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Clearly Trump winning the election has had a large impact on the price of bitcoin and even more so on altcoins. This makes sense as bitcoin did not need any "regulatory clarity" while for altcoins having a friendly regulatory regime is necessary for survival.
This is because most altcoins, imo, are unregistered securities and not decentralized. If a regulator or the DOJ had xrp or cardano or even eth in their crosshairs, there is a throat to choke. With bitcoin, this person does not exist. Bitcoin survives in a harsh, unfriendly environment as it was specifically designed to do so.
However, with the recent election of Trump, the winds are shifting.
  1. Trump's company is in the process of purchasing Bakkt, a crypto exchange. He and his family will directly profit from the proliferation of altcoins, regardless of the value proposition they bring to the table.
  2. Trump has said, and of course there is a decent chance he doesn't follow through on what he said, that he will eliminate capital gains taxes on all cryptocurrencies that are issued by a U.S. based company. IMO, this would immediately make several altcoins more favorable than bitcoin from a price appreciation and trading perspective. If you are a trader moving billions of dollars of volume, trade in an asset that is correlated to bitcoin and save massively on capital gains taxes.
  3. Post the election, options trading on IBIT were very quickly approved. This is typically a several month if not year process, but the approvals have already happened and these options literally launched today. While there are some arguments for why this may be positive for bitcoin price, I'll remind everyone of what happened when the CME introduced bitcoin futures contracts in December of 2017. Quite literally marked the top and was imo a great tool for controlling bitcoin price with fiat without ever having to touch the underlying. If you are a government with access to an infinite money printer, you want tools like these cash futures and options to try and suppress price, if necessary. I am not saying this is actively being done, but take it from the gold folks who have studied this extensively and are 99% sure it is being done to suppress gold prices.
  4. The strategic bitcoin reserve. On one hand, everyone of course is allowed to buy bitcoin and hey, I love when big buyers come in and price moves up. However, with Trump being the one enacting it, I think there is at least a 20% chance that altcoins that will be throw into a "crypto reserve" further confusing the value proposition to the normie who hasn't studied these things.
I'll conclude by reiterating that Trump's victory is certainly a positive to the industry at large from a price perspective. However, I wonder in the medium-long term if this will cause another speculative mania based on largely useless projects with tiny market caps that are not actually decentralized. This is a man who loves to profit off of get rich quick schemes with suspect marketing (steaks, airline, casino). It is about glamour, glitz, spotlight with no real substance underneath. That is crypto, not bitcoin.
231 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 19 Nov
However, with Trump being the one enacting it, I think there is at least a 20% chance that altcoins that will be
I'm pretty optimistic that it will be bitcoin only. Moreover I would be willing to bet that the whole "no captial gains tax" thing is only extended to bitcoin and not alts (I think full no-cap gains tax is fairly unlikely though....most likely is they give a "de minimis exemption", so like no cap gains on transactions under $500)
My rationale for bitcoin reserve being bitcoin-only is: (a) Publicly traded companies are already rolling out bitcoin treasuries, there is no alt-coin treasuries out there, (b) Elon has a bitcoin-only treasury in Tesla, (c) RFK has most of his wealth in Bitcoin. (d) Lummis the bill sponsor, has been pretty much bitcoin only.....
Then there is the deeper strategic rationale, it would be foolhardy to adopt a shitcoin into your reserve and then vitalik prints a few million extra coins and dumps on your reserve. That could have real national security implications in coming decades if that were to happen.....
The howie-test for all its criticisms is actually a decent benchmark to protect investors (namely that its sufficiently decentralized and there is no single party that controls the investment). I think that century-long litmus-test will continue and bitcoin will be the beneficiary.
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