The two-year anniversary of the first of three coronavirus economic impact payments (aka, stimulus “stimmy” checks) deposited in U.S. taxpayers’ bank accounts came and went on April 11, and headlines about monetary inflation, possible economic recession and generally grim financial tailwinds are everywhere.
The ethos of Bitcoin stands diametrically opposed to the perceived reckless spending and money printing that characterized the past two years, specifically with Bitcoin miners tasked with issuing new units of bitcoin at predetermined, unmalleable intervals. So, at this point, perhaps it’s appropriate to look back on the returns that individuals who received stimulus checks would have enjoyed if they invested their dollars into bitcoin mining and the alternative financial world it supports.
Bitcoin’s Stimulus Check Narrative
Before parsing mining-specific data, it’s helpful to remember how quickly the narrative that supported investing stimulus money in bitcoin exploded across all social media channels before the first checks were signed or mailed. So large was the support for this meme that multiple polls were later conducted to quantify exactly how many Americans actually exchanged their free fiat money for bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based bitcoin exchange by volume, fueled the fresh bitcoin by sharing data that showed a surge in stimulus-check-sized bitcoin buy orders on its platform as checks were being mailed.
Bitcoin’s capped and predictable supply acted as the perfect foil for the inflationary, unpredictable monetary policy being created in real time as a response to the coronavirus situation. The same month that the first checks were mailed, a Twitter account was created that tracked the dollar value of the first stimulus check ($1,200) if it was invested entirely into bitcoin. The account still tweets updates today.
But beyond bitcoin itself, what returns would stimulus check recipients have received if they spent their free money on…
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Wanda Beck
View More PostsWanda Beck is a technology reporter who covers the intersection of business and crypto. A native of Boston, Wanda spent almost five years at The Boston25News, where she wrote extensively about the media industry's struggle to adapt to the Internet.
