JUST IN: Donald Trump Issues Statement On Bitcoin

Former United States President, Donald Trump, has called Bitcoin (BTC) a scam. Trump said this while he was being interviewed by Fox News yesterday.

“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam […] I don’t like it because it is another currency competing against the dollar. Essentially, it is a currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world, that’s what I’ve always said,” the former President stated.

This is not the first time that Donald Trump has made negative comments on Bitcoin. In July 2019, while in office, Trump stated that he was not a fan of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. At the time, the former President identified price volatility as a major point for his anti-cryptocurrency stance while stating that cryptocurrencies were not money and that their value was based on “thin air.”

The Trump administration specifically sought to put in place, anti-cryptocurrency policies, with the former President, allegedly telling former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to “go after Bitcoin.” The Treasury Department, in the last days of the Trump administration, came up with regulations aimed at monitoring self-hosted wallets. The policy has become even further expanded by the Joe Biden administration, with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) also looking to close crypto-related tax loopholes.

However, pro-cryptocurrency congresspeople like Senator Cynthia Lummis and Rep. Warren Davidson continue to advocate for crypto wallet privacy rights. The conversation around cryptocurrency regulations in the United States seems to has shifted toward ransomware and is now the new focus for the anti-crypto policymakers in Washington. This is because ransomware attacks in the U.S. have become a reoccurring event. For example, the cyber-attack on the top U.S pipeline company, Colonial Pipeline, saw the company pay a ransom of $5 million to the hackers in cryptocurrency before they got hold of their network.