President Trump was against cybercurrencies before he was for them. In 2019, when he was in office, he said, "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity." Twitter, Donald J. Trump, July 11, 2019, 8:15 PM. Further, two years later, former President Trump told Fox Business that he sees Bitcoin as a "scam" affecting the value of the U.S. dollar. August 31, 2021. Fox Business News, Stuart Varney Show.
"Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam," Mr. Trump said. "I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar."
Although Donald Trump was clearly against cybercurrencies in 2021, it seems that the President has changed his tune. Just days before his inauguration, Trump himself released a controversial personal meme coin, $Trump, soon followed by $Melania. The new coins garnered both backlash and praise, with Congress, crypto players, and compliance experts split on whether their release was exploitative or genius.
The President signed an executive order on March 6, 2025, creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve will use only Bitcoins and other cybercurrencies seized by the Justice Department. As of November 2024, the U.S. government owned over 207,000 Bitcoins, according to Forbes magazine. These are Bitcoins seized by the FBI relating to drug and other criminal activities. The United States already owns nearly $20 billion worth of bitcoin obtained through legal seizures, according to the crypto tracking firm ArkhamIntelligence.
Leading Economists Believe Cybercurrencies are Fraudulent
New York Times' economics writer Paul Krugman calls cryptocurrencies a "scam".
Krugman also compared cryptocurrencies to the 2008 housing bubble. Remember 'The Big Short'?" asked Krugman. "The 2010 book by Michael Lewis, made into a 2015 film, told the story of the 2008 global financial crisis by following a handful of investors who were willing to bet on the unthinkable -- the proposition that the huge rise in housing prices in the years before the crisis was a bubble, and that many of the seemingly sophisticated financial instruments that helped inflate housing would eventually be revealed as worthless junk." Krugman wrote an opinion piece on crypto, titled "Bubble, Bubble, Fraud and Trouble" in which he lets us know exactly what he thinks: "So is Bitcoin a giant bubble that will end in grief? Yes. But it's a bubble wrapped in techno-mysticism inside a cocoon of libertarian ideology." He compares crypto to USD 100 bills, where shops often don't take them, but drug dealers and tax evaders love them. New York Times, January 29, 2028.
Eugene Fama, a Nobel economics laureate, predicted Bitcoin will go to zero within ten years. In a Bitcoin Uncensored podcast, Professor Fama shared his thoughts about crypto. His opinion on Bitcoin adoption and the future is simple: "People won't use it because basically it's very difficult to know how much you need to settle ["] As if it doesn't have a stable value it's probably not going to survive as a unit of account. What that means is that its value is likely to go to zero at some point." He joins the ever-growing group of people who like to say that crypto is a thing only beneficial to drug dealers and criminals. Also, in his opinion, crypto has no clear advantages over fiat money.
Robert Shiller is an economist who also won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013, along with Lars Peter Hansen and Eugene Fama. In 2017, at a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, he stated, "Bitcoin, it's just absolutely exciting ( ") You're fast. You're smart. You've figured out nobody else understands. You're with it. And bitcoin has this anti-government, anti-regulation feel. It's such a wonderful story. If it were only true." He also compared it to the stock market in the 1920s, saying that "it's going to go way up, but we will reach a 1929 eventually".
Joseph Stiglitz received his Nobel Memorial Prize in 2001, known for analyzing markets with asymmetric information - but he cannot find a good use for Bitcoin. In his opinion, Bitcoin is trying to solve a problem that never existed. He said, "We have a good medium of exchange called the dollar. We can trade in that. Why do people want Bitcoin? For secrecy."
He also added to the criminal, money-laundering, drug dealer story, saying, "My feeling is that when would be no demand you regulate it so that you couldn't engage in money laundering and all these other things, there for Bitcoin. So by regulating the abuses you are going to regulate it out of existence."
Even Red State Legislatures Don't Believe in Bitcoin Reserves
Lawmakers in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming have all voted against establishing state-level crypto reserves in the last few weeks, citing concerns over risk and volatility associated with digital assets. Strategic crypto reserve bills have been introduced in 24 states so far, according to database Bitcoin Laws.
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