Could Donald Trump Ban Bitcoin?

Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and a member of CoinDesk’s product team. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a free newsletter for institutional investors interested in crypto assets. Sign up here.

Bitcoin yet again graced global headlines last week, after the President of the United States, Donald Trump, took to Twitter to declare himself “not a fan” of cryptocurrencies, “whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”

The ensuing discussion largely celebrated the global attention and the fact that bitcoin is now important enough for one of the most powerful men in the world to make a public statement about it. And the crypto markets seemed to shrug it off, signaling with their relative indifference that they have bigger things to worry about.

One potential conversation that has been largely overlooked is how vulnerable bitcoin…