Bitcoin As Public Infrastructure: A Forgotten Framing

The Crypto Advisor is your trusted resource for navigating the world of cryptocurrency. Each week, we deliver a clear and concise update on the latest developments in crypto, straight to your inbox. This is more than just a newsletter; it’s an essential resource for forward-thinking advisors focused on maintaining a competitive edge. We’re excited to support your journey in adapting to and thriving in the new age of financial services. What if one of the clearest and most durable explanations of Bitcoin didn’t come from a market participant, a crypto founder, or an investor with capital at risk? Instead, it came from a policy expert speaking directly to U.S. lawmakers - framing Bitcoin not as an asset to speculate on, but as public financial infrastructure. The argument wasn’t built around returns, adoption curves, or price forecasts. It was built around system design: public goods, single points of failure, institutional concentration, and the risks embedded in privately owned critical infrastructure. In 2018, a policy researcher testified before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee with precisely that framing. Years later, the testimony remains one of the most accurate, accessible, and intellectually disciplined explanations of what Bitcoin is, how it functions, and why it continues to attract institutional attention - even as narratives and market cycles come and go. We are resurfacing it here for two simple reasons. First, the core argument has aged remarkably well. Second, it remains one of the most effective ways to understand Bitcoin without treating it as a product to be sold. What follows is not an endorsement, nor an investment case. It is a structural explanation - one that helps clarify why Bitcoin continues to appear in regulatory discussions, balance sheet debates, and long-term infrastructure conversations, even among institutions that remain skeptical of the asset itself. (Peter Van Valkenburgh – U.S. Senate Banking Committee Testimony) “Chairman Crapo, Ranking Member Brown, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Peter Van Valkenberg, and I’m the Director of Research at Coin Center, an independent nonprofit focused on the public policy issues affecting cryptocurrency and public blockchain networks. What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is the world’s first cryptocurrency, and it works because of the world’s first public blockchain network. What does Bitcoin do? It’s simple. It lets you send and receive value to and from anyone in the world using nothing more than a computer and an internet connection. Now, why is it revolutionary? Because unlike every other tool for sending money over the internet, it works without the need to trust a middleman. The lack of any corporation in between means that Bitcoin is the world’s first public digital payments infrastructure. And by public, I simply mean available to all and not owned by any single entity. Now, we have public infrastructure for information - for websites, for email - it’s called the internet. But the only public payments infrastructure that we have is cash, as in paper money, and it only works in face-to-face transactions. Before Bitcoin, if you wanted to pay someone remotely over the phone or the internet, then you could not use public infrastructure. You would rely on a private bank to open their books and add a ledger entry that debits you and credits the person you’re paying. And if you both don’t use the same bank, well then there’ll be multiple banks and multiple ledger entries in between. With Bitcoin, the ledger is the public blockchain, and anyone can add an entry to that ledger, transferring their bitcoins to someone else. And anyone, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, gender, sex, or creditworthiness, can, for absolutely no cost, create a Bitcoin address in order to receive payments digitally. Bitcoin is the world’s first globally accessible public money. Is it perfect? No. Neither was email when it was invented in 1972. Bitcoin’s not the best money on every margin. It’s not yet accepted everywhere, it’s not used often to quote prices, and it’s not always a stable store of value. But it is working, and the mere fact that it works without trusted intermediaries is amazing. It’s a computer science breakthrough, and it will be as significant for freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing as the birth of the internet. And Bitcoin is just the beginning. If we can replace private payments infrastructure, then we can replace other private choke points to human interaction as well. Now, why should we want to build more public infrastructure? Why should we embrace blockchains over corporate intermediaries? Why should we tolerate their inefficiencies and work to make them better? Why should we want the pioneers of this technology here in the United States and not fleeing overseas? A simple reason: because the corporate intermediaries providing today’s critical but privately owned infrastructure are becoming fewer, larger, and more powerful - and their failures are increasingly grave. Roughly half of all Americans - 143 million people - had their Social Security numbers exposed to hackers because of a breach at Equifax. The SWIFT network has relayed hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions because of hacked member banks in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ecuador, and Russia. The FBI now suspects that the largest of these hacks was perpetrated by North Korea. Corrupt low-level employees at an Indian bank, Punjab National, were able to fraudulently certify SWIFT messages, stealing $1.8 billion. It’s the largest electronic bank robbery in history - in fact, it’s the largest bank robbery in history. In October 2016, an estimated 1.2 million internet-connected devices were hacked and turned into a botnet that, for several hours, made prominent websites unavailable across Europe and North America, including CNN and Fox News, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Increasingly, physical machines are being connected to the internet to augment their capabilities. They’re wired through servers that are owned and maintained by private and trusted intermediaries - the so-called Internet of Things. Pacemakers from St. Jude’s Hospital have been hacked. Baby monitors from Trendnet have been hacked. And Jeeps have been hacked to the point where they can be remotely commandeered and driven off the road. Now, those vulnerabilities are inescapable in systems that have single points of failure. It doesn’t matter if the point of failure is a corporation or if it’s a government - there shouldn’t be a single point of failure. Similar choke points existed before the internet. If you wanted to deliver a message, you’d have to go through one of three television broadcasters or a handful of newspapers. Private corporations are essential, but no critical infrastructure should rely on one or two. The internet removed single points of failure in communications infrastructure and ushered in a wave of competition among new media corporations building on top of its public rails. Blockchains can similarly disintermediate critical payments and IoT infrastructure. The technology is not yet ready to answer all of those questions today, but it is our best hope. And as with the internet in the 1990s, we need a light-touch, pro-innovation policy to ensure that these innovations flourish in America for the benefit and security of all Americans.” What makes this testimony notable isn’t just its clarity - it’s how little it relies on assumptions that have aged poorly. There is no appeal to price appreciation, mass adoption timelines, or speculative upside. The argument is grounded almost entirely in architecture: the fragility created by concentrated intermediaries, the risks of opaque infrastructure, and the systemic consequences of single points of failure. Those concerns were not hypothetical in 2018. If anything, they’ve become more visible since. Bet…