Rep. Keith Ammon Is New Hampshire’s Premier Bitcoin Advocate

Bitcoin Magazine

Rep. Keith Ammon Is New Hampshire’s Premier Bitcoin Advocate

On Tuesday, Rep. Keith Ammon addressed a New Hampshire House Ways and Means Committee on House Bill (HB) 302, which would permit the state’s treasurer to invest in bitcoin.

In speaking to the committee, he brought up the United States’ excessive debt and made the case for the state of New Hampshire to invest in bitcoin as a means to mitigate the ravaging effects of inflation.

As I listened to his petition, I got the sense that Rep. Ammon was a dyed-in-the-wool Bitcoiner, someone inside of the system doing his best to get members of the legislature of the state he calls home to see in bitcoin what he likely saw in it many moons ago.

After speaking with Rep. Ammon, I’ve learned that this is, in fact, the case.

The software developer and self-described “Bitcoin maxi” (who admits to also seeing some value in other blockchains and crypto projects) found Bitcoin two years after its inception and has been spreading 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 lead sponsor on the three current Bitcoin- and crypto-related bills in the state that are currently working their way through the legislative process, Rep. Ammon is perhaps the most notable Bitcoin advocate in The Granite State.

And the story of how he found Bitcoin is bad ass to boot.

Based on how you spoke at Tuesday’s committee hearing about HB302, I got the impression that you’re a long-time Bitcoiner. Is this the case?

Yes, and I’ll start by going way back. I heard about something called the Free State Project in 2004, and I moved up to New Hampshire to be part of that. Years later, I attended an event called Liberty Forum, which is an annual event put on by the Free State Project. In 2011, there were a bunch of anarchists that didn’t like the agenda of the forum — it was too corporate for them. So, they rented a couple of rooms at the hotel where the event was held and they had their own event, which they called the “Alt Expo”. I wandered into it and just happened to sit in the room. There were maybe six people there. They had a slide projector and they were talking about the precursor to Ripple, or XRP, which was RipplePay. It was pre-blockchain, but it was some kind of system of nodes and you would lend people money and IOUs would flow back and forth. It just didn’t click for me, though. But I kept in touch with that small group of people, and, a few months later, the idea of Bitcoin popped out of another discussion with them. I remember being like, “Wow, this is amazing. This is the thing that is going to change the world.”

Did you grasp it right away?

I come from a software development background, and I read books like The Creature From Jekyll Island in my early twenties, so my brain was primed to receive the concepts related to Bitcoin and the light bulb went off very early. I had a lot of understanding about big, abstract systems, which is basically what Bitcoin is. But then also 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 trying to spread it to other members of government?

So, fast forward to 2015 — I was elected to the state legislature. We tried proposing a few Bitcoin-related bills around that time, but nobody understood Bitcoin back then. However, I’ve kept with it, and now it’s at the point where I’m a subject matter expert within our legislature. I’m in my fifth term, and Bitcoin has become more mainstream. Other politicians in New Hampshire reach out to me whenever they hear something positive about Bitcoin. Well, they reach out with negative news, too, but lately, there’s been a lot of positive news. So, I’m finding it a little easier to bring the legislature up to speed.

You’ve done a lot of work shifting the Overton window regarding Bitcoin in New Hampshire. And, in the committee hearing on Tuesday, you talked about using bitcoin as a tool to hedge against U.S. dollar debasement. You mentioned that the U.S. 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 in government react when you bring up tough truths like this and propose 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’re from the sound money school of thought. But the majority in the legislature, and just people in general, view the national debt like an asteroid that’s coming — we can see it coming, but we still have to get up and go to work every day. It’s a scenario where, unless you really fixate on what’s happening, you tend to not focus on it because it’s such a big problem. If it ever escalates and snowballs, it could cause massive chaos in society. We don’t want that to happen, and we can see that there is an alternative with bitcoin. You can pick up your marbles and switch teams. You don’t have to suffer the consequences. Well, you’ll be affected on some level if society starts crumbling, 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 the state treasurer to invest in digital assets that have a market cap of $500 billion or more. We’re trying to get all these conversations moving within the state government so that when it becomes a little more obvious that bitcoin is a solution to inflation, or the country going bankrupt, God forbid, the state government’s members are primed to receive this message.

