Mr. Crypto Goes To Washington

With Donald Trump back in the White House, the floodgates for cryptocurrency scams have been flung wide open.

By Hadas Thier, Jacobin

“You’re going to be very happy with me,” Donald Trump told thousands of rapt Bitcoin believers back in July. I was standing within the throng, having gone down to Nashville to cover the annual Bitcoin conference last summer.

The conference hall was chilly and darkened, but the energy level was feverishly high, the crowd whooping and hollering as the then-presidential hopeful hit all the right notes, calling Bitcoin a “miracle of humanity” and rattling off a list of promises — the most popular among them, to fire Gary Gensler, chair of the crypto-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC under Gensler was widely decried by the crypto community for what they claimed was the commission’s “reign of terror against crypto.” Trump also promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, a Bitcoin-fueled black market for drugs and contraband, and declared that he would create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” with Bitcoin that has been seized by the Department of Justice.

Most of all, Trump vowed to help Bitcoin “skyrocket like never before, even beyond your expectations,” noting that Bitcoin prices surged by 3,900 percent during his first four years in the White House. “Now compare that to just after 3.5 years of [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris adjusted for inflation. Bitcoin is up 50 percent. Now 50 percent sounds good, but not when you’re comparing it to almost 4,000 percent, right?”

Incidentally, during his first tenure in the White House, Trump had declared himself “not a fan” of crypto, complaining that the value of cryptocurrencies was “highly volatile and based on thin air.” But here we are in the dystopia that is 2025. Cryptocurrencies — digital tokens like Bitcoin, Ethereum, DOGE, and tens of thousands of others that can be created and traded on the internet using decentralized technology — are back in the mainstream. Their fraud and scam-riddled history remains, as does crypto’s lack of social utility and surplus of hype, speculation, and grift. And the newly converted Bitcoiner in Chief is now issuing $TRUMP, his own highly volatile meme coins, ostensibly conjuring up tens of billions of dollars out of thin air.