B³ : Boris, Bitcoin, Britain

Now that Britain has Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, there is a better chance that Britain can become the natural home of Bitcoin

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Boris Johnson has a genius level intellect combined with a natural ability to connect with people. His tenure as Mayor of London was a success, demonstrating how his high expectations of what can be achieved can not only be imagined, but delivered.

And he is a faithful Lew Rockwell Reader.

Because he is so careful about exposing his personal views to the public, we can’t say much about his devoted reading of the most staunch Libertarian publication on the net, but what can be inferred from it is very encouraging. I suspect Boris is a Libertarian; a Libertarian who knows that just a little Libertarianism injected into the economy can make a huge difference.
This is exactly why Britain needs Boris to unleash Bitcoin.

But What is Bitcoin Exactly?
Bitcoin is the next Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Apple combined to the power of three. It cuts across all services, both on and offline. It is a new way of sending money and paying for goods and services that is global, instant, and infallible. It completely eliminates payer fraud.

From Nasdaq “Credit card fraud and ID theft statistics”

For the elimination of payer fraud alone, Bitcoin should be adopted as the global standard for payment online. Due to this and the many other time savings and efficiencies it will bring, Bitcoin is a huge positive. What Bitcoin is is less important than what it will do, the savings it will generate for everyone and the efficiencies it will introduce to the market.

But Where Will Bitcoin Do it?
Bitcoin businesses build tools and services that provide the public with the means to use it. They write software and build hardware to do this. The software companies build “wallets” and “shopping carts”, and the hardware companies build storage and custody tools, and the software to control them.

All of these companies need to be incorporated somewhere, and from that somewhere, their software and hardware is shipped globally. The profits made by these companies are taxed where they are incorporated, and while that’s good for the government, there are secondary effects for the public that are even more important.

The know how generated by these companies can’t be easily replicated and is proprietary. The training and experience gained by employees who then go on to start their own companies represents an incalculable benefit to the economy, once again, that cannot be replicated.

All of these effects and many more will all be captured in Boris’ Britain, bringing billions in revenues and cascading effects for decades. It will also induce people to move to Britain, knowing that it’s the best place to start a Bitcoin business, where all the talent and liberty is.

London is the Natural Home of Bitcoin
Boris will know that Britain is the natural home of Bitcoin. The British experience of creating Hong Kong (where the staggeringly successful BitMEX is incorporated) is the only example needed to guide the UK policy on Bitcoin.

And don’t forget Britain’s historic contributions to computing. From Babbage to Turing, Britain is the home of many world-changing innovations, and embracing Bitcoin will be a critical part of carrying on this tradition.

The City of London is one of the great financial centres of the world. It makes perfect sense for Bitcoin to be added to the British quiver. Through London, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem will pass network messages for processing, allowing Her Majesty's Government to take a small part of every transmission, netting hundreds of billions.

With this unprecedented windfall, Britain can indulge all of its desires, pet projects and very British things like the NHS.

The Unthinkable Alternative
The alternative is Boris rejecting Bitcoin, trying to “clamp down” on it, and all Bitcoin businesses avoiding Britain like an out of fashion eatery. Already, The world’s biggest wallet has left Britain for another jurisdiction, after being started in the UK by one man. Expect this to be repeated if Boris gets Bitcoin wrong. No one will suffer it. Why should they?

All the expertise, training, and side effects of Bitcoin will settle in another jurisdiction, which will reap all the taxes, downstream multipliers, cascades and accumulated advantages. This has already happened with two of the biggest Bitcoin companies, and it will continue to happen if Boris doesn’t change course.

Britain will become a vassal state, where the millions of British Bitcoin wallet users are paying foreign governments and not Her Majesty’s Government. Britain will become a “Bitcoin Flyover State”, the same way it is today with Social Media, where the government is openly mocked and ignored, as Mark Zukerberg did by ignoring Damien Green’s Parliamentary Committee.

Britain is only as good as the rules it has; if those rules are wrong, people will ignore Britain, avoid its rules and profit elsewhere. There is no reason why BitMEX cannot be operating from The Shard. The electricity and internet connections are the same; the only difference between Hong Kong and Britain is the style and attitude of government to innovation. That businesses choose Hong Kong over Britain is a scandal.

Britain will not have many more chances to get this right.

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