As the FT has reported this morning:
The total value of a memecoin backed by Donald Trump soared to more than $14bn over the weekend, before sinking following the launch of a rival coin by his wife Melania.
I feel it necessary to use a press release from an organisation that sends me daily updates, which I continue to note because they tell me everything I want to know about what so-called wealth advisers who embrace Bitcoin, amongst other things, are saying. That organisation is called De Vere, and it claims to be one of the biggest wealth managers in the world. The FT quotes them as such on occasion. Their press release had this to say:
Donald Trump's launch of the $TRUMP meme coin is sending shockwaves through the cryptocurrency market, with the coin's valuation skyrocketing by over 300% in less than 24 hours.
As of Sunday morning, $TRUMP hit a market cap of $5.81 billion, marking the former president's bold foray into digital assets and merchandise sales ahead of his upcoming inauguration.
Announced on Truth Social late Friday, $TRUMP was described as a celebration of Trump's “WINNING” the presidential election.
The coin, built on Solana's blockchain platform, debuted with a limited supply of 200 million coins. According to its official website, the supply is set to expand to 1 billion over the next three years.
While $TRUMP's meteoric rise has generated buzz, Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, urges caution.
“This is a revival of the meme coin trend we saw in 2021 and 2022, where many young, inexperienced investors got burned by extreme volatility,” he explained. “Without doubt, investors will get burned by this frenzy too.”
The deVere CEO highlights the speculative nature of meme coins, warning that their valuations can fluctuate wildly. He explained that while big money can be made by some, this type of investment is inherently high-risk and unpredictable.
He says: “Let's be very clear: this is more gambling than investing. If you're considering getting involved, you need to have a sound, diversified, long-term plan in place first.”
The $TRUMP coin's rapid ascent underscores the risks associated with meme coins, which are driven less by fundamentals and more by social media-fueled hype.
Nigel Green likens the phenomenon to gambling, explaining that many day traders are likely piling in with hopes of capitalizing on Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
“They're mostly not buying because they think the coin has inherent value,” he said. “They're buying because they hope others will drive the price higher, allowing them to sell at a profit.”
This strategy comes with significant risks, and he emphasizes that valuations for meme coins are likely to swing wildly in both directions.
Why quote so much of this? I have chosen to do so because I would say that everything they say is true of every crypto-currency, and not just these new 'coins' from Trump and his wife. The comments are as applicable, in my opinion, of Bitcoin as they are of Trumpcoins, whichever spouse has issued them. These are just gambling chips. That is it. Fools are, as has been known throughout history, easily parted from their money, and vast numbers of people will be in the USA today.
There is another reason for this, as well. In their own deeply tacky and startingly offensive way, the so-called coins are indicative of what the far-right's view of politics is all about. It is about using the power of the state to enhance the wealth, status and power of the far-right politician. That is all there is, ultimately, to their politics. It is an exercise in exploitation.
They do not offer solutions.
They come without any real policies that address any known problem.
They just come with the aim of extracting as much value for themselves as they can regardless of those that they harm - including their own supposed supporters - along the way. It is as if the kick of exploitation is the thrill that they seek.
That is the tyranny we are dealing with. We have to know our enemy.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Huh, whether Hitler, Pinochet or Franco, the extreme Right always knows how to feather its own nest.
Thank you and well said, PSR.
Another example would be the family that treats far right politics in France as a business. They often inherit town houses in the posh parts of Paris and holiday homes on the channel coast from supporters.
Imagine what would happen if sovereign currency nations all started taking “crypto” of any flavour, as tax payments. El Salvador has made bitcoin legal tender, giving the cryptocurrency the same status as the U.S. dollar!
A Trump coin exchange rate to the Bitcoin, is based on the US Dollar. I don’t see this ending well for the US Dollar.
Seems a good day to repost this long but well researched history of efforts to undermine fiat currency published in 2022. It is jaw dropping.
It ends:
‘The war over currency is but one front—along with traditionalism, nationalism, and energy—on the spectrum of current global conflicts. “You have to control three things: borders, currency, and military and national identity,” Steve Bannon said in 2017, speaking of his goals for the traditionalist fascist international. The increasing confluence of anti-Fed zeal with private intelligence collection presents an unprecedented risk of capture for democracies. At the same time, recent interest rate increases by the Fed have likely done more to pop the crypto bubble and disprove theories about bitcoin as an inflation hedge or store of value than any regulation ever could.
