candidate makes sense. Here, you're simply aligning your actions according to your [instrumental values](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values). No matter how we slice and dice it, however, there's going to be some discomfort with aligning with pro-crypto candidates. It has the feel of a Machiavellian arrangement where people are willing to play dirty in order to achieve specific goals. Still, it's too naive and simplistic to blame such people and paint them as traitors. What you realize is that we have a very crazy political system with twisted incentives and people are left with nothing to do than to join the system because they can't really beat it. When someone aligns with a pro-crypto candidate, they do so because other people are also aligning with anti-crypto candidates. Can you say "No, I won't play this game?" Maybe. The truth, though, is that playing the game often ceases to be a choice--not playing means getting knocked out early in Darwinesque, adverse selection-style. Furthermore, a politician who would support immigration, but hates crypto and refuses to see the value in stablecoin payments for citizens of impoverished countries is just as bad as a politician who doesn't support immigration but would allow people to use a digital dollar (not controlled by the Fed) for payments in high-inflation countries. In other words, no side is immune from criticism and so you're often choosing the lesser evil when it comes to a choice of political candidates. "Single-issue voting" then becomes a (useful?) crutch for dealing with the (inevitable) cognitive dissonance associated with supporting a pro-crypto candidate that probably has done some other things you disagree with. --- Whether or not you want to make the aforementioned tradeoff depends on your evaluations and preferences. If an avowed anti-crypto candidate has a solid chance of winning the presidency, simple logic says to support a pro-crypto president because you already know "I'm not going to have much luck convincing a publicly anti-crypto president to become pro-crypto" (people have tried and failed). You can go ahead to support the anti-crypto candidate because they tick other boxes, but how do you now deal with the cognitive dissonance that your preferred candidate also happens to hate the industry you work in? It feels bad. It feels largely unnecessary. It doesn't feel ideal. But, unfortunately, the world itself is not ideal and you'll often have to chew glass if you want to do anything meaningful. There's a good Dune quote that illustrates this point beautifully: > "Some believe that you must compromise integrity with a certain amount of dirty work before you can put genius to work. They say the compromise begins when you come out of the sanctus intending to realize your ideals." > — *Leto II (God Emperor of Dune)* Why bother with writing a long missive if I don't dabble in politics? Maybe it's because I see many people catching flak for trying to support pro-crypto candidates and this reply would help provide context on why someone would publicly align with a pro-crypto candidate. Or maybe it's because we need different points of views within the space to ensure healthy public discourse. Either way, it was fun writing this one!