Donald Trump is an unlikely crypto ally. Bitcoin’s strength, embodied in Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal paper, is that it frees participants from murky assessments of trust, rather than relying on an evidence base.
Bitcoin is the truth. So it was cosmically odd last week to hear attendees at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville enthusiastically hailing a former president who, according to a painstakingly compiled count, lied 30,573 times during his single term in office. Believers in the mathematically irrefutable blockchain poured out hosannas as Donald Trump delivered a speech full of lies, fabrications and fantasy. They screamed with glee when he took credit for bitcoin’s meteoric rise in value during his tenure — even as they knew for sure that until recently he was bashing the idea of cryptocurrency.
“Bitcoin, it sounds like a scam,” he said in 2021. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency that competes with the dollar.” Trump is now the sudden darling of the crypto world, even though no one believes he has a clue about how the tokens work or even what they are. “Staple-coins … stablecoin,” Trump said at one point, correcting himself as he probably looked at the teleprompter, then paused. “Do you know what a stablecoin is? Does anyone know?’
Trump obviously doesn’t. That didn’t stop him from making promises that only someone who deeply misunderstood Bitcoin both technically and philosophically would ever make. He compared Bitcoin to the steel industry of a century ago, a mind-boggling disparity between an icon of the Industrial Revolution and a cutting-edge movement of the digital world. At the time, he promised to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”
This sentiment, as conference attendees must surely know, overturns the basic premise of cryptocurrency and blockchain—a sovereign system that operates without regard to the interests of any nation. To quote cryptocurrency theorist Eric Cason: “Bitcoin offers a radical new hope that one can escape from the cage that is every nation-state today.” Trump’s promise that the United States will dominate Bitcoin is a slap in the face Satoshi.
One of the proposals Trump floated is a Bitcoin reserve where the US would stash billions of dollars worth of HODL tokens as well, a scheme experts say is of questionable value to taxpayers but could increase the value of the currency to enrich the Nashville Mob. Again, manipulation by a government superpower is anathema to the values of the blockchain revolution. Another promise Trump made was to pardon Silk Road owner Ross Ulbricht, who is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison for running a massive crypto operation for illegal drugs and money laundering. So much for being tough on crime.
Despite the oddity, the alliance between Trump and the Bitcoin brothers seems almost a foregone conclusion. The crypto world resents government regulation and sees in Donald Trump an opportunity to ease the state’s touch, perhaps to the level of a friendly tickle. Trump encouraged this thinking by meeting with key sponsors and investors and embracing their views. As if cementing a thinly disguised transaction, players in the crypto world are funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign coffers. So it’s no surprise that Trump promised at the Nashville conference that he would put an end to “left-wing fascists and totalitarians hell-bent on crushing crypto.” He was greatly applauded for the sentiment. Trump also pointed out that Kamala Harris is among those “fascists.” “By the way, she’s anti-crypto,” he said. “She’s very much against it.” (Harris hasn’t actually set her policy and has reached out to crypto companies.) The cheers were loudest when Trump said he would fire Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission — which oversees fraudulent crypto schemes – on his first day back in office.
Legitimate question: Does the current White House “hate crypto” as the industry and Trump seem to believe? I did a little digging and learned that in the early days of the administration, crypto policy — which admittedly was a relatively low priority during a pandemic — was indeed up for grabs, with some officials viewing it as a rogue technology. Ultimately, however, the administration charted a course that attempted to straddle the line between encouraging innovation in the field and enforcing existing securities laws.
