Author: Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, source: author's Twitter @balajis; translated by Baishuei, Jinse Finance
Overnight, the vast majority of the next US president's net worth ($59 billion) is now held in the form of cryptocurrencies. Even if it drops 90%, that will still be the case.
What does this mean?
1) First, President Trump's cryptocurrency holdings have risen from 1% to over 90% of his net worth. Many early Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana holders have experienced the same thing.
2) Second, as fiat currency disappears, this phenomenon - all non-cryptocurrency assets depreciating overnight relative to each other - will be experienced by billions of people worldwide in our lifetime.
3) Third, every politician, influencer and celebrity in the world is watching this phenomenon with bated breath. They will wait to see how it plays out politically and economically, and if a memecoin shows staying power - if! - they may do their own.
4) Next, if we really do get a large market with thousands of individual memecoins, that may actually be fine, as each buyer knows what they're buying: the potential future brand value of memes.
5) It largely depends on the value of Trump's assets (if any). Other celebrity meme coins quickly went to zero, but Trump is Trump, with the unique qualities of: (a) over 100 million fans, (b) non-stop daily coverage, (c) presidential immunity, and (d) unprecedented control over the government.
6) Therefore, regardless of whatever political backlash Trump faces, he now has a strong incentive to legalize cryptocurrencies in the most radical way.
7) Of course, this will be seen as a conflict of interest. But Biden took 10% for the big guy, Pelosi traded her stocks, Hillary monetized her speaking fees, and Podesta has a $300 billion climate slush fund, while Obama got a Netflix deal. They all became millionaires through various forms of deniable Democratic bribery.
8) So Trump's rebuttal may be that he's just doing everything out in the open. He may claim that disclosure solves the conflict of interest problem.
9) This may be true, but it doesn't fully solve the *alignment* problem. For context: the CEO of a company is usually one of the largest shareholders, but he is aligned with all employees because they hold the same shares. Ideally, all holders rise and fall together.
10) Similarly, ideally you'd want the president to be aligned with his citizens, so that they all hold (say) an America token that pays some dividends from America's profits. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund.
11) So one way to solve the alignment problem is for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP coins to every American citizen. However, it may be easier for him to simply email each of his Trump supporters individually and provide them with some free TRUMP coins in his personal capacity.
12) Specifically: he could give 72 hours' notice, and all sorts of Democrats would sign up for his personal email list just to get the airdrop.
13) Is this legal? Well, politicians soliciting *donations* via email is certainly legal. But to my knowledge, no politician has ever tried a personal airdrop to *gift* money - certainly not on this scale.
14) At current valuations, Trump could airdrop $100 of locked TRUMP to all 77 million Trump voters, which would "only" cost him $7.7 billion, when this asset was worth zero just two days ago. He could give everyone $500 and still have over $20 billion left.
15) Yes, this would cost Trump some of his assets. But if you have to join his email list to get the tokens, and if the airdrop can be done without any capital gains, then it will "recoup the cost" by turning his base into even more fanatical supporters.
16) It could even provide him the political support needed to completely destroy the Democratic donor machine. Basically, by joining Trump's email list and supporting his crypto policies, you'd get a kind of UBI.
17) If 77 million Americans also benefit from TRUMP, the conflict of interest accusations would disappear. This would be a new social contract, a personal relationship between the president and the citizens.
Worth pondering.
