(AFP) – US President Donald Trump’s son Eric on Thursday assured the world’s leading crypto conference that Washington would hoard “a tremendous amount of bitcoin,” aided by his father’s policies of slashing environmental protections to ramp up energy production.
In front of a packed crowd at the Consensus conference in Toronto, the younger Trump promoted his latest venture into the crypto industry, American Bitcoin, which he said aims to mine the digital currency more cheaply than its rivals. The US crypto industry has welcomed Trump’s return to the White House, praising policies it says mark a clear departure from the deep skepticism of the previous Democratic administration toward digital currencies.
But the Trump family’s entry into the crypto sector, from American Bitcoin to family-backed projects like World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin, has increased potential ethical concerns. $TRUMP saw a spike in value when it announced that its top 220 holders would be invited to a dinner with the president, with the top 25 receiving “an exclusive reception” beforehand, set to take place on May 22 at the Trump National Golf Club near Washington.
Eric Trump told the conference his father’s administration’s commitment to drive down US energy costs would help large-scale crypto mining businesses that need data centers, which consume massive amounts of energy. “We have a president in the United States that actually believes in having a proper energy policy in the United States of America, where he wants the cheapest energy anywhere in the world because that’s going to fuel all the innovation that we’re talking about right now,” he said.
The Trump administration has made bringing down energy prices and increasing domestic supply a key policy, along with rolling back clean energy initiatives and opening more federal land and offshore areas for oil and gas drilling. Similar bitcoin mining businesses in France and Scotland are not viable, Eric Trump argued, because “the energy price is too high.”
Trump said he sees the bitcoin sector as a competition with “two races.” One area is the accumulation of bitcoin, whose value topped $100,000 again this month. “Then I think there’s the game of who can mine it the cheapest.” American Bitcoin will strive to “accumulate a tremendous amount of bitcoin,” he said. “But I also want to be the person who’s mining it, by far the cheapest. And I think we can win that race.”
Bitcoin mining involves using computing power to solve complex mathematical problems. The data centers increasingly required for large-scale mining have drawn criticism from environmentalists over their substantial energy needs. American Bitcoin announced plans this week to go public on the New York Stock Exchange via a merger with Gryphon Digital Mining Inc.
© 2024 AFP
