Riot Platform’s Rockdale, Texas facility, North America’s largest Bitcoin mining farm by developed capacity [source]

Can a network that has been marketed as being resistant to government power be harnessed by the U.S. administrative state in order to attain its foreign policy goals?

Sam Lyman, an executive at Riot Platforms, a bitcoin miner, opens the door to the topic by suggesting that bitcoin can become a tool of U.S. economic statecraft, and the way to do so is by having the U.S. government buy a strategic reserve of the stuff.

I agree that bitcoin can be used as a tool of U.S. economic statecraft, but disagree on how. There’s absolutely no need for the U.S. government to buy any bitcoin in order to lever the Bitcoin network for foreign policy purposes. Buying bitcoins would only waste scarce resources, driving up the price to the benefit a select few speculators. No, the U.S. already has the means to lever the bitcoin network, and that’s by leaning on the U.S. private sector’s dominance of bitcoin mining, of which Lyman’s own Riot Platforms is a big player (see photo at top).

The U.S. controls 38% of all bitcoin mining capacity, a big share of that being in Texas. Mining is a word people use in place of “maintaining the network.” When a bitcoin transaction is made, miners are the folks who verify and process it, a number of miners often banding together to form pools for that purpose. Without miners, the bitcoin network ceases to function. 

How to lever the Texas bitcoin mining nexus for the purposes of statecraft? In short, the mining nexus must be brought on par with its bigger cousin, the New York banking nexus, which the U.S. government already harnesses to further its foreign policy goals.

Any American banker that deals with a foreign individual or entity that has been designated, or sanctioned, by the U.S. government risks a penalty, either monetary or jail time. Sanctioned individuals are generally folks living overseas who are deemed to be in conflict with the U.S. foreign policy interests. And so U.S. banks, the largest nexus of which is based in New York, try to avoid punishment by cutting sanctioned names off from their banking platforms, thereby exporting American foreign policy to the rest of the world.

By requiring Texas’s bitcoin miners (or the pools of which they are members) to abide by the same standard as banks, don’t deal with bitcoin users who are deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy goals or you will be punished, the Bitcoin network would likewise become a platform for extending American foreign policy goals to the rest of the world. This would oblige Texas miners to comb over sanctions list and offboard blacklisted individuals, just like bankers currently do. With 38% of the world’s mining capability in Texas and a few other states, that’s a sizable amount of U.S. influence.

But that’s only the beginning. There are ways to further upgrade bitcoin’s capability as a tool of sanctions-based statecraft. When the U.S. sanctions program was still in its infancy, the punishment for breaking U.S. sanctions was generally limited to Americans individuals and entities. Over the last decade or two the U.S. has been extending punishment extraterritorially to foreigners, by arguing that when a foreigner “causes” an unsuspecting U.S. entity to process sanctioned transactions, then the foreigner is themself criminally liable under U.S. law for sanctions evasion.

An example may help. A decade ago a large Turkish bank called Halkbank processed transactions for sanctioned Iranians. Nothing illegal about that. A Turkish bank isn’t under U.S. jurisdiction, and thus it can deal with any customer the Turkish government allows it to, even one that has been blacklisted by the U.S. What got Halkbank in trouble with the Department of Justice is that the transactions it processed passed through, or transited, the bank’s correspondent accounts in New York. The fact that it had “caused” its New York banker to provide financial services to sanctioned Iranians (see the language below) was enough for Halkbank to be criminally indicted in New York for sanctions evasion.

The crime of causing others to violate sanctions [source]

The same framework could be extended to Texas bitcoin miners.

For instance, if a Turkish crypto exchange were to send some bitcoins to a sanctioned Russian, and this transfer was processed by a Texas mining farm or pool, say Riot Platform’s Rockdale facility, that would now give the U.S. government the hook it needs to charge the Turkish exchange with sanctions violation. By “causing” Riot to process a prohibited transaction, the Turkish exchange is itself criminally liable under U.S. law. To avoid that possibility, the Turkish exchange may choose to proactively adopt the U.S. government’s sanctions list, thus acting as a vessel for conveying U.S. policy on Turkish soil.

The threat of punishing foreign actors for “causing” U.S. entities (whether those be miners or bankers) to process sanctioned transactions acts as a force-multiplier of U.S. foreign policy goals. Not only do U.S. financial institutions export policy, as was traditionally the case, but now foreign institutions are nudged into importing it, too.

To sum up, if folks like Lyman were genuinely serious about harnessing bitcoin as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, they’d be calling for the U.S. government to apply to miners the same sanctions standards that currently apply to regular financial entities like banks. That they aren’t calling for this, and instead want the U.S. government to buy bitcoin, suggests they are motivated by a higher price for bitcoin and their own corporate profits, not actual statecraft.