Wearing a khaki brown suit sans tie, Ridwan Kamil looked sharp yet casual. If this were a traditional finance conference, he would have fit right in, or he may even have been side-eyed for being a tad bit underdressed.
Except this was no ordinary conference. And this is no ordinary man.
Ridwan is the governor of West Java, the most populous province in Indonesia, with 50 million people. For context, that’s more than one and a half times the population of Malaysia. To boot, he’s in the running to be the next president of Indonesia.
And he was speaking at Bitcoin 2023, the largest Bitcoin conference of the year – an event that might seem like a big deal, except you’d be hard-pressed to find much mainstream media coverage of it.
So what was an Indonesian governor – and future presidential candidate – doing at a Bitcoin conference halfway across the world, in Miami, USA?
He was there to entice Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin businesses to set up shop in Indonesia. He cited the fact that Indonesia is No 7 in the world when it comes to Bitcoin adoption, and that there are far more Bitcoin investors in the country than there are mutual fund and stock market investors.
He spoke about how Indonesia has the largest untapped pool of renewable energy in the world – in the form of solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectricity. However, their population only needs about half of this.
This opens up much of the rest of it for Bitcoin mining – an energy-intensive activity that serves to secure the Bitcoin blockchain and network. Those who provide this valuable service get paid in Bitcoin. And thanks to a single Bitcoin currently being worth north of RM120,000 per coin, this is a lucrative business to be in.
Ridwan also spoke about how he believes that Bitcoin has the potential to bank the 40% of his constituency who are currently unbanked, adding that traditional financial institutions are not a solution to this.
He wasn’t the only politician with forethought courting the Bitcoiners. Far from it. Other speakers at the conference included Robert F Kennedy Jr (the nephew of former American president John F Kennedy), a Democrat running for the American presidency in the 2024 election, Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican, also running for the presidency in the 2024 election and Tulsi Gabbard, a highly-respected former congresswoman from Hawaii who ran in the 2020 US presidential election.
And recently Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and one of the frontrunners for the presidency in 2024, voiced his support for the right of people to own Bitcoin, saying the political and economic establishments did not like it because they could not control it.
From a situation where most politicians were entirely ignorant of Bitcoin’s existence or derided it to a situation where some of them are embracing it publicly as a cornerstone of their campaign – all in around a decade – is an incredible development.
Sure, most of the Americans mentioned above are relatively fringe candidates who stand little chance of winning the US presidency but this is how most new technologies and movements become mainstream – they start at the seams and slowly make their way to the masses in the middle.
These farsighted candidates are tapping into a potential voter base that is steadily increasing. It is an electorate that leans younger, is tech-literate and, for those who have been in Bitcoin for several years now, probably also wealthier than the average person. Most importantly, unlike other voter blocs which might or might not vote for many reasons, most Bitcoiners are single issue voters.
Most Bitcoiners will vote for the candidate who is pro-Bitcoin, regardless of the candidate’s stance on other issues. This makes them a faithful and somewhat homogenous voter bloc that politicians can pander to and appease easily.
And with Bitcoin adoption rising steadily, this is a voter base that is only increasing. Every new person that buys Bitcoin will want to vote for a politician who is pro-Bitcoin to ensure his/her wealth is protected.
This is why it blows my mind that no major Malaysian politician has come out strongly in favour of Bitcoin, even though a whopping 23% – almost a quarter of all Malaysians – own or have owned or used cryptocurrencies (with Bitcoin claiming the lion’s share of it).
As with many things, I expect Malaysians to be laggards when it comes to adopting new technologies and movements. However, when more and more mainstream figureheads start voicing their support for Bitcoin in other countries, I expect Malaysian politicians to follow suit.
Except, at that point, they would have lost the edge because if there are many vocally pro-Bitcoin politicians around, they wouldn’t stand out. Rather, this is the time to put themselves out there – to come out in favour of a technology that provides borderless, immutable, inflation-resistant, mathematically-determined, sound money.
Do that and chances are, their voter base will vote them into power. - FMT
The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
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