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Donald Trump is doubling down on his support for star-spangled BTC, looking to build electoral support from ‘crypto bros’ who apparently no longer believe in decentralization or Satoshi Nakamoto.
Trump gave a speech on July 28 at an annual BTC conference in Nashville, during which he unveiled a plan for the federal government to build a “strategic national [BTC] stockpile.” The “core” of this stockpile will be the over 210,000 BTC tokens seized by the Department of Justice (DoJ) over the years, to which will be added any tokens the federal government “acquires into the future.”
Trump warned that if the U.S. doesn’t embrace “crypto,” “China and other countries will. They’ll dominate it, and we cannot let China dominate.” Trump vowed to “keep each and every [BTC] job in the United States of America” and ensure that the U.S. “will be the crypto capital of the planet and the [BTC] superpower of the world.”
Trump said he wanted BTC “to be mined, minted and made in the USA. It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if [BTC] is going to the moon, as we say… I want America to be the nation that leads the way.”
Trump acknowledged the “tremendous” power demands that increasing U.S.-based BTC mining will require. “You need double the electricity of the entire electricity that we have right now in the United States to dominate, and we’ll get that done… we’ll be having power plants built at the sites. We’ll be releasing people from certain ridiculous requirements, and we’ll be using fossil fuel to make electricity because we’re going to have to. We’ll be using nuclear.”
Trump didn’t offer specifics on his claim to have a plan to burn these fossil fuels “in an environmentally friendly way,” just as he didn’t explain how BTC tokens would somehow be constrained by America’s territorial borders. Nor did he explore how the rest of the world might react to efforts to turn BTC and its mining networks into symbols of American power.
Turning to his new Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump told the crowd, “She’s against crypto, by the way, she’s against it, very big.” Trump vowed that “the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over. It will end. It’ll be done. The moment I’m sworn in, the persecution stops, and the weaponization ends against your industry.”
Trump then promised to fire Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler, a line that produced roars of approval from the audience despite presidents lacking explicit authority to remove SEC chairs. Trump promised to “appoint a new SEC chairman who believes America should build the future, not block the future.”
Trump further pledged to “immediately appoint a [BTC] and crypto presidential advisory council.” This council would be told “to design transparent regulatory guidance for the benefit of the entire industry, and they will get it done in 100 days… from now on, the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.”
Not yet done remaking this world, Trump vowed to “create a framework to enable the safe, responsible expansion of stablecoins… allowing us to extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers all around the world… there will be billions of people brought into the crypto economy and storing their savings in [BTC].”
Apparently forgetting that it was only three years ago that he called BTC “a scam” and “another currency competing against the dollar,” Trump said Saturday that “those who say that [BTC] is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards. I believe it is exactly backwards. [BTC] is not threatening the dollar. The behavior of the current U.S. government is really threatening the dollar.”
Trump flattered his audience by calling them “modern-day Edisons and Wright brothers and Carnegies and Henry Fords.” But Trump’s cynicism was on full display when he said tech bro/failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had told him that “175 million people” are involved in crypto. After learning this, Trump said his campaign team told him: “Let’s be nice to them, at least until after the election.”
The grift never dies
While Trump’s anti-crypto comments have been memory-holed by the bros who now view him as a fully ‘orange-pilled’ member of their cult, not everyone is buying this conversion as anything other than the latest Trump cash-grab. Trump held a private event ahead of his Nashville speech, but the 150 guests who qualified to attend must bring their checkbooks.
Those who joined Trump, his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Ramaswamy at a special roundtable during this ‘VIP reception’ needed to pay $844,600, the maximum contribution allowed under federal campaign financing rules. That also got you a photo with Der Donald, but you could opt for a photo-only package that costs $60,000 per individual or $100,000 per couple.
Mike Brock, a senior executive at Jack Dorsey’s BTC-friendly Block payment processing firm, recently tweeted that “Trump tried to ban Bitcoin in 2020, until [former Treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin and a group of people in the administration slow-walked his wishes… I know. I was invited to the meeting.”
Brock, who has donated to both Democrat and Republican campaigns, added a warning that Trump “will sell you out like everyone else he has sold out. Which is literally everyone.”
Strategic Beanie Babies
Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave his own speech in Nashville, noting Trump’s hasty conversion to BTC fanboy. Kennedy told the audience that “we don’t really have any insurance, do we, that [Trump’s] endorsement [of digital assets] is not another ephemeral monetary policy fad du jour.”
Kennedy told the conference that if his long-shot third-party campaign succeeded, he would transfer the government’s seized BTC to the Treasury Department “to be held as a strategic asset.” Kennedy further promised to order the Treasury to buy an additional 550 BTC tokens “daily, until the U.S. has built a reserve of at least four million [BTC] and a position of dominance that no other country will be able to usurp.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) used her conference appearance to promote new draft legislation for the Federal Reserve to buy one million BTC over five years using excess reserves at Federal Reserve banks. Lummis said the government would hold this BTC for “a minimum of 20 years” as part of a newly created strategic reserve with “one purpose: reduce our debt.”
That debt reduction could prove a tall order given BTC’s history of price manipulation, particularly in tandem with the Tether (USDT) stablecoin. We can’t wait for the government to announce the end of Medicare because the fiat value of the government’s four million BTC cratered following the revelation that Tether’s reserve assets are just a piece of paper saying Tether’s totally good for it, man.
