Donald Trump lambastes Bitcoin and cryptocurrency: “Not a fan”
The general consensus among crypto-watchers is that any publicity is good publicity, and this qualifies.
United States President Donald Trump has made his first public comment on cryptocurrencies, specifically mentioning Bitcoin and Libra.
His initial comments were not the warm welcome many Bitcoin enthusiasts hoped for, and he instead lambasted cryptocurrencies as "not money", "highly volatile" and "based on thin air".
Social media quickly started buzzing with the news, as people started parsing the implications of the tweets.
A bipartisan issue
The general consensus from cryptocurrency fans on both sides of the political aisle is that this is good for Bitcoin.
One person enthuses that: "Now that he's said this, the super 'regulate everything' liberal base may actually open their minds to Bitcoin/Crypto just because Trump hates it, and realize how revolutionary it is."
Another person says: "Good publicity... As long as [president Trump] said something, the... [media outlets whose viewership skews older and more conservative] will be discussing this for the next 4 weeks."
Among regulators, cryptocurrency and blockchain have always been a safely bipartisan issue. On the retail enthusiast level, surveys have found that while cryptocurrency fans collectively skew further to the right than the general population, individual coin userbases will often be noticeably skewed to certain political alignments.
The apolitical consensus is that one way or another, this is going to result in a lot of publicity for cryptocurrency and that all publicity is good publicity.
Who wrote the Tweet?
Another popular topic of conversation was whether the president wrote the tweet himself, and if not him, then who?
"It's actually pretty nuanced.. no way [he] wrote it," said one crypto executive quoted by The Block.
"Definitely didn't [write it]. Sherman's lobbyists probably did," another expert half-joked.
Brad Sherman (D) is a famously anti-crypto congressman whose largest donors are from the financial sector.
"'Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behaviour.' Yes, that totally sounds like a thing Trump would say. I mean, if nothing else that demonstrates there's still at least one other person working in the White House," said one Reddit user.
"I'm disappointed that the tweet thread isn't entirely lookalike Trumps announcing their free ETH giveaways," another added.
Market impact?
Bitcoin prices gently rolled at the exact time of the tweet, but if there was any immediate market reaction it was indiscernible from the overall motion of the markets.
There was a major drop several hours later which may be related, but it's tough to know for sure.
Meanwhile
Elsewhere, US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell described Bitcoin as akin to digital gold, while emphasising that the US will certainly not be returning to the gold standard. This was widely deemed good news for Bitcoin, with some people pointing out that he may have inadvertently advocated strongly for Bitcoin over gold.
But Powell also outlined some concerns around the Libra cryptocurrency, highlighting the regulatory coals Facebook's cryptocurrency offering has yet to walk over.
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Disclosure: The author holds BNB, BTC at the time of writing.
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