It is not particularly fashionable to point out when Donald Trump gets something right (whether accidentally or not). But for the record, back in 2021 he was right about crypto. Having two years earlier pointed out that crypto is “not money” and that its value is “based on thin air”, the former president said bitcoin “just seems like a scam”, suggested crypto was “a disaster waiting to happen”, and said “the bitcoins of the world” should be regulated “very, very high” [sic]. 

That was less than a year before the world of crypto imploded spectacularly. From May 2022 onwards, a series of exchanges, tokens and other crypto projects collapsed in quick succession, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in supposed “value” overnight. Crypto prices and the market for “NFTs” — a type of digital token that is just as worthless as any other but pretends to be otherwise — tanked. Regulators had not only been failing to regulate crypto “very very high”; they had been asleep at the wheel. In December of that year, crypto’s most notorious criminal, the man known as SBF, was arrested on charges of fraud and conspiracy that he would later be given a 25-year prison sentence for.

But Trump, alas, is no longer right about crypto. As the market recovered, he suddenly went from “not a fan” to seeming positively enamoured.