What year is it? Because I was reliably informed this was 2025, but it appears I should be expecting a new lockdown at any moment. Bitcoin has surged to its highest all-time price, Donald Trump is about to step into the White House once more, and meme coins are battling it out for market share—except this time, the chief proponents are none other than the incoming president and first lady.
US president-elect (quite possibly actual president by the time you read this story) Donald Trump launched $Trump over the weekend, a meme coin co-ordinated by CIC Digital LLC, a Trump-affiliated organisation that has previously played a part in handling hot-ticket consumer items like Trump-branded shoes and NFTs.
The price of $Trump rocketed to nearly $15 billion in overall market cap, before nosediving off a cliff down to almost eight billion dollars by Sunday evening, and now appears to have evened out to between nine and eleven billion dollars total value overall.
That has also probably changed by the time you read this. Crypto is volatile, you say? No one’s more surprised than me.
However, a contributing factor to $Trump coin’s recent stumbles seems to have been the launch of $Melania, a meme coin released by first lady to-be Melania Trump on Sunday, the day before Trump’s inauguration. Speculation suggests that investors dropped off the Trump-train in favour of hedging their bets with his wife instead, causing a dip in uptake of the gold-toilet-enthusiast’s crypto token.
BREAKING: Donald Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP, crashes over -40% as Melania Trump launches her own memecoin.This is beyond insane. pic.twitter.com/6Oj2GGqjqFJanuary 19, 2025
Meanwhile, bitcoin has hit an all-time high of $109,000 per token, thanks to a so-called “god candle” that sent the previously-beleaguered coin soaring to new heights. What with the new president now seemingly a fan of the crypto market (after previously labelling bitcoin a “scam” and expressing distrust of cryptocurrency as a whole), it seems the market is reacting to the idea that the incoming administration may be on the cusp of legitimising crypto in ways previously thought unlikely.
Sorry, I zoned out for a second there and thought about the infinite possibilities of multiverse theory, as we appear to be in the worst one. Anyway, the really important question here is what this means for us PC gamers, or at least I’m making it the most important question for the sake of my sanity.
A new crypto-mining boom affecting GPU prices, perhaps? Well, who knows at this point. Certainly, crypto mining is still very much a current issue, although it comes in many forms, as even a Raspberry Pi can be cattle-prodded into mining crypto (badly).
Many coins are now Proof of Stake but there are enough mineable (Proof of Work) coins on the market that, given the crypto upsurge as a whole, it’s not entirely unthinkable that demand for crypto-crunching hardware might put a squeeze on graphics card stocks once more. It’s in the realms of possibility at least, although it seems very unlikely at this point.
Energy costs are a massive factor, for one. And bitcoin isn’t mined on GPUs anymore (at least at scale, thanks to the rise of ASICs), although that’s not ruling out the possibility that a new proof-of-work, GPU-friendly coin may rise, kraken-like, from the depths of our greatest fears.
A lot of things are possible from this point forward. That’s the takeaway. It’s a brave new day for the world’s biggest superpower, and, it seems, a brave new day for cryptocurrency too.