Why a Trump Presidency Could Spark an "Altcoin Explosion"

We're entering a wild west stage combination of scamming and gambling. The altcoin explosion under sort of lax regulations, you know, would siphon demand away from bitcoin.

So let's talk about Trump's win in the recent US Elections. He made a few bold promises to the crypto industry. The first one is firing SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. Another one is creating a national reserve of bitcoin. And he also promised to make the United States hub for bitcoin mining. Do you think that he will follow through these promises?

So, yeah, I mean, I think Gensler is not going to stick around one way or the other. So whether he resigns first or is sort of asked to leave is kind of irrelevant. I don't think he. He stays in that seat for much longer. I am really optimistic that Trump will hold to his promise of a pardon for Ross Ulbricht. So that would be a good one for him to actually see through. As far as the bitcoin strategic reserve, that's kind of the fuzziest of the promises. And there's no indication that that would necessarily involve purchases of bitcoin. It might just involve the sort of continued the confiscation perhaps of some of the. The bitcoin that's been seized and, and not giving it back to its rightful owners, for instance. So we'll see. We'll see what happens there. And then what was the other one?

Making America a hub for bitcoin mining?

Bitcoin mining, yeah. Yeah. So I think that that, that's been a trend that's been in motion for a long time. It's actually not good for bitcoin to have it be too centrally sort of centralized in one jurisdiction. So I kind of like the split where it is with, you know, 40%, 50%, something like that in the U.S. but you see the rise of sovereign mining happening very quickly. There's rumors of the Saudis getting into it. There's been rumors for a couple of years now about China nuclear actually doing bitcoin mining, or I don't know if that it makes sense to try to be a majority, like more than 50% of hash rate in the USA. But certainly being the largest contributor of hashrate, I think is a great goal for the administration.

I want to just to touch upon something that you said a few months ago in another interview that we had last year when we were in the midst of the crackdown by the SEC and the other state agencies on crypto. You seem to be quite favorable towards this action that were taken Mainly against the world of crypto, not against bitcoin.

I mean, the SEC is doing its job, which is to, you know, basically protect people from Ponzi schemes and scams and unregistered securities.

So do you think that by firing Gary Gensler at the SEC and introducing sort of lax regulatory policies for crypto, Trump could potentially harm the bitcoin industry?

No, I think if I recall, our argument was mostly around kind of like whether there was actually a choke point 2.0 or whether that was just kind of a natural reaction to all the scams that had been perpetrated in the crypto space. And it was kind of inevitable that, you know, government officials who are responsible for regulating something that then goes haywire and a bunch of people get hurt. You know, if they want to remain in office or keep their post, if they're in at an agent at an agency, then they have to do something. Right? So it was kind of more a point that this was something that crypto had kind of brought on itself. And I didn't see it as existential for bitcoin. You know, bitcoin companies don't have any problem getting banked because bitcoin's not a security for sure and doesn't have sort of, you know, if you're like a reputable company with, with good people running it and don't have a track record of scamming people, then you don't have a problem getting banking relationships. So that was just kind of calling BS a little bit on, on the narrative there. Now, as far as like, what actually happened in this election, you saw just an absolute flood of donations coming from the non bitcoin crypto industry for the most part. And sometimes wrapping themselves in a bitcoin flag or trying to do the orange washing affinity scamming thing and get sidled up to bitcoin. But for the most part, I think they bought their freedom. They made the donations, they worked with the lobbyists, and they created these packs and it was something like 50% of the donations for the cycle. Massive TV ad blitz is funded by crypto packs for pro crypto candidates and attacking anti crypto candidates. And it's not too dissimilar from the letter writing campaign and all the lawsuits launched by Scientologists, you know, 40 years ago when they were trying to get Scientology, you know, recognized as a religion. And they choked the federal court system and the state court system and they basically gave up and said, okay, you can be a religion. And then they haven't paid tax on real Estate ever since. And so they own land all over L. A. So it's very similar. Like this is not the first time that you've seen sort of regulatory capture by an industry or an entity of some sort to, to sort of further their goals. So I think it's, it's, we're entering a wild west stage. You know, I'd call it, you know, a new Scambrian explosion or, you know, kind of came up with a term that I launched on Twitter a few days ago, the age of scambling. Kind of a combo combination of scamming and gambling. But it's also kind of, it's more innocuous than the last round because I think it's sort of been laid much more bare. First off, bitcoin has been completely separated from the world of crypto, like non bitcoin crypto in the minds of like the media, the political candidates, their platform statements. I think the markets, the ETFs obviously have, have shown that with the astronomical rise of, of the Bitcoin ETFs and like total lukewarm to just who cares launch of Ethereum ETFs and I don't think the other Altcoin ETFs will do well either. And so it almost kind of doesn't matter now that, that that battle has been one of separating bitcoin from crypto.

But so we can say that the results of this election were not like a major reason of, of happiness for you. Like you would have been fine enough with any results.

I'm, I'm happy. I'm happy either way. Yeah, I just think it doesn't really matter. I think that's why I wear a shirt like this. You know, we don't care. Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, you're a bitcoiner. It's kind of above politics or orthogonal to politics. And politics just don't really matter in the long run. It can certainly have short term effects, but you don't even know what the second and third order effects of that are. You know, you were just talking about maybe the altcoin explosion under sort of lax regulations, you know, would siphon demand away from bitcoin, which is possible. But it may also be that, you know, the second order effect of having more regulatory clarity for crypto just makes it even more remote that any government would ever do anything major contra bitcoin, which is kind of the silver lining in something like this. So I just see crypto, if crypto is free to do whatever it wants and the Trump family can Launch DJT and MAGA a Token and World Liberty Phi, everybody else is going to be able to do whatever they want. And so any regulators kind of chipping away at that, it's like there's this protective dome of, of crypto money and they of course have to, you know, the only one thing they can really defend that's true, that's near their space is bitcoin and so they'll essentially use their ill gotten gains to essentially defend bitcoin from governments.

So basically you're saying that if crypto wins, then bitcoin wins.

I mean, I think it's inevitable that there's pluses and minuses. So it siphons demand away and they use false marketing to claim that they're better than bitcoin in this way or that way, which has always been kind of the promise of altcoins. And obviously if you're unsophisticated and you don't see bitcoin as separate from crypto and you put a bunch of money into meme coins and Cardano and Ripple and then less money into bitcoin, you're harming yourself as an investor and you're harming your family's future. But you're still buying some bitcoin.

There were many predictions regarding price action of bitcoin following the potential election of Donald Trump. People are expecting to see 100k by the end of the year. Do you think it's possible?

I mean, I certainly think we'll see six figure bitcoin next year. I don't know about the timing of when. If I were going to actually put an over under bet on when that might happen by. It definitely feels like something that's achievable by the end of Q1. So I'd probably put like, you know, maybe, maybe the ides of March, like March 15th would be like you'd hit 100k, 50% chance before March 15th, 50% chance after March 15th. But that'd probably be about my target date for that. I think end of the year is aggressive. I think a lot of people are hoping for like inauguration day, which is I think January 20th. I think both are aggressive, not unachievable, but if I were going to put a target on it, I'd probably be more toward the end of Q1.

Got it, got it. All right, Corey, I think that was it. Thanks, thanks a lot for sharing your views and it was a pleasure to have you on our show.

Absolutely. Always love to be here. Thanks Joe.