Tech
JD Vance: Bitcoin Rises, But Big Tech Has Reason to Fear It | Business News
Much is known about J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, not least his past criticisms of the Republican presidential nominee, his tough, working-class upbringing, and his stint in the U.S. Marine Corps.
What the business world is most interested in, however, is the Ohio senator’s previous career in venture capital and his views on trade, as well as their potential impact if Trump returns to the White House.
In particular, Mr. Vance has been strongly supportive of cryptocurrencies, fueling hopes in the industry that a second Trump administration could have positive effects for the asset class.
Latest money news:
Mortgages hit as rate cut forecasts are rewritten
So it is too trump who, in May, became the first major presidential candidate to accept crypto-asset donations. He has already amassed nearly $3 million in such assets: $1.8 million in Bitcoin and $900,000 in Ethereum.
Mr Trump, a former cryptocurrency skeptic, spoke out personally last week about his ambitions to support the cryptocurrency sector in the United States.
He told Bloomberg Businessweek: “It’s not going away. It’s incredible.
“If we don’t do it, China will pick it up and China will have it, or someone else will have it, but most likely China. China is very involved.”
It’s no wonder, then, that the value of cryptocurrencies has surged – Bitcoin by more than 8% on Monday alone – after the attempted murder last Saturday on Trump was widely seen as a factor that would boost his chances of victory in November.
In Mr. Vance, the former president has chosen a running mate who is a staunch supporter of cryptocurrencies, having previously said he holds between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Bitcoin holdings on the Coinbase platform.
Who is JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president?
Shortly after his nomination as Trump’s vice president, a 2022 video resurfaced of Vance criticizing Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), the top U.S. financial regulator.
In the video, which dates back to February of that year, Mr. Vance said that Mr. Gensler was “the worst person” to run U.S. financial regulation.
He added: “He wants to meddle too much in the politics of the actual securities business in the United States.
“Gary’s approach to regulating blockchain and cryptocurrencies is the exact opposite of what it should be.”
Vance: UK is ‘Islamist under Labour’
Earlier this month, Vance also took to Twitter to express approval for cryptocurrencies as a means of countering government overreach, noting that Canada’s finance minister had frozen the bank accounts of truckers protesting COVID-related lockdowns.
He tweeted: “This is why crypto is taking off. The regime will cut off your access to banks if you have the wrong policy.”
This year, Mr. Vance joined other Republican senators in writing to Mr. Gensler to highlight an enforcement action against cryptocurrency miner Debt Box, in which, it was later discovered, SEC lawyers had used false statements to justify freezing the company’s assets.
Minister reacts to ‘UK is Islamist’ claim
He also voted to reverse accounting guidelines introduced by the SEC, which require publicly traded banks to include digital assets they hold in custody on their balance sheets.
This rule change goes against the convention of holding bank custody assets off-balance sheet and is expected to increase the cost of banks taking custody of cryptocurrencies and likely deter them from doing so. President Biden subsequently vetoed attempts to reverse the rule change.
So, with Mr. Vance, the United States would get a Vice President who is strongly pro-cryptocurrency.
The Ohio senator is likely more tech-savvy than any previous U.S. president or vice president.
After graduating from law school, he worked at Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded and backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal.
Mr. Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known figures, went on to support Mr. Vance’s run for the U.S. Senate in 2020. Mr. Vance subsequently began working for Revolution, a Washington, D.C.-based VC firm, before launching his own VC firm, Narya Capital, in 2019.
The US news site Axios reported that his backers include Mr Thiel and Marc Andreessen, another of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capitalists.
Axios said another Narya Capital backer was Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. Another longtime backer of Mr. Vance is David Sacks, the former CEO of the social networking service Yammer and an early-stage investor in successful tech companies such as Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as well as Palantir Technologies, another well-known tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel.
In other words, Mr. Vance has impeccable contacts in Silicon Valley, which explains why the likes of Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk have stepped forward since his nomination to pledge huge sums of money to the Trump campaign.
That doesn’t mean Mr. Vance is a conventional “tech bro.” He has also said in the past that big tech companies have too much power and called for them to be broken up.
He co-wrote a paper calling for Google to become a public benefit corporation and praised Lina Khan, the Democratic chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the top U.S. competition regulator, for her efforts to rein in the tech giants, even as some of her Republican colleagues criticized her for being too aggressive toward them.
To know more:
Who is JD Vance?
What could Trump’s candidacy mean for NATO and Ukraine?
This is a limited version of the story, so unfortunately this content is not available.
Open the full version
He said at a conference in February of this year: “I consider Lina Khan to be one of the few people in the Biden administration who, in my opinion, is actually doing a good job.”
This suggests that Mr. Vance’s approach to technology is much more nuanced than some believe.
Overall, his attitude seems to be welcoming of disruptors and startups and pro-innovation and competition, but rather hostile toward tech giants that inhibit consumer choice and, in his own words, are “so obsessed with pricing power in the marketplace that they ignore all the other things that really matter.”
If he becomes vice president, it could spark an interesting debate with the tech industry.