Regardless of the soundness of these plans, the growing support for a federal strategic reserve of BTC is a pretty sad commentary on just how far Bitcoin has fallen since Satoshi announced its launch in 2009 as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Following Bitcoin’s forced 2017 conversion to BTC and a new identity as utility-free “digital gold”, BTC has only one purpose: increase in value by whatever means necessary. The Nashville crypto bros appear all too eager to embrace the big centralized authority they once claimed to despise, so long as it pumps their bags.
Despite all the hype, BTC’s fiat price finished out the weekend around $68,000, about where it started the week. In other words, the hype machine doesn’t seem to work as planned. Quick, print more Tethers!
Congress gonna congress
Despite the new Lummis bill, efforts to pass any ‘crypto’ legislation in the current Congress seem to have stalled, effectively punting remaining hopes to the ‘lame duck’ session that will follow November’s election.
On July 25, Politico reported on efforts by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) to pass yet another new digital asset bill. Stabenow, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, has been circulating a discussion draft of a bill that would define ‘digital commodities’ as tokens that aren’t used “for the purchase or sale of a good.”
As with Stabenow’s previous (failed) legislative efforts, digital commodities would fall under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), leaving a smaller list of digital securities to be overseen by the SEC.
While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said last week that he wants to pass some crypto legislation this year, not all of his party is on board. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a reliable thorn in “crypto’s” side and a Senate Financial Services Committee member, told Politico that Stabenow’s bill doesn’t go far enough. “Advancing a crypto bill that doesn’t deal directly with the problems of money laundering… makes no sense at all.”
But Warren is having fresh difficulties passing her own legislation. Last week, sharp eyes discovered that Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) had removed his name as co-sponsor of the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, leaving just one other Republican (South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham) in support of the nearly all-Democrat affair.
Harris wild card
Joe Biden’s surprise decision not to seek re-election and Harris’s quick seal of the deal to replace him on the ballot have seriously upended the presidential race. Seemingly a shoo-in just 10 days ago, Trump is now tied with Harris in most polls.
As such, the digital asset sector hopes Harris represents a break from the Biden administration’s perceived antagonism toward all things “crypto.” Harris was allegedly invited to attend the Nashville shindig, but the organizers apparently couldn’t seal the deal (and subsequently heaped public scorn on Harris).
Harris’s positions on digital assets aren’t well-defined. While she didn’t attend the Biden administration’s recent ‘crypto roundtable,’ one of the attendees—investor Mark Cuban—said Harris’s team later reached out to him (and others with an interest in the sector) for input on a number of tech issues.
Cuban told Politico that “the feedback I’m getting, but certainly not confirmed by the VP, is that she will be far more open to business, [artificial intelligence], crypto and government as a service.” In another interview, Cuban said he was “getting multiple questions from her camp about crypto. So I take that as a good sign.”
Similar hopes were expressed in a letter signed by 14 Democratic members of the House of Representatives to the Democratic National Committee. The letter urged the DNC to “take a forward-looking approach to digital assets and blockchain technology.”
The letter claims that “crypto and blockchain technologies have an outsized impact in ensuring victories up and down the ballot” and thus, “it is critical that our party presents a persuasive case to crypto voters.” The signatories call for “pro-digital asset language in the party’s platform,” the selection of a “pro-innovation SEC chair” and a vice-presidential candidate “sophisticated in digital asset policy.”
An opposing voice came on July 26, as Politico quoted House of Representatives Financial Services Committee member Brad Sherman (D-CA) saying he’d urged Harris to “stick with the positions of the Biden-Harris administration on crypto.”
Sherman rubbished Trump’s recent pro-crypto ‘pivot’ as a direct result of the digital asset sector funneling millions to his campaign. Sherman called Trump “a slot machine president—you put in the money, you pull the handle, you get what you want.”
Clearly not done with the bon mots, Sherman delivered an epic burn on the floor of the House when he posed the utterly rational question: “Why is [BTC] more valuable than Skibidi [Toilet] coin? It is today. Maybe not after the movie.”
Musk muddies the waters
BTC fans sounded the alarm last week when their X/Twitter posts using #Bitcoin abruptly stopped showing the emoji associated with that hashtag. Coming just days before the big Nashville shindig, ‘Crypto Twitter’ was awash in theories as to what the removal was meant to signify.
The simple explanation was that Elon Musk had tweeted the previous week that he’d instructed his team to “end special hashtags.” Musk was never a fan of hashtags, in part because he couldn’t figure out a way to monetize them and shore up his social media platform’s dire financial straits.
Musk made far larger headlines earlier this month when it was reported that he would be donating $45 million per month to America PAC, a new political action committee supporting the Trump campaign that’s also supported by the Winklevoss twins of Gemini fame, through the rest of the election cycle.
But in an interview with podcaster/wannabe-Bond-villain Jordan Peterson last Monday, Musk called these reports “simply not true,” adding that “I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump.” Musk went on to say that he didn’t want the new PAC to be “hyper-partisan” and later tweeted that he was donating “some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level.”
Trump told Fox News last Thursday that Musk “never told me he was giving” that amount to the campaign. However, Trump said Musk “did say ‘I strongly endorse [Trump],’ despite the fact that [Trump is] against” the Biden administration’s electric car mandate.
Reflecting Trump’s transactional approach to everything, Trump praised Musk at a campaign rally (despite saying just two years ago that Musk would be “worthless” without government subsidies). Trump told the same audience that “we have to make life good for our smart people.”
This begs the question: given that most of the Nashville conference audience is too stupid to tell BTC from the original Bitcoin, why is Trump being so nice to them?
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