But if January 6 or Putin’s war in Ukraine have taught us anything, it’s that even bad ideas likely to end in disaster still have their appeal, and much harm can be wrought in their pursuit. The reactionary quest to restore “hard money” is just as attractive today as it was in 1933, and we should expect that those committed to the cause will try everything in their power—including microtargeted ads, disinformation, insurrection, launching futile wars, capture of the opposition, and purchasing entire social networks262 —to achieve their goal. The time has come to affirm our commitment to democracy over fascism and make serious, informed decisions about the future of money—in the full light of democratic oversight—before any more decisions are made for us through government capture, covert action, or violence.’
https://washingtonspectator.org/paranoia-on-parade/
The BRICS just need to heed Napoleon’s advice, i.e. do not interrupt when the enemy is making a mistake.
We need a system of money as a way to exchange goods and services instead of having to barter. We have fiat currencies controlled by Governments, they have value because the ‘Government’ says they do and you must use them in order to be able pay your taxes. Some on the far right dislike Government control of anything in principle. Currently crypto currencies have no inherent value and ‘investing’ in them is akin to gambling, you ‘could’ make money but someone else must lose it. However crypto currencies are not controlled by Governments. Do these billionaires envisage a world where national currencies don’t exist, big companies trade in crypto currencies they control? If we want to buy anything at all we must have, say ‘Amazon Vouchers’ So we need to demand our employers pay us with those same ‘Amazon Vouchers’ in order to be able to do so? Or is there (hopefully) some reason why this couldn’t work?
That is what they envisage
But in a world of vast numbers of currencies we return to barter
Richard Murphy wrote:
“we return to barter”
Adam Smith’s theory that barter was used widely before money was created is not true, and there is copious evidence to repudiate him on that issue. For more on this see David Graeber’s excellent book “Debt, the first 5,000 years”.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf
I know, and agree
But, where might qwe go if money fails?
To a slight extent these substitutes for money are already here, deeply embedded into ordinary retail commerce, and all far from the reach of regulators or consumer protection:
Gift vouchers (that expire before you use them) or just get lost
Savings/Christmas Clubs (where someone runs off with the pot, or if it is a company, just liquidates itself)
Every time a company gives you a refund or a compensation payment using a credit voucher or gift voucher instead of cash, or a utility company refunds you, not with cash but with “credit” on your already bulging credit account and you have to spend weeks trying to gouge your own money out of their grasping fingers.
Every time you use PayPal instead of a credit card, and lose your Consumer Credit Act protection
When your mobile phone company persuades you to regard your phone credit as a wallet, rather than a pre-payment for your communication device.
When the DWP arbitrarily decides to sanction claimants then deducts the “debt” from the payments they are entitled to.
Then there’s fungible tokens – I haven’t a clue how they work and could never afford them anyway. I don’t trust fungi, so many of them are poisonous 😉
If I buy a bit of art, I want the real thing in a frame and hung on the wall gathering real dust so I can admire it through my varifocals.
Resistance is when we consistently refuse to use such things. But it’s getting harder every day to do business, to buy or sell, without “the mark of the beast”, without which your transaction cannot be approved, please try later.
But those – fungible tokens apart are not money – they are poor stores of money, and so I have to disagree wth you on this one.
I can’t think of anything worthwhile that cryptocurrency actually does, and there’s something about it that seems emblematic of this point in history, a frenzy that has no foundation, something that is nothing that increases vastly in “value”. The fact that so many will chase the bubble, hoping to cash out and pass on to someone else the cost when it bursts is deeply repulsive. To me it’s a sign of desperate times, that so many will have nowhere else to turn but dumb luck for the hope of anything improving in their lives. In a world that is increasingly exploitative and difficult to live in, winning may feel like just compensation, the money to be made no more unjust than the rents and interest and dividends paid to the wealthy.
A man convicted of 34 counts of business fraud has issued a gambling chip that only has value if it is converted to the currency of the nation which he leads. He immediately receives the congratulations of the UK’s Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.
The best part of this is that Trump’s meme coin has been out shone by his wife’s meme coin.
The rapidity with which these coins can lose value has a term of art called a rug pull. 2.1 trillion of meme “valuation” can and has evaporated, live during a stream, in a fraction of a second.
