Former president and convicted felon Donald Trump said after a campaign event with Bitcoin miners that he wants “all remaining Bitcoin made in the USA.”
The remark was made on his alt-tech social media platform, Truth Social, after a meeting with Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey and execs from publicly traded BTC miners CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, and Marathon Digital. His vow last night and yet another appeal to the U.S. crypto industry heading into the 2024 presidential election.
In the latest polls, Trump holds a narrow lead over President Joe Biden with 41% of voter support to the incumbent’s 40%. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s running as an independent candidate, is still holding onto 9% of voter support in polls.
Trump added in his post that producing the remaining supply of BTC in the U.S. will help the country be “energy dominant” and that it “may be our last line of defense against a CBDC.”
Trump has vowed to “never allow” a CBDC if he’s re-elected, but he didn’t clarify why increasing Bitcoin mining might help block the creation of a central bank digital currency. A CBDC is a digital form of fiat currency and has become incredibly divisive in the crypto community as central banks around the world explore whether it would be beneficial to issue one.
As for pushing U.S. Bitcoin mining dominance, Trump might have meant that he wants to see America increase its portion of the network’s hashrate. The U.S. currently accounts for 38% of the global Bitcoin hashrate, according to The Chain Bulletin.
The next closest competitors are China, with 21% and Canada with 6.5% of total hashrate.
Even if the U.S. increased its hashrate, as Trump hopes, it wouldn’t preclude miners from operating in other countries and being rewarded with BTC. As it stands, approximately 94% of Bitcoin’s 21 million supply has been paid to miners as rewards for processing blocks of transactions on the network.
There have been pushes to use and increase the share of “American” Bitcoin before.
In 2020, the Chamber of Digital Commerce sent $50 worth of BTC to all members of Congress. The BTC used for the publicity stunt was mined by Core Scientific, a U.S. mining hardware company, which provided Bitcoin miners from Kentucky and North Carolina to mining pool Luxor, whose servers are in Iowa.
