Trump Says Never Sell Your Bitcoin – While Still Learning What Bitcoin is
Candidates often say what they think will sell.
In 2021 then president Trump said that bitcoin ‘just seems like a scam‘:
“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I was surprised — you know, with us, it was at 6,000 and, much lower. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar, essentially it’s a currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to the currency of the world. That’s what I’ve always said.”
In 2019 this is what he said about cryptocurrency:
“I’m not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” (credit: The Block)
As president, he said this:
As president, Trump cautioned that crypto assets helped facilitate illegal underground markets.
“We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It is called the United States Dollar!”
But this weekend, he was campaigning at the crypto conference in Nashville and he is all in on crypto. In speaking at the conference he attacked the feds efforts to reign in the billions of losses from crypto fraud, calling it a war on crypto rather than a war on fraud.
He said if he is reelected he will make it easier to mine crypto in the United States. Otherwise, he said, other countries will have it. What he didn’t say was … and those countries will suffer the billions in losses from crypto scams.
The 20,000 people at the convention liked what he said and might vote for him.
He conveniently did not mention, in his speech, the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Sam Bankman-Fried and the billions investors lost when the crypto exchange FTX went bankrupt.
One reason that crypto is popular with some Trump supporters is that even though they run the risk of losing everything since there is no insurance for crypto losses, is that, sort of, in theory, the government can’t track you. First of all, that is also true when you use dollar bills but more importantly, all crypto transactions are recorded in a public blockchain. Not for every crypto, but almost always. Years ago, the feds were ignorant as to how to track usage, but today, that is absolutely not true. Crypto wallet addresses are even on the feds sanctions lists.
Trump also said never sell your Bitcoin – which makes no sense; are you going to be buried with your crypto wallet and take it into the next lifetime? But he also said he is still learning what it is.
The price of Bitcoin fell a little bit after his speech. Not much, but it did not get a boost.
Crypto is very speculative and if you know what you are doing, it can be quite profitable, but if you don’t and you are just following the herd, you can lose it all.
by 