In little more than 10 years, Bitcoin (BTC) grew from a small cypherpunk community to a matter of national security with vast implications for geopolitics.

At
the Unitize panel titled “From Bitcoin to Fedcoin: The Next Decade of
Digital Money,” Meltem Demirors, CSO of CoinShares, and moderated by
Andy Bromberg, president of CoinList, actually spent very little time
discussing Fedcoin and central bank currencies in general.

Instead, they focused heavily on the implications of a changing geopolitical landscape,
where Bitcoin is set to play a role in the upcoming war for tech
dominance — while at the same time acting as the key to digitally “exit”
from governmental control.


Onshoring of mining


Demirors
noted that a profound change in global power dynamics began to occur in
recent years. She described it as an emerging narrative that focuses on
the importance of “computing and connectivity in the context of cyber
security and national defense.”

She cited landmarks of this phenomenon, like Amazon Web Services becoming the largest defense contractor, or how Huawei
was charged for allegedly endangering U.S. national security. Meltem
believes that this was politically motivated, as the U.S. “has voiced
its concerns about letting foreign governments participate in the build
out of infrastructure in this country.”

Furthermore, semiconductor
companies like Intel and TSMC have begun efforts to “onshore”
production back to the United States or their respective countries. The
same is likely to happen with Bitcoin mining:


“So I
think five years from now, it would be very likely that 40% of Bitcoin
mining, if not more, is on onshore in the United States. It's very
likely that governments will view big cryptocurrency networks as part of
national security strategy.”


Bitcoin as resistance money


Speaking
about stablecoins and especially government-issued digital currencies,
Demirors believes that they are in a completely different class from
Bitcoin:


“I think right now what you're seeing is
people are co-opting the idea and trying to implement it in different
ways. Central bank digital currencies have absolutely nothing to do with
Bitcoin. They're antithetical.”

In her view, saying
that these systems are blockchain-based could be part of a deliberate
misrepresentation as propaganda “is starting to come into this
industry.”

But at the same time, both Demirors and Bromberg noted
that central bank currencies could be an improvement over the existing
fiat infrastructure. She added:


“I think that
different needs require different tools. At the end of the day, Bitcoin
and all of these other cryptocurrencies, digital fiat and these other
projects, they're just tools that we're trying to use to solve our
problems.”

In her view, the problem that Bitcoin
solves is that of “monetary system choice.” People who may be
dissatisfied with the way the system works have few options to fight
back, and while dollar-based coins may solve some problems, they don’t solve issues of “financial censorship, financial control and a fundamental lack of privacy.” 

Bitcoin is, according to her, “the leading horse” in becoming a form of resistance money.

Thus, paradoxically, Bitcoin can be seen as both a matter of national security and a way of escaping it.