The Odyssey, Vladimir Putin, and How Crypto Saves America

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have found a way to use crypto to save America from itself.

It will not save any of us, however. Much more likely to make the cost of living in America painfully more expensive in years to come.

This thought begins a year ago, when one of Vladimir Putin’s top advisers predicted America would use crypto—particularly stablecoins—to revalue Uncle Sam’s massive debt. Now granted, that came from inside Putin’s orbit, so you could write it off as anti-American propaganda.

But as someone who’s active in crypto, and who has run through untold numbers of stablecoin transactions across multiple blockchains over the years, I’ve been thinking about how America might pull this off… because logically, there is some legitimacy to the idea.

And when you spend time thinking about it, the possibility turns pretty dark.

Worse, the necessary pieces are real and a lot of them are already on Scott Bessent’s desk. And when you connect all the dots, your wallet takes a hit you’ll never see coming.

The Two Pieces of Washington’s Crypto Puzzle

Piece 1 is the GENIUS Act, the crypto law that passed in the summer of 2025. It requires every dollar-based stablecoin, the cryptocurrencies that track the dollar 1-for-1, to be backed by real dollars or short-term US government debt.

Tether, the biggest stablecoin provider on the planet, already holds more US Treasury paper than Germany.

Piece 2 is a playbook. Specifically, one written in 2024 by Stephen Miran, Trump’s former top economic adviser and a former Fed governor. In Miran’s world view, America needs a much weaker dollar so its factories can compete globally again.

His view also requires that the dollar maintains reserve status so that Washington can keep borrowing fat bags of cash on the cheap.

Those two goals, however, are about as compatible as pancakes and mayonnaise. How do you shrink the dollar’s value without shrinking the world’s appetite for it?

How Do You Save America Without Sacrificing Americans?

The ancient Greeks had a story for exactly this problem.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus has to sail through a narrow strait guarded on one side by Charybdis, a whirlpool that swallows entire ships, and on the other side by Scylla, a six-headed monster hiding in the cliffs that snatches sailors off the deck.

There’s no clean way through. So Odysseus makes a captain’s choice. He hugs the cliff and gives up six men to save the ship. He warns the crew about the whirlpool.

He never mentions the monster.

For Bessent, Charybdis is $40 trillion of debt.

Scylla is the price of resetting that debt. And it’s everyday Americans he’s gonna sacrifice.

Here’s How the Crypto Trap Could Work

Here’s the path:

Step 1: Washington creates a nonprofit corporation, we’ll call it EagleCoin Trust. Congress has done this plenty of times. It’s how we got public broadcasting, for instance. It issues a stablecoin, we’ll call it EagleCoin, and it trades on various blockchains.

Under the GENIUS Act, it must be backed by cash or short-term Treasury bills; it can’t pay you a dime of interest.

Just like your dollar bills are issued by the Federal Reserve, not the Treasury Department, EagleCoin would be issued by a government-adjacent non-profit corporation, not by Treasury directly.

Step 2: Treasury launches its own blockchain a bit later. We’ll call that EagleChain. Congress orders every holder of US debt to move their bonds onto this new blockchain.

Step 3 is where you lose money: Every bond moving on to EagleChain from various other blockchains takes a haircut. Maybe it’s 15%. Maybe 25%. Who knows? It’s shaved off the top on the way in. Pick an excuse: Call it a security fee. Call it hacker protection. Call it whatever you like. There are many ways to spin what is, in precise terms, a default, just dressed up all sexy as a security protocol.

That’s the cost a bond holder must pay to move bonds—and to keep them secure—on EagleChain.

Twenty-five percent of $40 trillion: that’s $10 trillion. Gone. And about $2 trillion of that is IOUs in the trust funds behind Social Security, Medicare, and federal pensions. Write those down, and you’ve written down what’s promised to retirees.

Maybe DC imposes this unilaterally.

Maybe it’s polite about it and gathers together the world’s biggest Treasury holders and gives them a choice: Move all your debt onto EagleChain and accept the haircut, and you get to keep your access to American financial and consumer markets or American military protection.

Or refuse and pay a hefty user fee to access American markets.

And “user fee” is actually language built into Stephen Miran’s playbook.

Either way, foreigners dump the dollar and the dollar dives in value relative to major world currencies… So Stephen Miran gets his weak dollar.

And we’re all paying the price…