Tuesday processed rep. Keith Ammon A New Hampshire House Ways and Means Committee on House Bill (HB) 302, which would allow the state treasurer to invest in Bitcoin.
By talking to the committee, he raised the US’s excessive debt and made the case for the state of New Hampshire to invest in Bitcoin as a means of mitigating the prevailing effects of inflation.
When I listened to his petition, I got the feeling that Rep. Ammon was a colored-in-wool Bitcoiner, someone inside the system that did his best to get members of the legislation in the state he calls home to see in Bitcoin what he probably saw in it many moons ago.
After talking with rep. Ammon, I have learned that this is actually the thing.
The software developer and self -described “Bitcoin Maxi” (which admits to also seeing some value in other blockchains and crypto projects) found Bitcoin two years after the start and has spread the word about it in New Hampshire ever since.
As the founder of the New Hampshire Blockchain Council and a state representative who is the main sponsor of the three current Bitcoin and Crypto-related bills in the state currently working through the legislative process is rep. Ammon perhaps the most notable bitcoin spokesman in the granite state.
And the story of how he found that Bitcoin is bad ass to start.
Based on how you talked on Tuesday’s committee’s hearing on HB302, I got the impression that you are a long time bitcoiner. Is this the case?
Yes and I start by going back. I heard about something called the Free State project in 2004, and I moved up to New Hampshire to be part of it. Years later, I attended an event called the Liberty Forum, which is an annual event introduced by the Free State project. In 2011, there were a bunch of anarchists who did not like the agenda for the forum – it was too business for them. So they rented a couple of rooms at the hotel where the event was held and they had their own event, as they called “All Expo”. I wandered into it and sat right in the room. There were maybe six people there. They had a slide projector and they talked about the forerunner of Ripple or XRP, which was RipplePay. It was pre-blockchain, but it was a kind of system of nodes and you would borrow people money and Ious would flow back and forth. However, it did not click for me. But I kept in touch with the small group of people, and a few months later the idea of Bitcoin jumped out of another discussion with them. I remember I was like “Wow, this is great. This is the thing that will change the world.”
Did you understand that right away?
I come from a software development background and I read books like The creature of Jekyll Island In my early twenties, so my brain was due to receiving the concepts related to Bitcoin, and the bulb went out very early. I had a lot of understanding of large, abstract systems that are basically what Bitcoin is. But then the game theory behind it is just amazing. Bitcoin is like a virus that inhabits the human mind and spreads from person to person.
What has it been like to try to spread it to other government members?
So fast until 2015 – I was elected to state legislator. We tried to suggest a few Bitcoin-related bills around that time, but no one understood Bitcoin back then. However, I have kept it, and now it is at the point where I am a subject expert in our legislature. I’m in my fifth period and Bitcoin has become more mainstream. Other New Hampshire politicians reach out to me when they hear something positive about Bitcoin. They also reach negative news, but recently there has been a lot of positive news. So I find it a little easier to bring the legislation up to speed.
You’ve done a lot of work on changing the Overton window regarding Bitcoin in New Hampshire. And in the committee’s consultation on Tuesday, you talked about using Bitcoin as a tool to uncover against the US dollar base. You mentioned that the US federal government is $ 36 trillion dollars in debt and that it will have to print more money to meet its debt obligations. How do people react in government when you bring up hard truths like this and suggest Bitcoin as a solution?
Our national debt is a very harsh reality that people often just overlook. However, there are quite a few gold bugs in our legislature and they are from the Sound Money School of Thought. But the majority of the legislature, and just humans in general, see national debt as an asteroid that is coming – we can see it coming, but we still have to get up and go to work every day. It is a scenario where, unless you really fix what happens, you tend not to focus on it because it is such a big problem. If it ever escalates and snowball, it can cause massive chaos in society. We do not want it to happen and we can see that there is an alternative with Bitcoin. You can pick up your balls and shift teams. You don’t have to like the consequences. Well, you will be affected at some level if society begins to crumble, but you can limit some of the consequences or at least protect your personal sovereignty and wealth. And I look at this for the state. The conversation on Tuesday was about enabling Treasurers to invest in digital assets that have a market capital of $ 500 billion or more. We try to get all these conversations to move within the state government, so when it becomes a little more obvious that Bitcoin is a solution to inflation or the country is bankrupt, God is banned, the state government members are founded to receive this message.
