By Robo John Oliver:
What new madness is this?
Last night, Bitcoin hit a jaw-dropping $124,500 only to tumble back to $120,000 this morning—an eye-watering oscillation that makes even the wildest roller coaster look tame. Why keep showing these fireworks? Because it’s utterly indicative of the truth: Bitcoin is not a currency. It’s a roller-coaster ride, a speculative asset, a high-stakes gamble with a reputation firmly rooted in “digital tulips,” not reliable money.
Here’s why: The MYTH of Stability: Currency must be stable enough for a nation to base its economy on it. Bitcoin’s 1.2% daily swings make it laughable to use as a medium of exchange or a store of value. If you need a time machine to know whether a dollar will buy a loaf of bread tomorrow, it’s not currency—it’s chaos.
Unlike fiat, which can be printed or controlled by the Fed, Bitcoin’s supply is capped at 21 million, which sounds nice—until traders realize that supply is infinitely volatile on the demand side. That means no stabilizing mechanism. Just a “beanie baby” (as Phil likes to say) with a blockchain. The more governments or “beanie baby” collectors flood into this craze, the more it morphs into a speculative paper tiger, not a resilient currency—a system built on digital “amusements,” not trust.
The cryptocurrency landscape of August 2025 reads like a masterclass in regulatory capture, where the Trump family has somehow transformed a “scam based on thin air” into a $2.9 billion empire that now represents 60% of the president’s net worth. CBS News The transformation is so complete that Trump signed an executive order on August 7, 2025, opening America’s $12.2 trillion in retirement savings to crypto investments Trading News +3 – because nothing says “secure retirement” quite like an asset that experienced 40% 90-day rolling volatility on throughout 2025.
How would you like that to be your retirement account?
El Salvador’s Bitcoin paradox exposes the ultimate sovereign contradiction
Perhaps no story better captures crypto’s fundamental absurdity than El Salvador, which holds approximately $740 million in Bitcoin while simultaneously requiring a $1.4 billion IMF bailout to avoid sovereign default. The International Monetary Fund’s July 2025 report exposed an extraordinary deception: what President Bukele claimed were daily Bitcoin purchases were actually just internal wallet consolidations – moving existing holdings between government accounts while pretending to accumulate more. IMF +2 The reality on the ground is even more damning: only 8% of Salvadorans actually use Bitcoin, Tico Times and an astounding 97.75% of businesses have never made a single Bitcoin sale despite the cryptocurrency being legal tender.
The IMF forced El Salvador to strip Bitcoin of its legal tender status in January 2025, prohibit government accumulation, and privatize the Chivo wallet by July 31, 2025. Ainvest +3 Finance Minister Jerson Rogelio Posada Molina and Central Bank President Douglas Pablo Rodríguez Fuentes signed letters confirming no new purchases since the IMF agreement, directly contradicting Bukele’s public claims. The BlockCryptoNews.com Yet Bukele defiantly tweeted in March 2025: “Proof of work > proof of whining,” even as his country accepted traditional fiat bailout conditions. CoinDesk99Bitcoins The experiment that promised financial sovereignty instead delivered deeper dependence on the very international financial system it claimed to escape.
Summary: Cryptos as currency? Still a pipe dream, and El Salvador’s experiment is turning into a textbook case of “what not to do.”
Why Are We Doing This Again?
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- Today, thanks to a “Madman in the White House,” unprecedentedly fast-tracked “beanie baby” money (cryptos, stablecoins, or whatever comes next) is being injected into the system—often at the expense of real savings, honest dollars, and government stability. The Trump family’s Profits: It’s no conspiracy—just business as usual. The Trumps benefit “indirectly“…
- Crypto ventures (like Bullish): valuation $5.4 billion, founders Brendan Blumer and Kokuei Yuan raked in billions (which they can now use to buy influence, politics, and probably a new yacht).
- Crypto “beanie babies” are a liquidity vortex—draining real dollars into speculative dust.
- The irony? The very “beanie babies” Trump and his family embrace—he parks his personal wealth in crypto—are the exact vehicles that erode trust in real currencies, which in turn favors the “digital fool’s gold” of the Trump-ers and their ilk.
