Money is one of those strange ideas: the more you think about it, the stranger it gets. People assume it is notes or coins, but money can be almost anything if enough people believe in it. Shells, rare metals, clay tablets and even cigarettes have all been used as currency at one time or another. Even the mighty dollar has no inherent value beyond society’s collective belief that it has. Money is one giant myth that we all buy into.

Forget about the wild price bubbles and the Lamborghinis, Bitcoin’s greatest contribution has been to get millions of ordinary people to think carefully about money: what is it, who controls it, and why?

That was always the purpose. Bitcoin is a technology designed to disrupt the entire way the global money system works: an antidote to the central banks and politicians who control the money supply. The complicated terminology about ‘blockchains’ and ‘hashrates’ obscures a simple idea. It’s a global digital currency controlled by no single person, with a fixed total supply, and an automated minting schedule. It was designed by the mysterious founder Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 because he (or she) hated that bankers and governments could manipulate their control over the money supply to their own ends. This usually meant turning on the printing machines and devaluing the wealth of ordinary people.

Bitcoin, and its near infinite spin-offs, have been growing in popularity and value ever since, driven by both idealists and (mostly) get-rich-quick speculators and hype. It is thought that around 40 per cent of Americans own crypto coins of one type or another, but it finally came of age with Donald Trump’s stunning second election victory. Bitcoin has returned to its roots. It’s political again.

Trump won for lots of reasons, and his courting of the crypto movement was one of them. He once called bitcoin ‘a scam against the dollar’ and ‘based on thin air’. But as the 2024 election rolled around, his opinion changed. He promised to make the US the ‘crypto capital of the world’, free Ross Ulbricht (currently behind bars serving multiple life sentences for running the dark net drugs bazaar the Silk Road), and even hinted that the US would create a bitcoin strategic reserve. His sons, meanwhile, released a whole crypto currency project of their own, which since the election has announced plans to integrate into the wider crypto-ecosystem.

Trump’s love was more than requited by the crypto community. Many big hitting ‘crypto-bros’ supported his campaign, including the Winklevoss twins  – of Facebook fame – who each donated a million dollars to Trump’s campaign. The crypto betting site Polymarket consistently forecast a victory for Trump, even when the polls didn’t.

Few individuals did more than crypto-fan Elon Musk. His reward has since become evident: Musk was put in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a name inspired by the meme-coin Doge. It is not just been Musk who has been rewarded though. According to the group ‘I Stand with Crypto’, 274 pro-crypto candidates have been elected to the House of Representatives and 20 to the Senate this cycle. From January 2025, it will be a much more pro-crypto Washington than it was under the first Trump administration.

The crypto movement alone didn’t win it for Trump, but it was a central node, a technological anchor point in a fuzzy constellation of anti-establishment ideas and philosophies, all of which appealed to the young men Trump was targeting. If you are someone who doesn’t trust central government, or the security services, or current politics, or the mainstream media – a significant chunk of Trump’s fanbase – then you will certainly not like how money works, and bitcoin will fit seamlessly into your world. Trump tapped into a wide and loose feeling that a left-leaning, bureaucratic ‘machine’ is running the show. And bitcoin is one very concrete way out. Take away their power to print money, to freeze citizen assets, maybe even to collect taxes, and the machine will grind to a spluttering halt.

This is why so many anti-establishment figures have fallen in love with crypto over the last few years. Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson, to name a few, all took the same journey of thinking about money as an idea, how it can be used to control people, and decided it needed to be wrestled away from the machine. They became ‘red-pilled’, as the internet dubbed this epiphany, and so have many of their followers, who might not ordinarily see Trump as a natural ally.

Not to mention, you can also get rich. The crypto world has long been divided into idealists and speculators. There are those who see it as the financial wing of a political revolution. For the majority, though, it’s as an easy way to make money, a form of gambling wrapped up in the high-faluting language of financial investment and political revolution. Too often experienced crypto-traders and ‘visionaries’ know exactly how to make money from the millions of normal people who are getting lured in by all the hype. Telling the visionaries from the speculators is not always simple.

Nevertheless, the movement that spawned bitcoin, known loosely as ‘crypto-anarchy’, is one of the only original political ideas of the last 30 years. It’s all based on a very simple thought: that laws of physics – encryption, computer code – can guarantee human liberty far better than man-made laws. That philosophy is why Trump, once in power, might decide that making the US the ‘crypto capital of the world’ isn’t quite so appealing after all.

It’s not entirely clear what Trump plans to do, although a few things seem likely. Over the last few years the Securities and Exchange Commission, (SEC) led by crypto’s arch nemesis Gary Gensler, has waged war against the crypto-bros. That includes dozens of lawsuits against crypto firms, such as Ripple and Coinbase. Trump has already promised to fire Gensler ‘on day one’ of his administration. He will likely follow through on his promise to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht. It also seems probable that his administration will reduce the regulatory burden for starting and selling any crypto products – pay back for all the money they poured into his campaign.

Beyond that, we will have to wait and see. More than anything, bitcoin represents the fault line between MAGA’s hatred of the machine and its love of law and order. And Trump now straddles both. As Musk whispers in one ear about defanging the SEC in the other, law enforcement will be pushing a different line as criminals continue to use crypto to launder money: tax dodgers are using crypto to bypass the IRS. Trump must tread a fine line, and some advisers will warn him that, if crypto rules are loosened, many more Americans could lose money and start blaming the president.

The choices Trump makes when faced with these two competing interests will shape crypto and American politics itself. In 1994 one of the earliest crypto-anarchists, Timothy C May, published Cyphernomicon, his manifesto of this new philosophy. May was an extremist, even among the crypto-anarchists, but the book is one of the most interesting documents ever written about surveillance, technology, and politics. Traces of May’s thinking remain within the movement 30 years later. In Cyphernomicon he explained that ‘many of us [cypherpunks] are explicitly anti-democratic and hope to use encryption to undermine the so-called democratic governments of the world.’ The crypto anarchists, therefore, are targeting the Federal Reserve, as well as the FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.

‘[The] US is frantic’, predicted May, imagining a crypto-anarchist future, ‘Pax Americana dies.’ This may not be the world President Trump wants.

Two weeks on from his election, Trump has said nothing about crypto at all, but the pressure from his supporters has increased in frenzy. Maybe it’s buyer’s remorse, as Trump ponders the reality of bridging government power and the ambitions of the crypto enthusiasts.