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Trump's Crypto Embrace Could Be a Disaster for Bitcoin

At the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Donald Trump promised the crypto community the moon. They'd better hope they don't get it.

“At the end of the day, it's in the interest of industry to have a sound set of regulations that give Americans who are buying crypto confidence that they're not going to be victims of the next SBF,” says Peter Harrell, who was a senior director for international economics and competitiveness for the first half of the Biden term. If the government hadn’t enough to worry about with industry, privacy advocates, and reform-minded policy wonks urging liberalization of cryptography, the emergence of crypto rebels as popular culture heroes was a tipping point, an unexpected sign that the code wars had gone someplace new. For this first meeting [early Cypherpunk] Tim May had produced a 57-page handout, along with an elaborate agenda including discussion of “societal implications of cryptography,” “voting networks,” and “anonymous information markets.” There were reports on digital money in virtual realities and John Gilmore’s assessment of the NSA.

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