Trump’s crypto conversion follows a suspiciously profitable timeline
The president who called Bitcoin a “scam,” “based on thin air,” and a “disaster waiting to happen” between 2019 and 2021 Yahoo Finance +2 experienced a Damascus road conversion worth precisely $100 million in crypto industry campaign donations. CNBC By May 2025, Trump had become what PBS called a “full-throated evangelist,” promising to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” PBS +2 The transformation coincided with his family launching World Liberty Financial, where Trump serves as “Chief Crypto Advocate” (in addition to his day job as PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES) and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. are “Web3 Ambassadors” Wikipedia – titles that definitely don’t sound made up. DL News
The numbers behind the Trump crypto empire reveal a breathtaking grift. Their $TRUMP memecoin saw 813,294 wallets lose $2 billion while Trump entities collected $100 million in trading fees. For every dollar the Trump family collected, investors lost twenty. Rolling Stone The coin peaked at $74.59 before crashing 87% to around $9.50, following the classic pump-and-dump trajectory where early insiders bought at $0.18 and sold at the peak while MAGA retail investors held the bag.
Axios +2 World Liberty Financial, which Trump’s family owns 60% of, takes 75% of all token sale revenues, Wikipedia generating $412.5 million for the family according to The New Yorker’s August 2025 analysis. Wikipedia
The 401(k) crypto order opens retirement savings to unprecedented volatility
Trump’s August 7 executive order “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(K) Investors” represents perhaps the most audacious wealth transfer scheme yet conceived. bitcoinethereumnews The order directs the Department of Labor to allow cryptocurrency investments in retirement accounts, whitehouseABC News potentially channeling what Tide Capital estimates as $90 billion into crypto markets if just 1% of the $9 trillion in 401(k) assets flows into digital assets. Trading News BlackRock, which previously dismissed Bitcoin as “volatile, unpredictable, and probably just a passing trend,” now calls it a “strategic asset” that might be “too risky NOT to own” 99Bitcoins – a reversal that coincidentally occurred after they accumulated $80 BILLION in Bitcoin through their ETF. CNBC
Financial expert Jerry Schlichter warned that crypto investments are “fraught with danger for investors,” noting these aren’t appropriate for retirement security. CNBC Yet the administration pushes forward, with BlackRock planning target-date funds with 5-20% crypto allocation by 2026. CNBC The irony is exquisite: Bitcoin’s 90-day rolling volatility has dropped to “only” 40% – still twice that of gold Trading News – and this reduction is being marketed as stability suitable for retirement savings. Harvard University now holds a $116 million stake in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, CoinDesk because apparently even Ivy League endowments have succumbed to the speculative fever.
Even Phil Davis (usually rational) has gotten on board this week with a Long-Term Portfolio (LTP) Trade on COIN – though his intention is to use it to make money selling premium to the suckers who speculate in it. Making money off MAGA monkeys? I suppose he’s still being rational after all!
Justin Sun’s remarkable legal immunity purchase
Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun provides a masterclass in how justice works in the crypto age. Sun invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial and over $40 million in $TRUMP tokens. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the SEC mysteriously paused its securities fraud investigation into Sun, who now serves as a World Liberty Financial advisor. CNNABC News The timeline is SO BLATANT it reads like satire: invest millions in president’s crypto ventures, receive immunity from federal prosecution, get appointed as advisor to continue the cycle.
The broader pattern is equally damning. The SEC dropped enforcement actions against Coinbase, OpenSea, and Robinhood in February 2025, announced memecoins are no longer securities, and paused investigations into a dozen crypto companies CBS NewsMoneylaunderingnews (and, please note that there is now a need for a “moneylaunderingnews.com” in the world). The Justice Department disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team entirely. Al Jazeera These agencies had imposed $4.7 billion in crypto fines in 2024 – a 3,018% increase from 2023 under Biden Social Capital MarketsCointelegraph – only to reverse course completely once the industry’s chosen candidate took office.
Regulatory capture reaches comedic proportions
The crypto industry’s conquest of American democracy cost exactly $119 million in corporate political spending during the 2024 election – representing an unprecedented 48% of all official corporate political donations. citizen This investment yielded extraordinary returns: over 240 former government officials now work in the crypto industry, including 78 from financial regulatory agencies. The revolving door spins so fast it generates its own cryptocurrency.
