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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."
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday August 07, @09:20AM (10 children)
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)
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)
>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)
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
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)
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.
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)
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)
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)
[...] 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
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
> 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]