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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 07, @07:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-luck-with-that dept.

Make Bitcoin great again - what Donald Trump's backing of crypto could mean for the industry

On July 27, the former US president and Republican nominee for the upcoming election, Donald Trump, headlined the biggest Bitcoin conference of the year in Nashville. In his speech, Trump claimed he will make the US the "crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world" if returned to the White House after November's election.

Bitcoin Price Tanks Hours After Trump Floats Using it as US Reserve Asset

Bitcoin prices plummeted after former President Donald Trump suggested that the cryptocurrency could be used to pay off the country's $35 trillion national debt.

Bitcoin dropped 12 percent in the past 24 hours and ether plunged by 21 percent in the same time period. The price of bitcoin has been dropping since Friday, and briefly dropped to below $50,000 on Monday. This was the first time it had dropped below these levels since February.

In recent weeks Trump has been attempting to position himself firmly as pro-crypto. Speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, the Republican presidential candidate unveiled his plans to make the U.S. the "crypto capital of the planet" if he is elected for a second term.

He also spoke about the U.S. creating a "strategic national bitcoin reserve."


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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by aim on Wednesday August 07, @08:11AM

    by aim (6322) on Wednesday August 07, @08:11AM (#1367525)

    Is it any wonder that the scammer-in-chief would hail (yet another) scam aka ponzi scheme? Also, bitcoin in particular is very useful to his puppet master to circumvent sanctions. So, par for the course.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday August 07, @08:29AM (1 child)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Wednesday August 07, @08:29AM (#1367531)

    I can think of no better proponent of a financial scam.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 08, @04:40PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 08, @04:40PM (#1367788) Journal

      How about a new Trump cryptocurrency that you can get in exchange for your worthless DJT stock, for only a "minor" percentage of the transaction value?

      --
      Don't put a mindless tool of corporations in the white house; vote ChatGPT for 2024!
  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday August 07, @09:20AM (10 children)

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday August 07, @09:20AM (#1367537)

    Trump pledged to keep “100% of all the Bitcoin” the US government currently holds or acquires in the future if he is elected

    To do what with? A gigantic bitcoin slush fund? I assume the seized coins are mostly from drugs, or at least drug related. Not that it matters, money is money.

    Still a strategic national bitcoin reserve. Doesn't that sort of go against anything and everything bitcoin? Isn't this then an effort to centralize bitcoin? Also would this not completely tank the value of Bitcoin is the USA starts seizing and keeping everything?

    Not included here but apparently he promised more things to the bitcoin-broes. Such as releasing Ross Ulbricht, Dread Pirate Roberts of Silkroad fame. Why? Is he going to be Trumps new Bitcoin czar? Not sure if that will win any votes or enough votes to matter. It will probably be quickly negated by all those people that will get massive increases to their power utility bills due to all the new cryptomining that will take place when the US tried to become the crypto leader of the world.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Wednesday August 07, @10:32AM (3 children)

      by zocalo (302) on Wednesday August 07, @10:32AM (#1367548)
      For a reserve, I suppose Trump's advisors think this means they can somehow use their crypto holdings as a substitute for more tangible assets that the US holds in reserve and *can* sell off on the open markets to pay off the debt, or at least those parts of it where they see a tangible benefit somehow. You know, things like strategy oil reserves and the like which might be needed if the current tension in Middle East blows up into a serious conflict and global supply chains through Suez and around the Arabian peninsula are seriously disrupted again. There are two obvious problems with that; firstly, the value of the holdings will fluctuate like crazy, because that's what crypto does, and if it's pegged to the dollar as a reserve the the dollar will fluctuate with it -- goodbye Petro-dollar, helllooo Petro-Yuan, Petro-Euro, or whatever. Secondly, if you ever need to sell any of that reserve in volume, say to raise currency you can actually do anything with, the price will crash, just as it has done every time the German government has unloaded a few hundred million euros worth recently. I hate to think what the US dumping a few billion, or more, would do to the price - whatever the theoretic fiat value is, the actual trade-in value is likely to be double percentage points below that.

