How Trump's crypto push boosted Bitcoin

Australia Broadcast Center

4 days ago

Sam Hawley: Once a sceptic, now a convert. Donald Trump is embracing cryptocurrency and making a tidy profit on the side. The president's newfound love has seen cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin skyrocket in value, and now he's passing bills through Congress to change the sector entirely. Today, Ross Buckley, a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, on whether it's still just a bubble waiting to burst. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Ross, this month, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin reached an all time high. Just tell me what is going on.
Ross Buckley: Well, we saw a continuation of an incredible increase in Bitcoin's value throughout this year. It's now up 25% on where it started the year.
News report: The price of the main cryptocurrency Bitcoin has increased 10% in a week.
News report: The price of Bitcoin has reached a new all time high. Bitcoin has passed the symbolic 100,000 US dollar mark. The price of Bitcoin has reached a new all time high this week, surpassing 120,000 US dollars.
Ross Buckley: There's a couple of thousand cryptocurrencies, you know, many of them are very minor, but the more significant ones have all been doing very well.
Sam Hawley: Yeah. All right. And the overall market capitalisation for crypto has surpassed four trillion dollars, so it's a lot. OK, so let's unpack why, Ross, this is actually happening. And like so much right now, Donald Trump is a part of it. He is a crypto convert, isn't he? He's gone from saying it's a total scam, which he told Fox News in 2021.
Donald Trump, US President: Bitcoin just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world.
Sam Hawley: To really embracing it fully.
Ross Buckley: He has indeed. For one thing, he got a lot of votes out of crypto supporters in his run up to his election. And the other thing is he's made an awful lot of money personally out of it. The best estimates, the Financial Times of London estimates he's made between 320 and 350 million already himself. His wife has probably made about half that, about 160
Sam Hawley: million. Yeah, the whole family's in on this, aren't they? Yeah, they are. So Donald Trump is actually making a huge amount of money from it. And of course, there's a whole heap of ethical questions, concerns relating to that.
Ross Buckley: Yep, absolutely.
Sam Hawley: So just before we go on, you better just explain how crypto actually works. It's not real money. You can't go to a shop and buy something with it, but it is built on hype. So when Donald Trump says he likes it, that gives it a bounce, right? Just explain how it works.
Ross Buckley: Well, it's there's a strictly limited amount of it, right? Under the algorithm that creates it, you can never create any more than a certain amount, which means if demand keeps going up and your supply is limited, the price keeps going up. It's not entirely accurate to say you can't buy anything with it. It's just a very inefficient way to buy things. But if you want to buy horrible things on the dark web, for instance, it would be your preferred way of buying them because, you know, it can't be traced. So if you're a money launderer or if you're the sort of person who shops for horrible services on the dark web, your crypto is your preferred way of paying for them. If you're a legitimate person, it is a wildly inefficient way of paying for anything.
Sam Hawley: Right. Yeah. So if you're buying things illegally, you can buy drugs, weapons. All that stuff. But if you invest in crypto above board.
Ross Buckley: Well, then it's just a speculative asset. So then you're just investing in an asset. History teaches us that when you have booms of this magnitude, they tend to be followed by busts. And when you have a bust, a lot of people lose a lot of money. And that's the purpose of financial regulation, to stop a lot of ordinary people losing a lot of money. I would say it's much more volatile than gold. You know, it's extraordinarily volatile. And, you know, and of course, doesn't have the track record of gold and the physicality of gold, etc.
Sam Hawley: OK, so Ross, Donald Trump is now this huge enthusiast for crypto. And by the way, he's also the chief regulator of the industry and he is working to change it. Just tell me about this so-called crypto week in the United States.
Ross Buckley: Yes, crypto week comprises three bills that are making their way through the Senate and the House. The first one that has got all the way through and has been signed into law was the so-called Genius Act.
Donald Trump, US President: Yeah, we worked hard. It's a very important act, the Genius Act. They named it after me. And I want to thank you. I want to thank you. This is a hell of an act.
Ross Buckley: The president might think it's a reference to him. It's actually an acronym. It stands for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act. The Genius Act promotes a regime for stable coins and stable coins use similar technology to crypto, but they're different to crypto. They're really profoundly different. So that's the first. There's three bills that were making their way through the legislative process. This one is through. It's signed into law and it promotes a regulatory regime for stable coins.
United States Congress: The ayes are 294 and the nays are 134. The bill is passed without objection. A motion to reconsider is laid on the table.
Ross Buckley: The second act is the so-called Clarity Act, and that provides a comprehensive regime for the regulation of crypto. And so that is part of what's behind the boom, that a regulatory regime is coming that will make it more legitimate, easier to operate, and most financial services prosper when they're well regulated. And the third part of the crypto week is the Anti-CBDC Act. Now, CBDC is a Central Bank Digital Currencies, and this is an act to make sure that the US will never issue a central bank digital currency, which itself is fascinating because virtually every central bank in every reputable jurisdiction in the world has been working for the last few years on developing central bank digital currencies because everybody else thinks they're a good idea.
Sam Hawley: Okay, so one of these bills has already passed the House, the Genius Act, and this goes to the regulation of stable coins. And quite frankly, Ross, I have no idea what they are or what the point of them is. So can you please just unpack that a bit more? What on earth are stable coins?
Ross Buckley: Stable coins are digital currencies that are tied to real currency, to government currency. So what the Genius Act says is that banks and other entities can issue their own private digital currency as long as it's fully backed up by US dollars on deposit or by short-term US treasuries or other unimpeachable financial securities. So stable coins, I think, will change the world, and they will be important for Australia in time because if you look at Australia's financial system, our retail payments within the country work extremely well. International payments don't. International payments are slow, they're expensive. If you're engaged in international trade, given the modern world, they use a technology that is centuries and centuries old. Stable coins are perfectly adapted for international trade. So rather than making international payments by the Australian bank contacting the New York bank, which contacts the bank somewhere else, where they all take a little clip out of the ticket, and eventually the transaction happens between Australia and another country, stable coins are digital tokens. They can be sent directly. Payments that today may take two or three days and cost one or two percent will cost one or two hundredths of a percent and happen in a few minutes.
