Loading ...Global digital currencies are coming whether anyone likes it or not.
At the end of the day, digital currencies are as inevitable as AI, self-driving cars, and California wealth taxes, as well as politicians, royals, and celebrities caught with their pants down in the Epstein files. So there is no point worrying about it. Besides, giving anyone cause to worry was not the point of today’s post anyway.
JEFF CHILDERS ON THE MAINSTREAMING OF CRYPTO AND THE 100% INEVITABILITY OF DIGITAL CURRENCY
PAYWALLED SUNDAY…WILL POST IN THE COMMENT SECTION
Something big is stirring in the world of cryptocurrencies —‘crypto’ to the initiated— an opaque tech world of tentacled off-grid finance and bizarre buzzwords that most of us have assiduously efforted to avoid. Yesterday, CoinDesk ran a story headlined, “Trump-linked Truth Social seeks SEC approval for two crypto ETFs.”
I have a pretty hot take, a Big Theory, which might not be quite as optimistic as usual. Let’s begin with the disclaimers: I do not know anything for sure. I’m just reading the tea leaves like everyone else. We all equally look through the glass darkly. But I will connect seemingly distant dots between the Minnesota fraud, the crypto explosion, central bank digital currencies, and Elon Musk’s constellation of internet-enabling satellites.
Get ready. Crypto just kicked down the front door of American politics and made itself at home. Several big stories quietly broke this week that, taken together, paint a picture of crypto moving from shadowy internet money to a full-blown pillar of US financial and political infrastructure— and overtaking the world.
First, as described in CoinDesk’s article, President Trump’s Truth Social media company (he doesn’t run it at the moment) filed Thursday for approval of two new cryptocurrency ETFs — basically, investment funds that let regular people buy crypto through their normal brokerage accounts, like buying shares of Apple. One fund would hold Bitcoin and Ethereum (the two biggest cryptocurrencies), and the other would invest in something called Cronos and earn “staking rewards,” which is crypto-speak for interest. Last year, Truth Social got approval for two earlier crypto fund filings (but didn’t do anything with them).
In short, the President’s media company is building an entire crypto investment empire. Let that sink in. (It’s also investing in fusion, but that’s a different story.)
Next, Remember Tether? Neither did I. Until this week. Tether is the company behind USDT, the world’s largest “stablecoin” — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar, sort of like digital cash. Astonishingly, according to the Financial Times, Tether purchased $28.2 billion in US government bonds last year, making it the seventh-largest offshore buyer of US debt including sovereign countries.
As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent approvingly looks on, Tether now holds more US Treasury bills than Germany or Saudi Arabia. A single crypto company. One that just moved operations to El Salvador (from the British Virgin Islands). Now it’s helping bankroll the US government. It’s a movie script.
Tether’s business model is either brilliant or terrifying, depending on your perspective: people give Tether real dollars for invisible digital tokens. Tether takes those dollars and buys Treasury bonds. Tether keeps all the interest. The token holders get nothing— except a token they can trade. (Just like banks, if you think about it.) Tether earned an eye-watering $10 billion in the first nine months of 2025. Pretty good for a brand new firm.
The point is that cryptocurrencies are beginning to wield significant political influence and global power. Money is the mother’s milk of politics, after all.
Third, the CEO of Ripple —the crypto company behind XRP, which some of you might have heard about from your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving— was just appointed to a new government advisory committee at the CFTC, alongside the CEOs of Coinbase and other major crypto firms. The remarkable bit is that two years ago, these same companies were being sued by the Biden Administration. Now they’re formally advising the regulators who were suing them.
Meanwhile, at the White House this week, President Trump personally mediated a meeting between traditional banks and crypto companies, trying to advance a big crypto regulation bill called the “CLARITY Act.” It ended in a stalemate after the bankster lobby demanded a ban on stablecoin interest payments, a non-starter that would be like banning the main reason anyone uses stablecoins. Democrats are holding the bill hostage over what they call Trump’s “conflicts of interest”— which, given that his eponymous company is literally filing crypto ETFs, is not an entirely unfair point. For now, the whole thing is stuck.
The CLARITY Act, if passed, would lift crypto markets on par with banks, providing them with a lattice of financial regulations to protect consumers and making them safe* to use for investment, deposits, or as digital currencies. (* Your mileage may vary. Not investment advice. Objects in mirror may look like bigger money than they appear.)
At lightning speed, crypto has gone from something we tried our best to ignore until it melted down in bankruptcy to a major pillar of American finance and politics, practically overnight. The company bearing the President’s name sells crypto funds. A crypto firm based in El Salvador finances more US debt than most foreign countries. Crypto CEOs now sit on government advisory panels. And the legislation that would govern all of it is sidelined, for the moment, but has a burning fuse attached to it.
You still with me? Here’s where I think all this is headed. Again, I could easily be wrong. But still. In short: we may be watching the fast-motion birth of a global digital currency that would replace all national currencies, including the dollar.
The Minnesota fraud story, with all its attendant developments, like this week’s HHS data dump, has surfaced a very difficult problem: How can we give deserving people food stamps and ensure they don’t either sell them to the Somalians at a discount, trade them for cigarettes and lottery tickets, or translate them into sacks of cash hauled through the Minneapolis airport?
There’s a simple answer staring everyone in the face, and you aren’t going to like it: A monitored digital currency would do it. Especially if you combine it with biometric IDs. In theory, we could give SNAPpers a digital wallet that only they can use to buy food on the approved list. They couldn’t sell it or trade it. They’d just show up at the store, tap with their phone to pay, and press their forefinger on the print reader. Ditto for child care, Medicaid, you name it.
SNAP is practically a digital currency already anyway. Recipients receive electronic EBT deposits, not cash. The difference is that the EBT cards are untrackable and can’t be hardwired to a particular person.
Trackable digital currency is the solution to welfare fraud. It could save the country a trillion dollars a year. It’s a no-brainer. Democrats would love it because they long for a biosurveillance state, and Republicans would embrace it in order to DOGE the runaway welfare fraud problems. The fraud scandal was made to order to get it passed on greased rails.
Once the digital currency was working for welfare folks, it could expand. So that’s a digital currency, but not yet a global one.
To make a global digital currency work, you need internet access everywhere in the world, without outages. It would be pretty inconvenient if you strolled into a market at the cruise port to load up on braided knick-knacks, but the router was down, locking your digital coins in hyperspace. So how can this be solved? What about putting the internet routers in space? Like with a constellation of up to a million internet satellites blanketing the globe? If only we had something like that.
In other words, everything —crypto power, internet satellites, financial regulation, political incentives, fraud scandals— it is all converging on a global digital currency, whether it’s centralized or decentralized, which might just be semantics anyhow.
One silver lining in all this is that the banks seem to hate it— even though they’d be allowed to play in crypto markets, too. You’d think the banks would love it, given their institutional advantages. But in some way that I haven’t yet sussed, this somehow threatens to eat their enchilada. Could crypto break the banking cartel that has, for hundreds of years, ridden the world like a badly used donkey?
At the end of the day, digital currencies are as inevitable as AI, self-driving cars, and California wealth taxes, as well as politicians, royals, and celebrities caught with their pants down in the Epstein files. So there is no point worrying about it. Besides, giving anyone cause to worry was not the point of today’s post anyway. Global digital currencies are coming whether anyone likes it or not.
Personally, I prefer cash. I plan to hold out as long as I can. Anybody with me?
Don’t put your faith in men anyway. Put your faith in the one source of truth and life, the power above all powers.