      This is certainly NOT Trump driving this. He referred to a "Staple Coin", then corrected himself after a quick squint at the teleprompter, when talking about something that's supposedly a key tenet of his plans for 2025 and beyond. Clearly a guy that understands all this perfectly! He (or, more likely, his advisors) are either having their strings pulled by the likes of Musk and the other Crypto Bros (in exchange for what?), or his campaign is in full-on panic mode and is desperately saying anything to try and grab a few more votes from whatever crowd he's lying to today. Given what happened in 2020, if that end up doing enough to get a popular vote majority but he still loses the Electoral College, I fear Elon might just get his civil war, only it'll be on the Western side of the Atlantic.
      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 07, @07:25PM (2 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday August 07, @07:25PM (#1367626)

        >He (or, more likely, his advisors) are either having their strings pulled by the likes of Musk and the other Crypto Bros (in exchange for what?)

        Anybody who holds BTC loves people willing to pay current market price (or higher!) for BTC and hates anyone who would sell out for cash.

        In addition to Musk & Bros, there are lots of people (like my brother) who put in little chunks of a bit more than they could afford into BTC and other crypto, and they're HODLing because that's all they can do vs their ego which thought this was going to be their ticket to riches, but turned out to be another shit-pile of an investment.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday August 07, @08:39PM (1 child)

          by zocalo (302) on Wednesday August 07, @08:39PM (#1367646)

          Anybody who holds BTC loves people willing to pay current market price (or higher!) for BTC and hates anyone who would sell out for cash.

          Sure. Exactly the kind of cultish mindset that drove Ponzi's and all the other MLM schemes; once you check in to Hotel Crypto, you'd better not try and leave because you'll let somebody else down, namely those higher up the pyramid that actually stand to make something out of the scam.

          If you're not a whale and have been HODLing something other than shitcoins for a while, then you've had multiple chances to completely cash out while above water of late. I cashed out all the BTC I mined out of curiosity in the relatively early days and mostly forgot about some time ago and never looked back; even then, the larger exchanges had absolutely no problems with quite large (6-7 figure) outflows back to fiat if you did your homework and were prepared to wait a little for the necessary transactions to complete. You also need to accept the possibility it might go much higher still in the future, of course; during the recent peak that exceeded three times higher in my case, and I've still got no regrets about getting out when I did.

          Frankly, at this point, if someone is playing in the crypto casino with money they can really afford to lose, then they either recently bought in because of Trump/Musk/whatever without doing any due diligence first (it's not exactly hard to find out it's about as high-risk gamble as you can get, FFS), or have been HODLing a while and are well and truly on the "to the moon!" greed hook since they could easily have cashed out in the black with the very recent highs, either all in one go or piecemeal, potentially even completely covering their initial outlay while still leaving some tokens just in case if they'd been HODLing long enough. For better or worse, whatever happens to their finances now is entirely on them.

          --
          UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 07, @10:21PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday August 07, @10:21PM (#1367656)

            Back in the day I accepted a Bitcoin (then valued at $4) as payment for a $5 thing. When it hit $220, about two years later, I sold.

            Best ROI I ever got on any investment. Of course: woulda, could, shoulda, but I didn't have a spare $4000 lying around at the time.

            --
            🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 07, @10:49AM (4 children)

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 07, @10:49AM (#1367551) Journal

      To do what with?

      It would be part of the maneuvering by the Kremlin and Beijing, plus various Kremlin-allied oligarchs, to break the petrodollar and move to different global currency.

      Investigative journalist and tech pioneer Dave Troy pointed to the Trump-Musk link to crypto-economics. "It's happening. Trump cult is pivoting to crypto to undermine the dollar, in service of Putin / Xi / Musk / Thiel. This just in the last few minutes," he posted on X after seeing the Trump posts. "Hold on .... this is gonna get weird."

      Trump says he'll interview with Elon Musk next week — and onlookers react [rawstory.com]

      Once the petrodollar loses its position at the top, all that debt [cia.gov] comes home to roost.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @12:02PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @12:02PM (#1367554)

        There are five countries at the bottom of that list that owe zero dollars. Every other country owes money.

        Debt doesn't work like that. If you owe 20 trillion dollars, then that money is owed to somebody. How can every country in the world (except five zeros) have a negative balance? Who is that money owed to, Lizard people from Zeta Reticuli?

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by aim on Wednesday August 07, @12:51PM (2 children)

          by aim (6322) on Wednesday August 07, @12:51PM (#1367558)

          That list should be taken with a huge mountain of salt.