I was a motivated to start poking around cryptocurrency again after seeing a scientist lured into crypto. He’s been suckered by the appeal to commodity backed currencies and the idea that bitcoin is a digital gold standard. The proposition crypto advocates make is that it observes the conservation of energy of the physical world; pure lunacy to anyone who has a software background. The digital world can be replicated infinitely.
A great deal of effort goes into consistency either through a centralized authority, or the blockchain’s non human consensus distributed authority, but blockchains, the network of auditor data centers, can fork. Cryptocurrencies have been forked. The owners of auditing data centers fork their wallet balances in the act. It represents a wee bit of a problem in terms of authoritative ledger. Which ledger is the authoritative? Which ledger carries legal force?
I am not at all comfortable with the level of competence securing the private keys that are everything to accessing wallet. Depending on the nature of a private key, the incredible increase in compute power like the kind of compute power of AI can dramatically reduce the time private keys can be cracked; solving the hash challenges of crypto are the same class of computation necessary to crack a private key. There is also the social engineering pathway to stealing keys.
A handful of US states are currently purchasing bitcoin as part of their reserves.
—
Two errata concerning the coin mining limit con that is used to imply crypto has discipline of a commodity backed currency and the distributed nature of blockchain used to imply that it cannot be controlled.
The availability of coins to mine decays with a power law. While mine-able bitcoin is slated to run out in 2140, 19 million of the total 21 million bitcoin that can be mined have already been mined very early on by Chinese data centers. Whatever data centers are still mining, are mining the very thinnest of the tail end of the remaining pool. Russia is the second largest miner of coin and they subsidize the process with their energy supplies. The largest miners of coins seem to be US owned concerns.
Instead of governments, crypto bros propose have a world where they control the currency system, but China crypto has cornered the market. It’s also a valuation system which is exceedingly volatile. Not an ideal characteristic for the means of exchange.
In all this, nothing has changed about commercial debt and commercial money creation.
One last tidbit is that a billionaire who has some affiliation with Eric Trump has been borrowing $2 billion a week purchasing bitcoin in some sort of arbitrage scheme.
The guys from Silicon Valley, the PayPal mafia have long-term goals of destroying the US government and the dollar so they can replace the nation with a patchwork of their own private held city states. That’s the libertarian utopia they tell everyone they are aiming for.
The Institute for Economic Affairs is nw promorting city states
A video is coming…
Thank you, both.
G: “A handful of US states are currently purchasing bitcoin as part of their reserves.” There are shills CNN and the BBC promoting this on business programmes, often lauding El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.
Long foretold by various on Twitter back in the day (e.g. bakerstreetherald), and European Powell on BlueSky now, this iteration of Charter Cities was supposedly debunked by Chris Gray on Byline times. However the whole business of Special Economic Zones and their hinterlands, and the private arbitration courts specified in the 25 year contracts, remain robustly obscure. Given the corruption allegations around Teeside detailed by Private Eye, one wonders if the ‘debunk’ was premature?
The IEA is now pushing the idea
I will address it soon
We should not ignore the human dimension to the cryptocurrency bubble. I know of someone with fragile mental health who has their life savings invested in crypto (despite the misgivings I shared). It is highly likely they will attempt suicide when the crypto crash happens. And they can’t be the only such vulnerable victim who has been seduced by the scam.
Agreed
@Richard Murphy
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/20/trumpcoins-represent-the-essence-of-far-right-politics/#comment-1002853
“But those – fungible tokens apart are not money – they are poor stores of money, and so I have to disagree wth you on this one.”
I don’t think they are money either, and so I have to agree with you on this one. 😉
I was describing things that seem to be “substitutes for money”. And with fungible tokens, they are very confusing substitutes – I confess my complete bafflement as to how they work. But I never confused them with money. Beyond that, I’m totally out of my depth. Might as well be magic mushrooms for all I know. 🙁
Funnily enough I have just received my notification that I will be direct debited for Vehicle Excise Duty for my & my wifes car.
Can I pay this in Crypto?
No
So Crypto isnt money
With respect, it dosnt matter how many people you reach, its surely time to leave X
https://substack.com/@themidnightmanuscripts/note/c-87420526?r=iyf4i&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I no longer post there.
Haven’t you noticed?
Apologies, I hadn’t.