I have a disclaimer for this article, and it’s that I am incredibly biased. I hate gambling and I see it as a huge waste of money. I choose mutual funds over individual stocks because I am risk averse. I don’t feel that I’ve missed out on any winnings because I know I’ve missed out on a lot of losing.
I’ve said since 2013 that I refuse to invest in cryptocurrency because any currency that is only backed by vibes cannot be stable and has a high chance of manipulation. Even Bitcoin, the long-touted “most-stable token” has lost 27% of its value in 2026 alone. Sorry to burst the bubble, but cryptocurrency is only worth what other people think it is worth.
A counter argument to that is usually made by the crypto-bros that the US dollar is also not backed by anything, which isn’t exactly true. The US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government, so it is secured by the huge portfolio of physical property owned by the government, as well as their revenue, which is a lot. Anyway, back to crypto.
The main issue with cryptocurrency is that any money you invest is basically at the mercy of influencers, and I think everyone should be aware of that before investing in them.
Unfortunately, the President of the United States is also a crypto influencer, which feels embarrassing even to type. Trump entered the crypto game in 2024 and Forbes tags his total crypto-related profits between $2.1 and $3 billion. He might have rejected his presidential salary, but crypto influencing is clearly much more lucrative.
I want to also clarify before I get into the dirty side of crypto influencing that Trump is far from the only person guilty of this stuff. I am only choosing to highlight him because this conflict of interests between this and his position, coupled with his level of influence over the Boomer generation. They are the generation with the most money and the least knowledge of how crypto works, which makes them prime targets for crypto scams. The majority of them genuinely think crypto apps are actual investments and not just glorified gambling apps.
So how can crypto influencing be so bad if Trump made so much money? Let me discuss the concept of rug-pulling. Imagine an influencer(or the President of the United States) tells everyone about this great new investment opportunity in this crypto token that is launching the next day. This person is rich, so you trust his advice and invest $100 in the token on opening day. The token starts at a decent value because the influencer owns the majority percentage of them, and the price of them is based on how many of these tokens are owned. So you, the investor, watch the price boom on the first few days, thinking you made a sound investment.
Then you wake up one morning and see that the value you own is now $15 and you have lost most of your money. So what happened? The owner of the crypto token, who paid nearly nothing to start this coin, waited for enough people to invest to drive up the price, then sold the majority of their shares to cash out, crashing the value of the token for everyone else. Trump’s $TRUMP token crashed by 97% after the first few days, while his family made $616 million from it. Buyers collectively lost over $700 million. Yahoo! Finance reports that all of the Trump crypto tokens have left investors with a $4.3 billion loss. Contrast that with the amount of money Trump himself made from them, and it’s hard not to call it out as a scam.
To think, Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm when he became president because he felt it was a conflict of interest with his position.
Now coupled with his ethics (or lack thereof) on crypto, it’s not a stretch to ask the question of if Trump is capable of using his financial influence to manipulate the much-harder-to-manipulate actual stock market. Trump has claimed around 40 times that he is in talks with the government of Iran and that the Iran War is nearly over. Every time he makes this claim, major indexes jump and the price of oil falls. Then, a few days later, he changes his mind and they both return to their previous positions. Most of the time, Iran responds that they haven’t talked to Trump and they have no idea why he would be saying these things.
So why does he say them? We have to confront that he is either losing his mind, or that he has ulterior motives with these statements. I’m not sure which is worse. The concept of a senile president with access to the nuclear launch codes is horrifying, but what about a self-serving president who is extremely knowledgeable about manipulating the market that holds all of our retirement funds for his own personal gain?
It’s easy to see why the prices of precious metals have surged over the past few years. Gold and silver are the only things that have retained their value throughout history. They will be here long after our country is just a memory, and historically, they are what Americans invest in during times where they have lost faith in the US Government. Gold surged in 1933 when the Gold Standard was revoked. Gold surged again in 1980 and also around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, and it surged 64% last year alone.
My point is that it is important to be able to distinguish gambling from investing, even when it all kind of feels like gambling right now.
Speaking of gambling, I’m not a prude who is against others gambling for fun. But back in the day, a person would have to travel to the casino to gamble, and it was a contained, rare experience. This changed in 2018, when the popularity of crypto apps led to the legalization of sports betting apps. Today, crypto apps and sports betting apps are on most people’s phones, and they can place bets from their lunch break or at home in bed. Over half of American men aged 18-49 have an active online betting account.
You know if you’ve read any of my past articles that I am a huge fan of personal freedoms, but at what point does this become detrimental to our society as a whole? Are we just going to accept an entire generation developing a crippling gambling addiction because we chose to legalize it? As unlike myself as it feels to say it, at some point it may be the government’s job to step in if citizens are unable to make rational decisions for themselves. Maybe not yet, but I have a bad feeling about the future of these apps and their influence on our people.
I feel like our technology outgrowing our financial educations are to blame for a lot of these issues in our society. I had the benefit of working in finance for several years, so I spotted the red flags in crypto years ago, but did any of us really learn about investing at all in school? We learned about bull and bear markets, and the causes of previous stock market crashes, but a rug-pull wasn’t in the dictionary back then. And the most I learned about gambling was the once a year my grandmother “went to the boats” with her sisters for fun. She certainly didn’t watch the State of the Union speech with her phone in her hands, betting how many times Trump would say the word “China”.
These problems are new. We were never warned about them. Our Founding Fathers had zero idea that things like this would ever exist. There was no way for school to prepare us for this. So we should give ourselves some grace and do our best to educate ourselves now. After all, the best we can hope for is to know more tomorrow than we did yesterday. And, of course, not to fall for any more crypto scams.
Taryn Ogletree is a local small business owner and author with previous experience of several years in finance.