Donald Trump

On 12 July 2019, the President of the United States announced his crypto policy the way he announced most things that year — in a tweet, in the morning, from @realDonaldTrump. He was “not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies,” he wrote, which were “not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” It was the rare crypto dismissal delivered from the actual seat of the dollar, by the one person on earth whose signature, in a sense, backs the alternative.

Bitcoin was trading near US$11,400 that day. The objection itself was orthodox — “based on thin air” is the populist compression of the same point Buffett, Gates and Lagarde all made in longer words: that the thing has no intrinsic anchor, no coupon, no earnings, no farm growing corn underneath it. Coming from a sitting President, in the same thread that touted the unmatched dominance of the US dollar, it read less as market analysis than as incumbent defending the home team.

The Bureau records the 2019 position exactly as posted, because it is unambiguous and it is on the public record under his own name. Thin air, he said. Not money. Highly volatile. The number at the top of this page is what that thin air did in the years that followed — a fact about the asset, posted hourly, and indifferent to who is doing the dismissing.

What makes this entry unusual in the ledger is not the dismissal. Plenty of people dismissed it. What makes it unusual is what came next — because the man who filed this verdict did not, like the others here, hold the line. He is the one skeptic in the set who reversed his public position outright, and that reversal is filed below.