Stop With the Bitcoin, Already

On Sunday, President Trump reiterated his intention to create a “crypto strategic reserve” for the United States. Besides the usual references to Bitcoin and Ethereum, this time he also mentioned three relatively obscure cryptocurrency thingamajigs: XRP, Solana, and Cardano. In attempting to find out what these entities really are, I stumbled across this definition of Cardano: “A decentralized, open-source blockchain network that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts.” On its website, Cardano boasts that it is “a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.”

Translation: Very powerful people are creating make-believe digital toys and marketing them in a sophisticated pump-and-dump scheme that has already yielded untold billions of dollars. In the 24 hours following Mr. Trump’s announcement, the price of Cardano rocketed upward by nearly 50 percent. Now that’s some “positive global change,” right there.

This whole crypto game is getting completely out of hand. There is an element within the Trump Administration, along with some of the President’s big-money backers, that is capitalizing on the financial woes of the country by sucking the last blood out of the nation’s fiscal corpse before the cadaver is sent from the morgue to the graveyard.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Congress responds to the challenge of $36 trillion in national debt by formulating a budget proposal that will actually increase spending. Nero fiddles while Rome burns.

Government complicity in the crypto swindle is of a piece with the proposed “sovereign wealth fund” that will, in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “monetize the asset side of the US balance sheet for the American people. We are going to put the assets to work, and I think it's going to be very exciting….There'll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country, as we work to bring them out for the American people.”

Translation: We’re bankrupt, so we’re going to have a national foreclosure sale and sell everything that isn’t nailed down. Wait, on second thought, even what is nailed down can be “monetized” or “tokenized” or put on the “blockchain,” or whatever. Yes, Mr. Bessent, it is very exciting indeed, especially for the vultures who will be feasting on the carrion.

The Trump Administration has done great work in exposing and dismantling some of the nation’s worst scams, such as green energy, diversity, and the Ukraine money laundromat. But please, please, do not replace these scams with new grifts that threaten to derail your excellent accomplishments.