Sam Hawley: So if, hang on, so if I went and bought a stable coin, say, worth a dollar, the issuer that gave me that stable coin would have to keep a dollar in reserve.
Ross Buckley: You've got it.
Sam Hawley: Is that how it works?
Ross Buckley: Yep, and it would get, under the Genius Act, it will get audited every month and the regulator will make sure that there is a dollar in a trust account in a bank backing up that stable coin.
Sam Hawley: Right, so then if I want to cash in my dollar, I can get paid immediately?
Ross Buckley: Yes, you can. And you might say, well, how is that different to digital money now? Is that this is a tokenized form of money. So this token can be sent abroad. This token will work well on blockchains and distributed ledgers and with, in all the sort of plumbing of the system that is being developed. So rather than something happening in the software and then having to step outside the software into the banking system to make the payment, this will run on the same software. So it's very much more efficient.
Sam Hawley: But it's still a cryptocurrency, right? But it's just, well, it's less volatile.
Ross Buckley: It's rather like a cryptocurrency. It uses all the same technology, but it should not, if it's well done, it shouldn't be volatile at all. It shouldn't be any more volatile than the Australian dollar because it will be a digital expression of the Australian dollar or in this case, the US dollar.
Sam Hawley: OK, so how widespread could these stable coins become?
Ross Buckley: Well, they're best thought of as just a digital expression of the currency of the country, which is why every other country, including Australia, thinks the best way to create them is as central bank digital currencies, because issuing money is a core sovereign function. You know, paper notes are going out of use. These are just digital versions of paper notes. So logically, you'd think they'd be issued by the entity that issues the paper notes, namely the nation's central bank. But that doesn't fit well with the American ethos. So this trio of acts, the Genius Act promotes stable coins. The Anti-CBDC Act says we will never have the central bank issue this currency, this digital currency.
Sam Hawley: And why is that?
Ross Buckley: You'd have to ask Americans, wouldn't you? It's a profoundly different culture. They don't trust the government. They're very worried about the privacy imposing potential of a CBDC that government could look into the transactions you're making. But of course, it's easy to develop a CBDC. So the government can't see inside what's happening. That's what the Bank of England is doing with its CBDC. It'll be able to see when you buy them, when you redeem them, but it won't be able to see the transactions you're making at all. And strangely, nobody seems to mind that MasterCard and Visa sees everything we buy on the current system, right? That doesn't seem to bother Americans, but the US government potentially, because the government will promise not to look and it will build in technological solutions to prevent it looking, but Americans don't trust their own government. That's part of it.
Sam Hawley: All right, but there are big companies, aren't there, like Amazon and Walmart, that are pretty keen to jump on this?
Ross Buckley: Well, if you are an Amazon or a Walmart, at the moment you're looking at those fees, those surcharges, right, which looks like Australia is going to prohibit the separate charging of. The bill for credit card surcharges for Walmart or Amazon, which are much higher than they are in Australia, by the way, in the US, is huge. So if they create their own stable coins, they can create their own payment mechanism and basically sideline Visa and MasterCard altogether.
Sam Hawley: Wow, OK. All right, so Ross, Crypto Week was pretty significant in the United States. We're seeing this legislation aiming to integrate cryptocurrencies into financial markets. That's right. But what about here in Australia? Is something similar being considered at all?
Ross Buckley: I don't know. I'd be surprised if Australian regulators went in that way because of the potential for a huge bust. And a lot of people losing a lot of money. In some ways, Australia, I think, clearly will respond. The Australian banks will have to respond with their own stable coins to facilitate cheap, efficient international payments by Australian corporations. And if that's done well, that should be absolutely fine. I'd be absolutely gobsmacked if we ever passed a piece of legislation saying we can't issue a central bank digital currency. That would be nutso in my humble view. So I don't think we'll ever have anything quite like the Crypto Week that the Americans have had. But on these issues, we're a profoundly different people.
Sam Hawley: Yeah, sure, but could the RBA, for instance, could it be in the future that it is issuing things like stable coins?
Ross Buckley: It would issue a central bank digital currency because it's a central bank. And it's been working on this for a few years. It had a very good project two years ago exploring use cases on this. And it's got one going at the moment, Project Acacia, which is looking more broadly to examine how you could use central bank digital currency to pay for tokenised real-world assets. So tokenised money being exchanged for tokenised assets. So the RBA's doing a lot of work on it, some internationally leading work on it, yes.
Sam Hawley: OK, all right. Well, of course, Ross, some of us have dabbled in cryptocurrency. A lot of us have not. But does this all mean that perhaps it will become more accessible and more widespread, or do you think, really, it's just the same and it's just too risky?
Ross Buckley: The stable coin stuff will change the rails upon which international payments and probably wholesale capital markets payments in Australia in time move. But that won't be something that the average person will really notice. You know, the same way you pay on Osco on your phone, you don't really deal with, you know, just transfer some money to a friend. You don't worry about how all that happens. It just works, right? The stable coin thing will be a revolution of payment rails and will really make a difference. But the cryptocurrency itself, Bitcoin type of stuff, that's every individual's personal choice. The actual cryptocurrency, I think, at these prices is extremely risky.
Sam Hawley: Ross Buckley is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales. He's also a member of the Payments System Board at the Reserve Bank. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.