Bitcoin’s Survival Is Up To Japan, Not Donald Trump

Story by: William Pesek

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao seems to have internalized Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal. The key lesson from the one-time real estate mogul’s 1987 book is that “bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.”

And if any financial product is getting bad press these days, it’s Bitcoin, a crypto-asset that Zhao’s exchange wants to popularize. Yet these two worlds are colliding as U.S. President Trump slams digital currencies as “not money,” something based on “thin air” and an innovation of which he’s “not a fan.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

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….

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Zhao’s own response is quintessentially Trumpian: “The fact that [Trump] tweeted about it, and the president of the United States is talking about cryptocurrency, it’s a good thing.”

Perhaps. Yet he’s right about one thing: Trump’s government won’t be the one to decide if bitcoin and its blockchain-revolution brethren thrive. Odds are, it’s up to Japan.

Myriad paradoxes leap to mind at this mere suggestion. The developed world knows no more risk-averse or red-tape-obsessed government than Tokyo. The idea that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s party, which has ruled Japan with only brief interruption since 1955, is hip to financial disruption sounds fanciful indeed.

Original story: https://tinyurl.com/y6jv3ag4

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