Top 7 crowd reactions to Trump's BTC tweets

On Thursday evening, the cryptoverse got a very public confirmation of something that most assumed but never expected to be addressed: the President of the United States is a no-coiner.

In one of his signature twitter tirades, Donald Trump ousted himself as a crypto skeptic, berating Bitcoin as a valueless asset leveraged by criminals, warning Facebook’s Libra coin of additional regulatory hoops, and professing his unwavering loyalty to the US Dollar. And all of that in just 3 tweets!

Needless to say, Trump’s tweetstorm was the only talking point in crypto yesterday, as you can tell by a quick look at our Top Social Gainers list:

Over the last 48 hours, ‘Trump’ was mentioned over 3000 times on crypto social media - easily an all-time high social volume for the phrase:

Everyone wanted to chime in on the Donald’s indictment of the crypto ecosystem- and everyone did. In a matter of hours, Pomp was meticulously dissecting Trump’s comments on CNBC, Justin Sun invited Trump to his upcoming charity dinner with Warren Buffer, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong declared this a momentous occasion for the nascent industry:

And that was just the heavyweights. The general community reactions were even less tempered, with more than one ‘Trump hates Bitcoin’ threads reaching the front page of reddit as the whole thing quickly devolved into a hot take fiesta.

And now, as the dust begins to settle, we can slowly see the main community talking points beginning to take form. We counted 7 main narratives, with each branching into dozens of smaller discussion threads.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. BTC is not the only currency used by criminals

One of Trump’s main arguments against crypto assets was that they can be used to ‘facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity....’ It wasn’t long before folks started pointing out that this is not exactly an issue endemic to crypto, and that the US Dollar has been a staple currency of criminal organization for decades:

2. This proves USA is scared of crypto’s rise

I don’t know how many times the quote ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win’ has been used on crypto reddit in the past 36 hours, but it has to be some kind of a record.

Either way, many believe Trump’s rant is documented proof that the US is gravely concerned about crypto’s potential impact on USD’s global influence and stock:

3. Trump did not write these tweets

Perhaps my favorite Trump theme to emerge on crypto social media is a strong conviction of some community members that there’s no way that he wrote those tweets themselves, and that they were in fact ghostwritten by his bear-dominant staff:

4. Trump doesn’t understand crypto

Although he hasn’t touched on crypto’s underlying tech at all, many are sure Trump doesn’t have even an elementary knowledge of and familiarity with how cryptocurrencies work:

5. BTC just went mainstream

Regardless of his argument’s merits or the overall sentiment, many were just thankful for the free publicity Trump has bestowed on the crypto industry in general, and Bitcoin in particular:

6. This is actually about Libra

To some, the ‘bitcoin is bad’ part was just fodder for Trump’s main motivation behind the tweetstorm: to go after left-leaning Facebook and its upcoming coin:

7. This is good for Bitcoin

And finally, as perhaps the only possible conclusion to the above talking points, much of the crowd saw Trump’s comments as overwhelmingly bullish for crypto’s biggest coin:

With all the above in mind, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s anti-coin sentiment had little impact on the short-term price of Bitcoin. The king coin did initially dip slightly to its local low ~$11370 following the tweets, but has managed to stabilize quickly thereafter and has continued to trade sideways since. Or, as Erik Voorhees put it: