US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy takes a scathing streak over Ron DeSanti’s remark on Bitcoin $BTC

Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, Bitcoin is suddenly at the center of the campaign frenzy and chest pounding.

Vivek Ramaswamy, biotech entrepreneur and Republican candidate, said in an interview with CoinDesk that he is the only candidate who understands Bitcoin deeply enough to intelligently discuss it in the presidential debate.

His comments came after his Florida hopeful and Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his own presidential campaign on Twitter on Wednesday – amid a host of technical glitches – and vowed to “protect the ability to do things like bitcoin.”

Ramaswamy says even the language used by DeSantis shows a superficial understanding of the world’s dominant cryptocurrency.

“I understand these things much more deeply and comprehensively,” Ramaswamy said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Even the way he said, ‘Do things like bitcoin.’ When we think about the leader we want in the White House, it has to be someone who understands “why.”

“Since I wrote Woke, Inc.,” Ramaswamy explained, “DeSantis has studied it and adopted many of the suggestions as his own, and I think that’s a good thing.” I’m not sure he has the same understanding like me, be it central bank digital currencies or bitcoin. But that’s ok. He says the right things.”

CoinDesk emailed the DeSantis campaign requesting a response to Ramaswamy’s comments, but had not received a response as of press time.

Some see Ramaswamy as an outsider in the presidency race. According to website FiveThirtyEight, Ramaswamy ranks 3.5% of the declared or presumptive Republican nominees for the 2024 race, behind Donald Trump at 54%, DeSantis at 21% and former US Vice President Mike Pence at 5.1%.

He’s certainly not the first politician to champion Bitcoin or any other digital asset. Robert J. Kennedy Jr. delivered a keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2023 conference.

“I’m a passionate defender and a lifelong advocate of civil liberties,” Kennedy said. “And bitcoin is both an exercise and a guarantee of those freedoms.”

But Ramaswamy — who also spoke at the same conference — may be the only pro-bitcoin candidate who claims to have a strong understanding of cryptocurrency.

Conversely, former US President Donald Trump once called Bitcoin a “scam,” according to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation (`). It is not clear if he will maintain this stance during his re-election.

Ramaswamy says he’s a supporter of bitcoin because he sees it as a “decentralized alternative” to the US dollar that expands the country’s financial infrastructure by “keeping the existing system in check.”

“Competition breeds strength,” Ramaswamy said. “I see it as competition to the existing system.”

“Even some smarter minds lose the ability to think clearly when it comes to their natural guttural tendencies to seize power as much as possible,” Ramaswamy said. “Many of them may think they start out with good intentions and think they’re protecting people, but in reality they end up harming the very people they’re supposed to be protecting.”

He says that if he became president, he would cut the Federal Reserve staff by 90% and would be open to an overhaul of the SEC, particularly given what he described as “unclear enforcement discretion.”

“Many of our existing securities regulatory apparatuses are outdated and broken. “We can actually learn by allowing metrics like bitcoin to roam free from SEC regulation,” Ramaswamy said. “The administrative state as a whole must be reformed.”

The 37-year-old former high school valedictorian and Harvard biology graduate summa cum laude says he first encountered Bitcoin at Yale Law School.

“I also had a full-time job as a hedge fund manager while I was in law school. So I was anchored in the financial markets,” explained Ramaswamy. “Then I heard this totally parallel system under the mantra ‘Code is Law.'” That’s when it caught my attention.”

The principle of “code is law” is popular in the crypto community and considers actions triggered by computer code to be just and fair, even if they are potentially controversial. The most famous example of this is the Ethereum DAO hack in 2016.

Ramaswamy, who has a net worth of around $630 million, eventually bought some Bitcoin (BTC), but no longer manages his personal portfolio himself during his campaign for “best practice” reasons and cannot confirm if he still does does holds any.

During a speech at the 2023 Bitcoin Conference, he claimed he was the first Republican candidate in the current election cycle to accept Bitcoin donations, and the first ever to do so via the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin scaling solution for cheaper and faster transactions, have done.

“We accept donations through the Lightning Network,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m going to put these issues we just discussed at the center of Republican debates in the primary.”

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