First Trump, then flump. Having inched up a little on Friday —“boosted” by Trump’s anti-crypto tweets in the early hours of the morning, apparently —bitcoin took a dive over the weekend. At pixel, it was trading just above the $10,000 mark, down about 15 per cent since Friday. Ethereum, the thinking man’s crypto, is down about 20 per cent, to around the $220 mark. The whole of CoinMarketCap, in fact, is a sea of red.
(We don’t know about y’all, but we think Trump’s tweets might have been more related to Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to create a global digital Federal Reserve equivalent.)
But suddenly, by Monday, the Trump bump had turned into a Trump slump.Apparently his twiticisms had mysteriously turned from being a reason to buy crypto into a reason to sell it.
Or maybe these price movements weren’t related to Trump after all? Maybe this was just another classic case of ump and dump in crypto markets? Who knows.
A bigger question than whether Trump’s tweets affect crypto, surely, is whether his tweets will affect him. Does coming out against censorship-resistant money risk alienating his base of bitcoin-loving libertarian bros? Are itcoin bros really libertarians these days? Are Trump supporters really libertarians these days? Does this affect the 2020 election?
We headed to the internet to get some answers.
Here’s a response to Trump’s tweets from @DJ_AVANTI on Twitter (bio: HODL CRYPTO 💎’s. Life is hard so deal with it! BTC 🚀):
(We are so curious about these 10 very intelligent levels that we have reached out to DJ Avanti to find out what they are . . .)
Then there was this, from far-right social networking site Gab (the site that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter posted his anti-Semitic message on before carrying out his massacre last year):
Away from Twitter, discontent with Trump spread across the internet forums. Over on the far-right “politically incorrect” /pol/ message board on the anonymous 4chan —a board that’s historically been pro-Trump and indeed is considered to have contributed to his rise to power —a thread was started under the title:
Donald Neocon Trump hates bitcoin
Replies included:
He would much rather have the banks control our money instead of it being decentralized. F***k him and his neocon ways. He deserves to die along with all the other bankers and fiat supporters.
And:
He just lost the election. anyone else wins now.
And:
I was on the fence about voting for him again, but no f**k that he’s a f**king moron.
Some people also seemed a bit cross over on bitcoin Reddit:
While others suggested the idea that you could simultaneously be a Trump supporter and a libertarian was a fallacy:
Maybe, though, the Donald could be for turning? Maybe he could win back the lolbertarians after all?
Nicholas Gregory, founder of an outfit called CommerceBlock (“the blockchain specialists”, apparently), sent the following commentary to our inbox:
A few years ago Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO, came out fighting against bitcoin and subsequently released JPMCoin. Give it a few years and we’ll probably see the emergence of TrumpCoin.
To be fair, he could be on to something with that one.
Back on Twitter, Justin Sun, the ICO founder who won the charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett on July 25, tried to play Trump at his own game: first of all by telling him he was being misled by the fake news MSM, and then by telling him that if he attended the lunch, he would become the world’s greatest expert in crypto.
Nothing could be more irresistible to the Donald, surely.
True idiocy. BTC can’t beat the United States of America and welcoming the clash is tantamount to an ant welcoming a boot, via AP:
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says the Trump administration has “very serious concerns” that the new digital currency planned by Facebook could be used for illicit activity such as money laundering, human trafficking and financing terrorism.
Mnuchin told reporters Monday at the White House: “This is indeed a national security issue.” His comments came a few daysafter President Donald Trump tweeted that Libra, the currency proposed by the social network giant, “will have little standing or dependability.”
Mnuchin says Facebook has “a lot of work to do before we get to the point where we’re comfortable with it.” His remarks came a day before Congress begins hearings on Facebook’s Libra plan. The head of the Federal Reserve also raised an alarm about the plan last week.
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Still, as the US ramped up its attack, BTC rallied overnight. If we can take the BTC market at its word (one almighty “if”) and it is digital gold, then it will be an interesting tension ahead as the Fed cuts, gold rallies and BTC becomes an open question for regulatory doom.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
