Former Coinbase CTO: How Trump resolves conflicts of interest caused by currency issuance

Author: Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Source: Author’s Twitter @balajis; Compiled by: White Water, Golden Finance

Overnight, the vast majority of the next president of the United States’ net worth ($59 billion) is now held in cryptocurrency. This is true even with a 90% decline.

what does that mean?

1. First, President Trump’s cryptocurrency holdings increased from 1% to over 90% of his net worth. Many early Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana holders experienced the same thing.

2. Secondly, with the death of fiat currencies, this phenomenon – the overnight relative devaluation of all non-cryptocurrency assets – will be experienced by billions of people around the world in our lifetimes.

3. Third, every politician, influencer, and celebrity around the world is watching this phenomenon with dumbfounded eyes. They'll wait to see how it plays out politically and economically, if memecoin shows staying power - if!

• They might make their own.

4. Second, if we do get a large market with thousands of individual memecoins, then this might actually be okay because every buyer knows what they are buying: the potential future brand value of the meme.

5. A lot will depend on the value of Trump’s assets, if any. Other celebrity meme coins quickly go to zero, but Trump is Trump, and he has the following unique qualities: (a) 100 million+ followers, (b) non-stop daily coverage, (c) presidential immunity , and (d) unprecedented control over government.

6. Therefore, whatever form of political backlash Trump encounters, he now has a strong incentive to legalize cryptocurrencies in the most radical way possible.

7. Of course, this would be considered a conflict of interest. But Biden took 10% for the big guys, Pelosi traded her stock, Hillary monetized her speeches, Podesta had a secret $300 billion climate fund, and Obama got the Netflix deal. They all became millionaires through various deniable forms of Democratic bribery.

8. So Trump’s rebuttal might be that he just does everything in public. He may claim that the disclosure resolves the conflict of interest issue.

9. This may be true, but it doesn't completely solve the alignment problem. As background: A company's CEO is typically one of the largest shareholders, but he is aligned with all employees because they hold the same shares. Ideally, all holders rise and fall together.

10. Similarly, ideally you would want the president to align with his citizens so that they all hold (say) US tokens that receive some dividends from US profits. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund.

11. So one way to solve the consistency problem would be for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP coins to every US citizen. However, it might be easier for him to personally email every Trump supporter offering them some free TRUMP coins.

12. Specifically: He can give 72 hours notice and various Democrats will sign up for his personal email list just to get airdrops.

13. Is this legal? Well, it's certainly legal for politicians to email requests for funds. But as far as I know, no politician has ever tried a personal airdrop to give away money before - certainly not on this scale.

14. At current valuations, Trump could offer all 77 million Trump voters $100 in locked-up TRUMP via airdrop, which would “only” cost him $7.7 billion, and the asset is worth two It was still zero days ago. He could give everyone $500 and still have over $20 billion left over.

15. Yes, Trump will lose some of his assets by doing this. But if you need to join his email list to get the tokens, and if the airdrop can happen without any capital gains, it will "pay for itself" by turning his base into more ardent supporters.

16. It could even provide him with the political support he needs to completely dismantle the Democratic patronage machine. Basically, by joining Trump’s email list and supporting his encryption policies, you gain a kind of UBI.

17. If 77 million Americans also benefited from TRUMP, then the conflict of interest accusation would disappear. It would be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between the president and his citizens.

Food for thought.