Donald Trump’s cryptocurrencies rant: Allow me to retort

Blow up a balloon, hold it tight in your fingertips and then let it go. See how it farts its way around the room in all directions? This is Donald Trump’s brain and this week his brain decided it would be a good idea to write about Bitcoin.

In the words of the great Samual L Jackson…Well, allow me to retort.

Trump is wrong about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies not being money, because whether a thing is money or not depends on how we use it. It’s all about context. Cigarettes are money in prisons, bullets are money in war zones and Bitcoin is money in Venezuela. Bitcoin is in fact money in a myriad of different ways all over the world and it has a chance of becoming the best money we’ve ever created.

Let your mind linger on the following: Bitcoin is borderless, it has a global price, it is permissionless, censorship resistant and truly native to the internet. Its issuance cannot be inflated, it isn’t owned or run by a central authority and its codebase is open source. This means it belongs to everyone, always. Think software for money with a free licence to use it how you wish in perpetuity. It’s not possible to win a fight against this kind of utility, and just like all the other software we’ve invented, in time it will eat the world. No wonder old men in suits are shaking their fists at it.

Imagine giving Donald Trump a money printing machine and then asking him kindly not to use it. My thoughts exactly… This is why the US economy is 22 trillion in debt and why the average lifespan of a government backed fiat currency is 27 years. There will be a reckoning, and when it comes it will be something like Bitcoin that comes to the rescue.

Bitcoin is based on mathematics, millions of participants with ‘skin in the game’ proving their participation by paying for the cost of energy (mining) and thereby creating the largest network of computational hashing power we’ve ever created. It is hugely robust in terms of its network, it’s as trustworthy as our best encryption affords and as strong as humanities collective fascination with the profit motive. Furthermore, Bitcoin does not require a banking charter, just an internet connection and no amount of blurting out random thoughts on Twitter can change this fact.

At the end of his tweet thread Trump says the US dollar will always stay the most dominant currency in the world. Probably a good time to remember he has also said that he had the world’s biggest inauguration crowd, that he won the popular vote, that Kim Jong Un is a smart, great leader and that his father, Fred Trump was a German.

Watch that balloon fly!