Yesterday, CoinDesk launched its Post-Trust Election series, looking at how politics and the U.S. presidential campaigns are grappling with issues of cryptocurrency, data security, privacy, disinformation, online voting and other areas.
We spoke with Ben about why we’re launching this series and what it means. Benjamin was on the ground in South Carolina in the days leading up to that primary, heard all the major candidates speak and spoke with voters, so we wanted to see whether cryptocurrencies and blockchain were factoring into people’s thought process around the primaries and election.
Today on Markets Daily we’re taking a break from our quick-hit news roundup format for a brief discussion about the U.S. election in the age of bitcoin with CoinDesk features editor Ben Schiller and privacy-beat reporter Benjamin Powers.
The candidates have been largely silent on the issue of cryptocurrencies, outside of the Andrew Yang campaign before it folded. But with trust in traditional institutions waning, the rise of a digital national currency in China, and whispers of the same in the U.S., the world of cryptocurrency is seemingly on a collision course with politics. In the same way things like election interference, disinformation, and the impact of tech platforms rose to national prominence in the years following 2016, we think stablecoins, decentralization and privacy will have a similar impact on the national discourse leading up to, and in the wake of, 2020.
Weird News Out of Canada and a Predicted Bull Run
Brad Kuen: Bitcoin is right around $7100 with not much change over the weekend. CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole writes that price charts are looking bearish, potentially heading back toward $6500 during the holiday. Prices would have to climb above $7870 to signal a short-term bullish reversal or above $8500 for a convincing start of a new bullish trend. The good news? This is far from the market low we hit a year ago on December 15 and prices are up 127% since then.
The price has been stable, which has defied some market prognosticators’ call for a big bull run into bitcoin’s expected mining-reward halving in May 2020. We’ll have more clarity on that in the new year.
In Bull News, Mark Yusko, CEO of the money-management firm Morgan Creek Capital Management, was once a skeptic of bitcoin. But he told Business Insider recently that he sees the price going to $100,000 by 2021, and potentially all the way to $500,000 by 2030.
Turning to the news, Chinese media are reporting that police arrested the CEO of MicroBT, a Chinese manufacturer of computers used to mine bitcoin. The arrest happened in October and the CEO, Yang ZUO SHING, previously worked at the dominant industry leader, Bitmain, where he was mining chip design director. According to the report, the CEO is accused of embezzling $15,000
Bitmain has a pending civil case against Yang and MicroBT, alleging the former employee of infringing a Bitmain patent on bitcoin mining equipment Separately, CoinDesk’s Wolfie Zhou reports that a district court in Shenzhen ordered the freezing of $680,000 in assets belonging to a unit of Bitmain over a contract dispute with an electronics supplier.
Coming back to the US, Fidelity Digital Assets, a unit of the giant asset manager Fidelity, might enable support for ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, as soon as next year.
According to reports, Tom Jessop, the unit’s president, said that it has so far only supported bitcoin because it has a longer track record Finally, we offer some news of the weird. Lingering suspicions over the death of Gerald Cotten, former CEO of the defunct crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, have led to calls for Canadian investigators to exhume his body
