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Trump Wants to Court Cryptocurrency Investors. Here’s How They See the Financial Future
Amid a presidential campaign that could determine the future of cryptocurrency, industry leaders at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville envision a future where the U.S. dollar is pegged to the Bitcoin standard.
“What happened in 1971 is Nixon took us off the gold standard,” said Brian Estes, a cryptocurrency adviser to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. “So we’ve been running an experiment for the last 53 years, and that experiment is failing.”
He argues that the scarcity of bitcoin, which has a fixed volume to be digitally mined, makes it a new way to secure the value of our money.
“As humans default back to a hard money system, like the one we’ve had for 3,500 years, my view is that we’re not going to default back to gold. We’re not going to default back to gold because gold had problems, it was centralized. My view is that we’re going to default back to the new version of gold that’s called bitcoin,” he said.
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Bitcoin has more than doubled in value in the past year, now near its all-time high. The momentum is fueled by a GOP party platform that promises a future where Americans have a “right to self-custody of their digital assets and [can] to conduct transactions free from government surveillance and control.”
“People under 40 are totally educated on what cryptocurrency is, they understand bitcoin. If you talk to people over 50, they don’t care much,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, a bitcoin mining business. “Once you make buying and selling cryptocurrency as easy as buying and selling AT&T stock, the 50-plus demographic will start to embrace it, and I think what we’re going to see in the next three years is a wave of retirement accounts allocating to bitcoin.”
The Nashville conference was marked by speculation that Donald Trump might announce plans for a strategic national cryptocurrency reserve if elected to a second term.
“We have $35 trillion of debt in this country,” Thiel said. “If the U.S. government held two million bitcoins, at today’s price of about $120 billion, a little more, at $20 million a bitcoin, the United States would be worth $42 trillion. They could pay off the national debt without having to raise taxes, without having to disqualify any discretionary spending or entitlement spending. It would solve a lot of problems.”