In the wake of yet another iteration of China’s enduring crackdown on cryptocurrency, a particularly influential narrative on Crypto Twitter suggests that by banning Bitcoin (BTC), China has definitively put itself on the dark side of the struggle, while the collective West must now resolutely throw its weight on the opposite side by embracing crypto. Granted, this framework for thinking about the relationship between political power and decentralized finance is appealing for crypto allies. Yet the news coming out of the United States gives few reasons to believe that policymakers there see the situation this way. It appears that U.S. elites are bent on preserving the incumbent financial order and restricting the growth of the digital asset space, if with a less heavy-handed toolset than their Chinese counterparts. This middle-of-the-road approach is more likely to land the U.S. somewhere in the center of the dark/light continuum spanning from China to the still-unattainable ideal of a society that had embraced a fully disintermediated financial system.