Navigating the crypto landscape, a refreshing feature is that it can come across as cleanly apolitical. Often, this is due to a deliberate effort by analysts and influencers to maintain a neutral approach and steer away from contentious issues.
In polarized times, it is too easy to alienate sections of one’s audience with a revealing comment, and in the social media age, what might usually be an innocuous opinion can almost instantly be elevated into a political flashpoint, generating backlash and noise.
With the so-called ‘culture wars’ seemingly still ramping up to angrier extremes, it makes sense that many people, if they’re not engaged in a professional capacity, would choose to steer clear of the drama.
And, crypto, in particular, lends itself to cold neutrality. It is a tech development that revolves around code and mathematics. Traders pore over charts and technical analysis, and markets, most of the time, at least, function in predictably mechanical ways: as long as you know enough of the input, you can make a decent estimate of the probability of a range of outputs.
Can Politics Be Avoided Altogether?
It may not be possible to avoid politics altogether (and that’s putting aside the argument some might make that avoiding politics is itself a political act). When crypto becomes significant enough that regulators are taking an interest, it is necessary for advocates to sound out crypto-friendly politicians, and to make a case for crypto in standard political terms, or at least in ways that correspond to the questions asked by bureaucratic institutions.
Widespread institutional adoption may be on the cards, but is waiting for a nod from regulators and political entities to indicate that crypto, or at first just bitcoin, is coming in from the fringes, and so it would be irresponsible not to include it in a balanced portfolio.
On the other hand, it’s certainly plausible that politicians are now interested in bitcoin not because it requires establishment approval, but because there is very little they can do to stop it, and so they are forced to incorporate it because if they don’t, it will simply circumvent them and exist on its own terms.
By this reckoning, traditional institutions are not absorbing bitcoin, but rather, the opposite: bitcoin is…
