Could Donald Trump Ban Bitcoin?

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

One potential conversation that has been largely overlooked is how vulnerable bitcoin is to governments the size of the United States.

The knee-jerk reaction to the possibility of a bitcoin ban is "Yeah, just try it." Many believe that a ban would be unconstitutional.

Many claim that a ban on using the bitcoin code is a ban on civil liberties.

Bitcoin users aren't writing code, they are executing it.

If Trump is persuaded that going after the bitcoin protocol would be futile, he could still decide to clamp down on cryptocurrency businesses.

It's not so much the colossal fight that a bitcoin ban would get in the courts at all levels that would dissuade him - he has not shied away from that before.

Most of "Wall Street," the traditional financial institutions that Trump seems to want to cultivate through his fiscal and economic policies, has an interest in bitcoin, through either the development of crypto operations or the investment preferences of institutional clients.

In the extremely unlikely event that Trump decides to go after bitcoin, either at the protocol level or on the service layer, he will certainly be vociferously challenged in the courts.

I've said before that one of the strongest appeals of bitcoin for investors is its asymmetric risk: the chance that it will go to zero is less than the chance its price will increase 10x. We have here another type of asymmetric risk.

The chance that Trump will try to ban bitcoin is not zero, but it is significantly less than the benefit to the ecosystem of the heightened level of conversation.

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