Trump’s Bitcoin Plan

The pieces are falling into place earlier than I thought…

For a while now, I’ve been saying that I suspect Uncle Sam’s minions will, at some point this decade, figure out a way to use crypto to deal with the country’s excessive debt. (US debt sits at some $35 trillion now, and is on pace to exceed $40 trillion, possibly nearing $50 trillion, by 2028.)

And then last week, Donald Trump revealed his idea to use bitcoin to repay, or at least pay down, America’s debt.

Here’s what he told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo:

Who knows, maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion [national debt], hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little bitcoin and wipe away our $35 trillion.

Frankly, I have zero idea how that would work. It’s a big idea with no actual detail available for what it would look like. All I know for certain is that the US government currently owns roughly 213,000 bitcoin collected through seizures in criminal cases, and at today’s prices they’re worth about $15 billion.

To help manage America’s debt, bitcoin would need to approach $164 million per coin.

Such a price would value bitcoin at about 7.5x the combined value of all the assets in the world today… Not even remotely likely. And I say that as an unrepentant bitcoin fanboy.

That said, Trump’s comment highlights two truths about bitcoin that everyone needs to keep in mind…

1. Bitcoin now has political backing.

As I noted in a recent dispatch, both sides in American politics are now pro-crypto, a stark reversal from just a few months ago, when the Dems were raging against crypto as though it were some kind of underworld scourge from Stranger Things.

Now, it’s “game on” for bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and a large number of cryptocurrencies focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, AI, and something called DePIN, or decentralized physical infrastructure (think: owning the cell towers and allowing Verizon or another mobile provider to access them in return for sharing in their revenue stream).

This is the moment you want to be a buyer… and that’s exactly why I’ve put together my upcoming Crypto Profits Workshop on the hottest trends in crypto. (It’s FREE for Field Notes readers. Click here for your e-ticket.)

2. Bitcoin has the power to fix the world’s financial troubles.

A lot of people still don’t realize this.

Just recently, in fact, New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman called bitcoin and crypto “economically useless,” which makes perfect sense coming from an economist wedded to the failed economic theories that have led the world into its current debt trap. (This is the same guy who once said that the internet would have no more of an impact on the economy than the fax machine… How exactly has that worked out? The internet has literally changed every aspect of our lives and of business.)

The truth is, crypto has uncountable numbers of economically useful use-cases.

Companies are preventing product piracy with crypto. They’re tracking temperatures that food and drugs are exposed to in transit by way of crypto, thereby mitigating potential consumer harm. They’re lowering the cost and speeding up the process of moving money globally—so it happens in seconds rather than days. Real-world assets such as stocks, bonds, even rare whiskey are being transformed into crypto and that’s opening up entirely new financial markets—ones that are far more efficient than even the most modern financial market today.

These are the kind of crypto projects that are disrupting the world the way Netflix disrupted home-video and Amazon transformed retail… and they’re also the kinds of projects with outsize profit potential—if you get in now. (That’s why I’ll tell you more about opportunities like these my Crypto Profits Workshop.)

That’s just a few examples. So many more exist.

So, Paul Krugman (as is too common for a Nobel Prize winner) is dead wrong.

But Trump is dead right.

Kamala Harris is too—assuming the Dems’ new candidate does emerge as fully pro-crypto, which she’s been moving towards.

All fiat currencies, especially Western currencies, are facing existential threats. Not from bitcoin and crypto, but from their own governments and the lawmakers who, over the last 50 years or so, have bought into the Keynesian notion of aggressive government spending and lower taxes as a way to spur consumer demand, which then grows the economy.

It’s a flawed theory for a variety of reasons I won’t dive into here.

All I will say is that decades of Keynesian economics have led us to this point where Western politicians have buried the world in a suicidal quantity of debt.

At some point, an event is certain to happen that spooks consumers, savers, and investors. Let’s call it the mother of all bank runs.

People are going to flee fiat currencies, including the dollar, because the value of the paper in their pocketbooks will be sinking dramatically relative to food, housing, cars, gasoline, or the price of a Red Bull and a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos.

And as humans have done in similar moments across the span of history, they will dump government-backed money and fly into any asset where they feel they can preserve their wealth and their purchasing power.

Bitcoin fits that bill.

Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist, and a good chunk of them (estimates are 3.7 million) have been forever lost.

No person, no agency, no government anywhere in the world controls bitcoin. There’s no one and no government body that can unilaterally increase the number of bitcoin for political or economic expediency.

And that right there, Mr. Paul Krugman, is “economically useful.”

People can (rightly) argue that bitcoin will never be a currency that you and I spend at Piggly Wiggly on a regular basis. That’s true. But no one who understands bitcoin expects that anyway. I would never look to spend bitcoin on a package of Twinkies and a root beer. Other cryptos will serve in that role.

Bitcoin, instead, is clearly emerging as a financial harbor asset, despite its volatility. People want to own it because a) they expect the price to rise into the hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, and b) they want protection from the government purposefully destroying fiat currencies as a way to ease their extreme debts.

Right now, that group of people is small relative to the global population—106 million bitcoin holders globally, based on a 2023 estimate. That’s a measly 1.3% of the global populace.

So, ask yourself: With both America’s political parties solidly pushing a pro-crypto stance… and with Western governments increasingly beholden to their debts and the massively expanding debt payments they must make… what happens when that mother of all bank runs does happen?

What happens when hundreds of millions of savers and investors around the world suddenly want out of failing fiat currencies and, instead, want to put their cash into an asset that only has 21 million coins, or about 0.0026 coins per global inhabitant?

This isn’t a guess. This is a fact: Bitcoin’s price is going to the moon.

And other crypto will follow. That’s why I’ve put together my Crypto Profits Workshop… where I’ll reveal much more about my strategy for big crypto wins in this strange moment.

The crypto boom is far from over… but it won’t be around forever.

Those savvy enough today to understand what bitcoin and crypto represent, and why Donald Trump sees it as the solution to America’s debt woes… Well, those are the folks who are not only going to survive the monetary crisis to come—but profit from it.