I’m sure it’s easier to get politicians to see the problem than is to convince them that Bitcoin is a solution. Do you get a lot of pushback on HB302?
With the special bill we worked with Satoshi Action Fund. I have to be friends with Dennis Porter and Eric Peterson. We started with one of their pieces of model legislation. The first thing we did was that we met with the Treasurer. Dennis and his team showed up and I had a few people there from the Blockchain Council. We sat in the cashier’s office and talked to her about it. She was not 100% familiar with Bitcoin, but was open to the idea of learning more about it. She also commented that her colleagues around the country are starting to talk about digital assets. After this discussion, we refined the bill. We changed it in the Trade Committee, which is the first committee it went through. Then we talked to the Treasurer again about the changes. She said the Treasury’s department may not invest in Bitcoin right away, but it would be great to have another tool in the toolbox, another potentially active to invest in.
The HB302 determines that only digital assets with a market capital of over $ 500 billion can be included in the reserve. Currently, Bitcoin only meets these criteria. How did you get up with this number and do you predict a number of other digital assets that were eventually added to the reserve?
There must be some kind of threshold because we do not want anyone to get the idea that the Treasurer can invest in Meme coins. However, we cannot explicitly say “Bitcoin” in the legislation.
Why not?
It would be seen as choosing winners and losers. Good legislation should be rational and objective.
What is the probability of Hb302 passing?
Well, so it is likely to pass parliament and then it goes to the Senate. I think there’s a higher than 50% chance that it passes the Senate. The problem is when the house adopts some bills and the Senate knows that there is a priority on the side of the house, they attach their things to it when the bill comes over. Because of this, bills can sometimes die in the cross -fire between the two chambers.
Does politicians in the government of New Hampshire are now taking the idea of a bitcoin or digital active reserves more seriously because they see members of other state governments made bills proposing the creation of such reserves in other states?
I don’t know. There are really only a handful of members of New Hampshire’s legislative body that are aware of this. I try to emphasize when I testify that the last in the pool when it comes to Bitcoin loses. In other words, we do not want to be the last state to buy Bitcoin because its price will rise significantly in the meantime, especially if other states start buying first. There is still some skepticism for Bitcoin. All of these false tales – as if its energy consumption will melt the planet or that it is only used by criminals, terrorists and drug dealers – are still pervasive. When new people try to wrap their heads around it, they are often standard to discredit it as soon as possible because, after doing so, they don’t have to think about it anymore. So these same arguments continue to be brought up by new people who are still trying to find out. The same thing happens in our legislature. But now that the Trump administration is talking about it seriously and talking about how we should be a bitcoin country, it really breaks down some walls. Now, although they do not fully understand it, they will at least take it more seriously.
If the HB302 is adopted and the treasurer starts buying Bitcoin, what kind of deposit setup do you imagine the state that creates?
Everything is moving at a snail pace in the government, so the most likely scenario is that they buy some shares in Say Fidelity Spot Bitcoin Etf at first. Fidelity is like one of the biggest employers in New Hampshire. It carries a lot of threat. So I would imagine that they would invest a small amount in such a vehicle. But as time goes on, the state is to be able to self -indulge Bitcoin important. I can imagine that they probably don’t want to do it on their own because they would be afraid of losing their keys. They would probably like to have an institutional shared detention situation, such as what is unkind or other companies offering – custody across institutions with a multisig.
A question that has not come up with a lot of Bitcoin and crypto-related legislation is crypto and their legality. Plus, tea Samorai Wallet and Tornado cash Developers are still in trial, despite many other crypto cases being thrown out under the Trump administration. What are your thoughts about cryptobers? Should Americans be allowed to use them?
Yes. Economic privacy is super important. It’s bad if you buy a cup of coffee and the grocer who owns the store on which you spend your pair of SAT’s can see the entire Bitcoin balance. Economic privacy is huge and it is something we cannot give up. So it’s done, it needs to be protected.
Any last thoughts?
Yes, there is a lot of fraud in the crypto area and it gets so annoying. Bitcoin is the opposite. That’s the hard truth. If you understand Bitcoin, you appreciate the truth, you appreciate honesty and transparency. It gets a little old to always dodge these scams from the larger crypto ecosystem. The truth will win in the end. Many other projects in the room are just noise – a big smoke screen.