Are you ready for the “crypto president”?
And even though he has already indicated his intent to claim the title, would it even be Donald Trump?
California-born Kamala Harris is the one with long-time personal and professional ties to Silicon Valley, where she’s gained strong financial and sectoral support in past California elections.
Admittedly, whether or not a candidate is batting for bitcoin does not seem to be a burning campaign issue except for some modest portion of tech bro and financier types, though Forbes called the crypto voting bloc “increasingly important”. Then again, that article was written by a bitcoin consultant.
Trump’s announcement of Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance as his choice for vice-presidential running mate two weeks ago got a certain corner of the tech world very excited because Vance is pro-cryptocurrency. If there are any votes to be had from fans of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or virtual currencies, Trump is eager to claim them.
In recent weeks, even before Vance’s anointing, Trump promoted himself on his social network Truth Social as pending protector in chief of the tens of millions of Americans who own some cryptocurrency. But in a June post, he overreached, stating that he’d ensure “all the remaining bitcoin [is] MADE IN THE USA!!!” – thus flagging to anyone who knows anything about cryptocurrency that the former president doesn’t actually know very much about it at all.
A key point about cryptocurrencies is that they are borderless and not under the control of any state, and can be minted and used anywhere.
Whatever. Facts and truth are malleable in Trump’s world.
Nor have they been a significant feature of the cryptocurrency sector, which has been plagued with an image problem after some spectacular company collapses, arrests of crypto entrepreneurs and the high profile trial and conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran one of the largest Silicon Valley crypto exchanges.
And remember the mid-pandemic obsession with NFTs? By the end of last year, most of that briefly booming market was thought to be worthless. Even the infamous Bored Ape NFT has tumbled.
Vance has been having his own campaign travails as old interviews and comments surfaced of him lambasting Trump, and of course, single childless women with cats. Vance was reportedly pushed as a candidate by far right tech billionaire and PayPal head, Peter Thiel, and his political and tech circle. That’s the Thiel who also founded creepy mass surveillance companies Palantir and Clearview.
And the same Thiel who late last year told the Atlantic that the Trump administration “was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work”.
Just months later, Thiel and friends now think that if Trump is seasoned with a pinch of anti-cat lady crypto guy, everything will change, despite the Trump campaign’s regular signalling that they’d double down on everything that made it crazy and dangerous the first time around.
The crypto corner is truly bizarre.
In mid-July, the UK Independent headlined a story: “Bitcoin price surges after Trump assassination attempt”. Yes, target the crypto president-in-waiting and your investment will balloon (up almost 10 per cent). The crypto-fan thought process was that the attempt increased the likelihood of Trump’s election, but the cause and effect is chilling.
To top off this month’s crypto frenzy, Trump gave a keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville last week. Yes, that same Trump who described bitcoin in 2021 as “a scam against the dollar”.
The conference organiser enthused that the speech would be “heard around the world” even though the vast majority of voters would likely display Resting Bored Ape Face during a political speech about virtual currencies. The Forbes article said Trump’s speech “established his bona fides” on bitcoin – with crypto-flattering statements that were obviously drafted by campaign staff, as opposed to Trump’s nonsensical social media posts about shifting all bitcoin minting to the US.
Within hours of Vance landing on the ticket, I was emailed one of the crazier press releases I have ever received, in which a crypto consultant and financier gushed at length that Vance was a “stroke of genius” choice who “appeals to younger voters” because, apparently, they are all clamouring for decentralised financial systems. He complains, too, that Biden is “stifling innovation” (yes, that tired whine) because he “has implemented stricter regulatory measures aimed at curbing the excesses of the crypto market”. And your point is?
The Trump campaign crypto strategy was destabilised when Biden stepped down as candidate, and Harris stepped up.
Her tech “bona fides” are significantly stronger than Trump’s or Vance’s – meaning, they aren’t actually illusory or thin. Age also went out the window, except in the sense that Harris arguably looks like the stable adult in the room. That said, Politico noted that Harris doesn’t really have a pro or con record on crypto. She might be indifferent to becoming the “crypto president”.
Who cares? In a world beset by multiple turbulences, becoming the “crypto president” surely falls near the bottom of the lengthy list of things a president needs to be.
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