Il promontorio della paura

FIRST CRYPTO PRESIDENT Overnight, the vast majority of the net worth ($59B) of the next President of the United States is now held in cryptocurrency. This will hold true even with a 90% drop. What are the implications? 1) First, President Trump just went from crypto being perhaps 1% of his net worth to 90%+. Many early Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana holders experienced the same thing. 2) Second, this phenomenon — the overnight relative devaluation of all non-crypto holdings — will be experienced by billions globally within our lifetime as fiat dies. 3) Third, every politician, influencer, and celebrity worldwide is watching mouth agog at the phenomenon. They’ll wait to see how it shakes out politically and financially, and if the memecoin shows staying power — big if! — they may do their own. 4) Next, if we do then get a large market with thousands of personal memecoins, it may actually be ok, because every buyer knows what they’re buying: the potential future brand value of the meme. 5) Much depends on how much value the TRUMP asset holds, if any. Other celeb memecoins went to zero quickly, but Trump is Trump, and has the unique qualities of (a) 100M+ followers, (b) daily non-stop coverage, (c) presidential immunity, and (d) unprecedented control over the government. 6) So, whatever form of political counterattack comes his way, Trump is now strongly incentivized to legalize cryptocurrency in the most aggressive way possible. 7) Of course, this will be attacked as a conflict of interest. But Biden took 10% for the big guy, and Pelosi traded her stocks, and Hillary monetized her speeches, and Podesta had his $300B climate slush fund, and Obama got his Netflix deal. All became millionaires via various deniable forms of payola for Democrats. 8) So, Trump’s rebuttal may be that he’s just doing everything in public. His claim may be that disclosure solves the conflict of interest problem. 9) And that may be true, but it doesn’t fully solve the *alignment* problem. As context: the CEO of a company is typically one of the largest shareholders, but he is aligned with all his employees because they hold the same shares. All holders rise and fall as one, ideally. 10) By analogy, you would ideally want the President to be aligned with his citizens, such that they all held (say) USA coin, which gave some dividend from the profits of the USA. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund. 11) So, one way of solving the alignment problem would be for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP to every US citizen. However, it might be easier for him to just send an email in his personal capacity to every Trump supporter offering them some free TRUMP. 12) Specifically: he could give 72 hours notice and all kinds of Democrats would also sign up for his personal email list, just to get the airdrop. 13) Would it be legal? Well, it is certainly legal for politicians to email out *requests* for money. But to my knowledge no politician has attempted a personal airdrop before, to *give* away money — and certainly not at this scale. 13) At current valuations, Trump could give $100 of locked up TRUMP to all 77M Trump voters via airdrop and it would “only” cost him $7.7B in an asset that was worth zero two days ago. Heck, he could give $500 per person and still have $20B+ left over. 14) Yes, it would cost Trump some of his asset to do this. But if you needed to join his email list to get the coin, and if the airdrop could be effected without any cap gains, it would “pay for itself” by turning his base into even more rabid supporters. 15) It could even give him the political support necessary to completely destroy the Democrat patronage machine. Basically, by joining Trump’s email list and supporting his crypto policies you’d get a kind of UBI. 16) And if 77M Americans are also benefiting from TRUMP, charges of conflict of interest go away. It’d be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between President & citizen. Worth thinking about.

I don’t love the downside risk of the TRUMP memecoin. Nevertheless, now that’s it’s out there, the holders may want to add value to the asset — if only to buffer the impact of a possible crash. Here’s how they could do that. 1) First, recall that the onchain nature of memecoins means that creators can permissionlessly add value to them over time. So, you could allow TRUMP holders to attend offline community events. The various rallies and balls at the inauguration could be continued on a smaller scale back home, with holders gaining access. 2) Second, an online community of Trump supporters could set up token-gated access, such that you need to hold a certain amount of the asset to enter a digital forum. Over time, this might even become a type of provable ingroup loyalty signal. 3) Third, recall that the onchain nature of memecoins means there is a public list of all TRUMP holders. As of the time of this post, there are 771,250 on Solscan. Think of this like an onchain email list, and suitable for airdrops — or political messages. What kind of messages? Well, the holder list is highly enriched for right-of-center people around the world with at least enough tech/finance acumen to buy a coin. So this audience of 750k+ could be useful for conservative and libertarian politicians worldwide.