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Former Coinbase CTO: How can Trump resolve conflicts of interest caused by currency issuance?
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2025-01-20 16:02 7,548

Author: Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Source: Author Twitter @balajis; Compiled by: White Water, Golden Finance

Overnight, most of the next president of the United States’ net worth ($59 billion) ) are now held in cryptocurrency. This is true even with a 90% decline.

What does this mean?

1) First, President Trump’s cryptocurrency holdings increased from 1% to over 90% of his net worth. Many early Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana holders experienced the same thing.

2) Secondly, with the death of fiat currencies, this phenomenon - the overnight relative devaluation of all non-cryptocurrency assets - will be experienced by billions of people around the world in our lifetimes.

3) Third, every author, influencer, and celebrity around the world is watching this phenomenon with dumbfounded eyes. They'll wait to see how it fares, both politically and economically, if memecoin shows staying power - if! - They might make their own.

4) Secondly, if we do get a large market with thousands of individual memecoins, then this might actually be okay, since every buyer knows what they are buying: the meme's Potential future brand value.

5) A lot will depend on the value of Trump’s assets, if any. Other celebrity meme coins quickly go to zero, but Trump is Trump, and he has the following unique qualities: (a) 100 million+ followers, (b) non-stop daily coverage, (c) presidential immunity , and (d) unprecedented control.

6) Therefore, no matter what form of counterattack Trump encounters, he now has a strong incentive to legalize cryptocurrencies in the most radical way.

7) Of course, this would be considered a conflict of interest. But Biden took 10% for the big guys, Pelosi traded her stock, Hillary monetized her speech, Podesta had a secret $300 billion climate fund, and Obama got the Netflix deal. They all became millionaires through various deniable forms of Democratic bribery.

8) So Trump’s rebuttal might be that he just does everything in public. He may claim that the disclosure resolves the conflict of interest issue.

9) This may be true, but it doesn't completely solve the alignment problem. As background: A company's CEO is typically 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 would want the president to align himself with his citizens so that they all hold (say) US tokens that take a cut of US profits get somedividend. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund.

11) Therefore, one way to solve the consistency problem is to have Trump airdrop some TRUMP coins to every US citizen. However, it might be easier for him to personally email every Trump supporter offering them some free TRUMP coins.

12) Specifically: He could give 72 hours notice and various Democrats would sign up for his personal email list just to get airdrops.

13) Is this legal? Well, it's certainly legal for politicians to email *requests* for funds. But as far as I know, no politician has ever tried a personal airdrop to *give away* money before - certainly not on this scale.

14) At current valuations, Trump could offer all 77 million Trump voters $100 in locked-up TRUMP via airdrop, which would “only” cost him $7.7 billion , an asset that was zero two days ago. He could give everyone $500 and still have over $20 billion left over.

15) Yes, Trump will lose some of his assets by doing this. But if you need to join his email list to get the tokens, and if the airdrop can happen without any capital gains, it will "pay for itself" by turning his base into more ardent supporters.

16) It could even give him the support he needs to completely dismantle the Democratic patronage machine. Basically, by joining Trump's email list and supporting his encryption, you get a UBI.

17) If 77 million Americans also benefited from TRUMP, then the conflict of interest accusations would disappear. It would be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between the president and his citizens.

It’s worth thinking about.

Keywords: Bitcoin
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