Donald Trump calls BTC ‘scam’ in latest tirade on Fox Business
Former U.S. President Donald Trump is back to publicly disseminating disinformation, this time fatuously claiming that the BTC token is a workable currency.
On Monday, Trump called in to Stuart Varney’s Fox Business television program Varney & Co to engage in one of his patented stream-of-consciousness word salads, including slamming Facebook for banning him from the platform for another two years, a move that Trump said was aimed at “destroying our country and they don’t want to hear a sane voice.” Ahem.
As Trump’s COVID-impaired lungs began to tire, Varney threw out a digital currency query: “You don’t like Bitcoin? You wouldn’t invest in Bitcoin?” To which Trump responded: “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I was surprised… you know, with us it was at $6,000, much lower. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar. Essentially, it’s a currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That’s what I’ve always said.”
First off, we assume that Varney’s reference to ‘Bitcoin’ was in fact a reference to the BTC token that was the subject of all that irrational exuberance in Miami over the weekend. (We all know that BSV is the only protocol that remains true to the original vision of peer-to-peer electronic cash described in the 2008 white paper and thus the only one that deserves to be called Bitcoin, correct?)
With that out of the way, we commend Trump on acknowledging that BTC is a scam, given that its high transaction fees and glacial confirmation times have rendered it pretty much useless in terms of functioning as a true form of currency. Hence the frantic narrative shift over the past few years to define BTC as ‘digital gold’ that one buys and never, ever, ever, EVER sells, otherwise Max Keiser will come stand on your front lawn, screaming profanities until you call the police.
Yet in the same breath, Trump claims BTC is ‘competing against the dollar’. In reality, BTC is competing against more traditional financial hedges (precious metals, real estate, etc.) to become a valid ‘store of value’, despite the fact that BTC’s wild valuation swings make it an utterly unreliable store of value, ticking off yet another box on the ‘provably scammy’ checklist.
It’s worth remembering that Trump hasn’t always been so concerned with the fate of the greenback. During his 2016 campaign, Trump bragged that he was ‘the king of debt’ and suggested he would negotiate a haircut with U.S. debt holders—a tactic he employed many times during his bankruptcy-prone business career—which would have undercut the one thing the dollar still has going for it: the fact that the U.S. government has never defaulted on its loans.
The ensuing panic in global financial markets forced Trump’s advisers to fan out to clarify that their candidate (a) never said what he said and (b) to ignore what he said because he didn’t really mean it. So Trump isn’t exactly the final word on sound fiscal policy matters.
Anyone interested in learning more about the real Bitcoin—including BSV’s ability to serve not only as a friction-free, low-cost means of settling transactions, but also the BSV blockchain’s massive data-handling capacity—be sure to tune in to this week’s free live broadcast of the CoinGeek Conference in Zurich from June 8-10.
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