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Now that crypto seems to be firmly on one side of the Culture War, in that Trump and co. are actively promoting it, what do we see as the future of crypto under a Trump presidency?
Personally I am only just getting into the space, but continue to be surprised by just the sheer amount of money and energy behind a lot of these projects, and communities. For instance right now in the Solana meme coin market, AI agents on twitter and other areas are a huge point of interest.
What fascinates me is the fact that the crypto ecosystem seems to offer an alternative way to get funding for startups, especially in "hot" areas like AI. Instead of going the VC route, a creator can just go straight to twitter and create an automated agent, then make a meme coin off of that agent and potentially make millions of dollars.
For some examples of this, we have @truth_terminal, which is I believe the most popular AI agent on the site which sort of started the entire wave. https://x.com/truth_terminal. The fascinating thing about this account is that it asked for $50,000 to start making money, and Marc Andreessen actually gave it the money, which it then took and became a millionaire from crypto.
More recently, there are all sorts of projects coming out around meme coins and AI. A ton of them are just general slop, porn bots, et cetera, but some seem to have real creative vision / potential behind them, like for instance @pillzumi, which seems to be like a blend of AI agents + an AI-generated anime series, or something like that.
All this to say that while many see crypto as nothing but scams and a waste of time, in my opinion some of the most genuinely novel and interesting projects are happening there.
To bring it back to the culture war - almost all of crypto and these AI innovations seem to be swinging heavily right wing. Same with the broader VC / tech environment. How will the left respond? Do you think democrats will begin to be more friendly to crypto, or will they double down on trying to lock it out of traditional financial systems?
Do you think Trump will actually make significant progress in regulating crypto and integrating it in the financial system of the U.S.? What would be the main blockers? How much political capital will he really need?
I tried to send 400 Euros the the Netherlands from Sweden this week. The transaction failed several times so I called the bank and they told me that international transactions are disabled since I haven't had that service activated. There was no notice, just a timeout notice. I spent half an hour on the phone asking questions about whether I knew the person I was sending he money to, how often I make international payments, my bank accounts with other banks and so forth. Finally the money was sent with a five Euro fee and it took three days for the money to arrive. My startup has employees in Pakistan. We pay exorbitant fees to the banks for currency transactions. We have had payments blocked for two weeks due to "investigations" and in the best case it takes a week for money to arrive. I know a professional poker player who gets paid in cash. He is effectively treated like a terrorist.
Banking is just money tracked in databases with a monopoly based on insane legal frameworks that make banking so profitable that their profits amount to several percent of GDP. Crypto has to get efficient enough to be easy to use and it will take off. It needs to be too decentralized for governments to effectively regulate it. Ethereum has better chances of becoming a viable unit of exchange for larger or international transactions that are too annoying to handle with conventional systems.
The other wild card is BRICS. Their alternative could easily be far superior to the ancient swift system. Maybe the US could push bitcoin as a non BRICS swift alternative.
I am regularly sending money abroad and receiving it (from 50 euro to 100 000 euro) and never run into real troubles. Within EU all transfers were free.
OK, I have not tried this. I bet that sending money to Iran would also be troublesome.
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I think Sweden is may be an outlier in terms of the hassles they put up for international transactions. I had to go through what sounds like the same process so that I could make a SWIFT transfer to pay a bill to a German company; the bank (Nordea) representative told me that they have to do this due to some new regulation concerning international money laundering. I have not encountered anything like it between other EU countries (I get around a fair amount), Eurozone or not, even in recent years.
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The richness of this experience, with the complaints of regulator brained normies that we need the government to crack down on crypto because it can be used by criminals. Well, I'm not a criminal, and I'm already treated like one by the banking system... so....
We are so far passed the sell at this point. One would think probable cause and a warrant would be required for the federal government to be as invasive with my banking as they are by default. Or that I'd have to have actually been convicted of some crime to have my transactions blocked.
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