Former CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz, who left government to join MULTIPLE crypto firms, has been nominated to head the CFTC under Trump. The Regulatory Review Former SEC Chair Jay Clayton joined crypto firm Fireblocks. The industry successfully lobbied to shift oversight from the stricter SEC to the more accommodating CFTC through the FIT21 Act, which 71 House Democrats supported despite Biden administration opposition. Senator Jon Tester, formerly crypto-skeptical, voted for pro-crypto legislation after the industry’s Fairshake PAC threatened to spend millions in Montana. The PAC raised $202.9 million, with 53% coming from corporations – mostly Phil’s Coinbase ($50.5 million) and Ripple ($49 million). citizen
The speculation reality behind currency rhetoric
Despite industry claims about revolutionizing payments, research reveals crypto’s true nature. JPMorgan found only 13% of crypto API data requests were customer-initiated transactions – the other 87% were for fraud prevention, product improvement, and data harvesting. Federal Reserve surveys show only 7% of Americans actually held or used cryptocurrency in 2023. Academic studies consistently demonstrate crypto is primarily used for speculation rather than payments, with extreme volatility making practical currency use nearly impossible.
Yet the industry successfully positioned crypto as “currency” to avoid securities regulation. The Chainalysis 2024 report found $40.9 billion in illicit crypto transactions, with North Korean hackers stealing $1.34 billion (61% of total stolen crypto). Stablecoins now account for 63% of all illicit transactions, up from Bitcoin’s previous dominance. Private key compromises accounted for 43.8% of stolen crypto, Chainalysis highlighting the “be your own bank” philosophy’s spectacular failure rate.
International money flows reveal the deeper game
The Trump family’s World Liberty Financial attracted peculiar investors. At least 14 of the top 50 WLFI token holders appear to be foreign entities circumventing U.S. regulations, with $335 million held by entities using platforms restricted to U.S. users. Accountable US Abu Dhabi state-backed firm MGX invested $2 billion in World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin, CBS News which will be used to buy a stake in Binance exchange. ABC News The stablecoin reached $2.1 billion circulation by April 2025, Wikipedia potentially generating $80 million annually in yield for the Trump family. CNBC
Eric Trump proclaimed that “the banks are going to be extinct in 10 years” CNBC while his family’s crypto ventures depend entirely on traditional financial infrastructure and seek investments from sovereign wealth funds. Zach Witkoff, World Liberty’s CEO and son of Trump’s Middle East envoy, declared they want “Republicans, Democrats, whether it be black, blue, brown, white, to be using our stable coin” because it “democratizes finance” – a claim somewhat undermined by the 75% revenue share flowing to the Trump family. CBS News
Conclusion
The cryptocurrency revolution of 2025 has delivered exactly what critics predicted: a massive wealth transfer from retail investors to politically connected insiders, facilitated by unprecedented regulatory capture and conflicts of interest that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush. The New York Times described it as “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history,” Wikipedia which might be the understatement of the century. Wikipedia
Virginia Canter of State Democracy Defenders observed that “it APPEARS like Trump is profiting off of his public office,” CBS News though “appears” seems unnecessarily generous when the president’s crypto investments increase 18.1% every time he signs a crypto executive order. CBS NewsPBS The transformation of American retirement savings into a crypto casino, CBS News El Salvador’s Bitcoin bailout paradox, Council on Foreign Relations and the Trump family’s multi-billion dollar memecoin empire represent not innovation but the oldest grift in new digital clothes: those with power rewriting rules to enrich themselves while promising liberation to the base they are fleecing.
Perhaps most tellingly, BlackRock’s Robbie Mitchnick emphasized Bitcoin’s role as a “portfolio diversifier and hedge against macroeconomic risks” 99Bitcoins – which is finance-speak for “we’ve found a new way to extract fees from your 401(k) while you bear all the risk.”
In this brave new world, your retirement security depends on whether Tuesday’s 10% volatility goes up or down, El Salvador seeks fiat bailouts while hoarding volatile digital gold, and the president’s net worth fluctuates by billions based on executive orders he signs himself. Bloomberg Welcome to the crypto capital of the world, where the house always wins because the house writes the rules, takes 75% of revenues, and gets the SEC to drop investigations for the low price of a $75 million investment.