I’m sure it’s easier to get politicians to see the problem than it is to convince them that bitcoin is a solution, though. Are you getting a lot of pushback on HB302?

With that particular bill, we worked with the Satoshi Action Fund. I’ve gotten to be buddies with Dennis Porter and Eric Peterson. We started with one of their pieces of model legislation. The first thing we did was we met with the state treasurer. Dennis and his team showed up and I had a couple of people there from the Blockchain Council. We sat in the treasurer’s office and talked with 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 beginning to talk about digital assets. After this discussion, we refined the bill. We amended it in the Commerce Committee, which is the first committee it went through. After that, we talked to the state treasurer again about the amendments. She said that the state treasury department may not invest in bitcoin right away but that it would be nice to have another tool in the toolbox, another potential asset to invest in.

HB302 stipulates that only digital assets with a market cap of over $500 billion can be included in the reserve. As of now, only bitcoin meets this criteria. How did you come up with this number and do you foresee a number of other digital assets eventually being added to the reserve?

There has to be some kind of threshold, because we don’t want anyone to get the idea that the state treasurer might invest in meme coins. However, we can’t explicitly say “bitcoin” in the legislation.

Why not?

It would be seen as picking winners and losers. Good legislation should be rational and unbiased.

What is the likelihood that HB302 passes?

Well, so it’s likely going to pass the House, and then it will go to the Senate. I think there’s a higher than 50% chance that it passes the Senate. The problem is when the House passes some bills and the Senate knows that there’s a priority on the House side, they attach their stuff to it when the bill comes over. Because of this, sometimes bills can die in that crossfire between the two chambers.

Are politicians in New Hampshire’s government now taking the idea of a bitcoin or digital asset reserve more seriously because they’re seeing members of other state governments put forth bills that propose 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 paying attention to this. I try to stress when I testify that the last one in the pool when it comes to bitcoin loses. In other words, we don’t 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’s still some skepticism about Bitcoin. All these false narratives — like that its energy use is going to melt the planet or that it’s only used by criminals, terrorists, and drug dealers — are still pervasive. As new people try to wrap their head around it, they often default to discrediting it as quickly as possible, because, after they do that, they don’t have to think about it anymore. So, these same arguments just keep being brought up by new people who are still trying to figure it out. The same thing happens in our legislature. However, now that the Trump administration is talking seriously about it, talking about how we’re going to be a Bitcoin country, that really breaks some walls down. Now, even if they don’t fully understand it, they’ll at least take it more seriously.

If HB302 is passed and the state treasurer begins buying bitcoin, what sort of custodial setup do you imagine the state creating?

Everything moves at a snail’s pace in government, so the most likely scenario is that they purchase some shares of say the Fidelity spot bitcoin ETF at first. Fidelity is like one of the largest employers in New Hampshire. That carries a lot of clout. So, I’d imagine they would invest a small amount into a vehicle like that. But as time goes on, the state’s being able to self custody bitcoin is important. I’d imagine they probably don’t want to do it on their own because they’d be afraid of losing their keys. They’d probably like an institutional shared custody situation, like what Unchained or other companies offer — custody across institutions with a multisig.

One issue that hasn’t been coming up in a lot of Bitcoin- and crypto-related legislation is crypto mixers and their legality. Plus, the Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash developers are still on trial, despite many other crypto cases being thrown out under the Trump administration. What are your thoughts on crypto mixers? Should Americans be allowed to use them?

Yes. Financial privacy is super important. It’s bad if you purchase a cup of coffee and the merchant that owns the shop that you spend your couple of sats at can see your entire bitcoin balance. Financial privacy is huge, and it’s something that we can’t give up. So, however that’s done, it should be protected.

Any final thoughts?

Yeah, there’s a lot of scamminess in the crypto space, and it gets so annoying. Bitcoin is the opposite. It’s the hard truth. If you understand Bitcoin, you value the truth, you value honesty and transparency. It gets kind of old to always have to dodge these scammy bullets from the larger crypto ecosystem. The truth is going to win in the end. Many other projects in the space are just noise — a big smoke screen.

This post Rep. Keith Ammon Is New Hampshire’s Premier Bitcoin Advocate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.