          External debt here means "public and private debt owed to nonresidents repayable in internationally accepted currencies" (cf Wikipedia). Luxembourg for instance is listed as #6, but the country sure doesn't owe that kind of money, having a public debt of about 25% of GDP, which is healthy enough to warrant an AAA rating - no, it's actually mostly money placed in funds there. For the exact same reason, I don't believe for a second that Liechtenstein, of all places, would be ranked with a 0 there - there's lots of money placed in Liechtenstein, too.

          Public debt also isn't owed only to other countries, but to the private sector - resident or foreign.

          • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday August 08, @07:27AM (1 child)

            by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 08, @07:27AM (#1367728) Journal

            [...] is healthy enough to warrant an AAA rating [...]

            It's not about economic health. The debt itself has become the currency. The result is that those AAA ratings have nothing to do with solvency or fiscal responsibility but is only the recognition that the countries in question toe the line on various (sometime self-defeating) social and economic policies.

            --
            Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
            • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 08, @06:38PM

              by VLM (445) on Thursday August 08, @06:38PM (#1367802)

              The debt itself has become the currency.

              The ability to tax their subjects to pay the interest on the debt is the currency.

              You can see why they get worked up about things like permanent demographic-driven long-term economic decline, because that means taxes will have to drop in parallel, which means currencies will have to drop in parallel... oh wait they don't like that last part at all.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 07, @07:21PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday August 07, @07:21PM (#1367624)

      > Not that it matters, money is money.

      Oh, it matters. It matters a lot. BTC is not money. BTC is secret numbers in a Ponzi-game.

      If the US Federal Government were to suddenly dump all their BTC holdings, I'm guessing the resulting BTC value crash would be something like $56K/BTC down to $560/BTC - effectively killing the scheme for good.

      Everybody loves the status-quo, BTC is a useful tool in many ways I'm sure much more useful when there are idiots out there willing to trade big $ for it.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @09:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, @09:28AM (#1367538)

    From Web 3 is going just great! [web3isgoinggreat.com]:

    August 6, 2024

    Trump-themed $DJT token rug-pulls, people blame Martin Shkreli or Barron Trump

    Surprising just about no one, a wallet holding around 20% of the supply of the $DJT Trump-themed memecoin suddenly dumped its holdings, crashing the token price by around 90%. The token price had briefly spiked in June, when it was falsely reported that the token was "an official Trump token". However, the token's price had already dwindled since that time, and before the sudden dump.

    People were quick to blame those behind the project [web3isgoinggreat.com], primarily "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli (who has been accused of dumping his own token before [web3isgoinggreat.com]). Shkreli was quick to shift the blame to Donald Trump's youngest son, Barron, who he has also claimed is behind the token (although this has not been independently confirmed). However, the owner of the wallet that dumped its tokens is not definitively known.

            "No one surprised as DJT token has finally rugged" [protos.com]

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Wednesday August 07, @03:06PM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 07, @03:06PM (#1367575)

    Bitcoin prices plummeted after former President Donald Trump suggested that the cryptocurrency could be used to pay off the country's $35 trillion national debt.

    "The USA is gonna raise $35T for Bitcoin? Wow, that's great! Wait... you mean then they're gonna sell it all? Fuck that!"

    --
    🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 08, @06:35PM

    by VLM (445) on Thursday August 08, @06:35PM (#1367800)

    I'm not sure if it's election strategy or a economic strategy.

    What worked well for his first election was he infuriated the absolute worst people in the world. So getting really awful people really mad in public, perhaps by pushing BTC, might be a valid election strategy. There's some truly awful people working in finance at a high level of politics and corporations, so triggering them in public is probably an excellent election strategy. I think those people wildly underestimate how much of the population hate them and what they've done.

    Plenty of people voted for Trump the first time around because he made smarmy self righteous MSNBC propaganda readers and Hollywood pedos and adjacent people cry on camera, it was awesome! Second time around he didn't do anything like that, or at least not much, and lost. If he makes thieving scumbags chimp out on TV about his BTC comments, he could win this third time around.

    As an economic strategy, I don't know if it matters all that much. Here's a non-inflatable non-counterfeitable currency, OK then, so ...

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