Author: Andrei Jikh
Translator: Ding Dang
Original Title: Why is the United States Embracing Encryption? The Answer May Lie in the 37 Trillion Dollar Debt
At a recent Eastern Economic Forum held in Russia, one of Putin's closest advisors made a widely noticed statement. He indicated that the United States is preparing to use cryptocurrencies and stablecoins to devalue its massive 37 trillion dollar national debt in an almost imperceptible manner.
His claim is: The U.S. is conspiring to "migrate" this debt into a crypto system, completing a system-level reset through a so-called "crypto cloud," with the ultimate result being that the rest of the world foots the bill.
At first glance, this might sound like a crazy theory. But similar views are not appearing for the first time. MicroStrategy founder and billionaire Michael Saylor has publicly made a highly controversial suggestion to Trump in the past: sell all of America's gold and buy Bitcoin with the proceeds. Empty the gold reserves directly; with the same funds, you could buy 5 million Bitcoins. By doing this, you would demonetize the entire gold asset class. And our rival nations happen to hold large gold reserves. Their assets would approach zero, while our assets would balloon to 100 trillion dollars. The U.S. would simultaneously control the global reserve capital network and the reserve currency system.
But the question is: Is this realistic? Is it actually feasible?
YouTube creator Andrei Jikh, with 2.93 million subscribers, dedicated an episode to dissecting: What exactly did Putin's advisor say? And how exactly could the U.S. potentially devalue its 37 trillion dollar debt through stablecoins and Bitcoin? Odaily Planet Daily compiled and translated this episode.
First Question: Who said this?
The speaker is named Anton Kobyakov, a senior advisor to Russian President Putin, serving for over a decade, primarily responsible for communicating Russia's strategic narrative at important occasions like the Eastern Economic Forum.
In his speech, he clearly stated: The United States is attempting to rewrite the rules of the gold and crypto markets, with the ultimate goal of pushing the global economic system into what he calls a "crypto cloud." Once the global monetary system completes this migration, the U.S. could embed its enormous national debt into digital asset structures like stablecoins, and then devalue it to effectively achieve a "debt reset."
Second Question: What does "debt devaluation" actually mean? How does it work?
Let's understand with an extremely simplified example. Assume the entire world's wealth is worth a single $100 bill. I borrow this entire $100, so I owe the entire wealth of the world, and I must repay it.
The problem is, if I repay the debt honestly, I must return the original $100 bill intact. But luckily, I possess a special "superpower"—I control the world's reserve currency issuance rights.
So, instead of returning the original $100 bill, I print a new $100 bill out of thin air.
What is the result? The total money supply in the world goes from $100 to $200, but the quantity of goods, houses, and resources in the world hasn't increased.
The result is, the price of everything starts to rise: real estate, stocks, gold, especially things everyone wants, all become more expensive; what used to cost $1 now requires $2. Everything gets more expensive, but the supply of goods remains the same. This is inflation.
Now, when I return "that $100" to you,表面上 I have fulfilled the debt in full,但实际上, the purchasing power of the money you receive has been halved. I haven't defaulted, but I've devalued the debt by diluting the currency.
Stablecoins are replicating this old playbook
However, what many people don't realize is: This is one of the oldest and most common ways to repay debt in human history. This is also how the United States has been repaying its debt all along.
Debt devaluation is not the same as default; it doesn't mean not repaying. It simply reduces the real value of the debt through inflation or currency manipulation.
And this method has happened time and again throughout history. It happened after World War II, during the great inflation of the 1970s, and again with the massive money printing after the pandemic.
So, when the Russian advisor says "the U.S. might use cryptocurrency to devalue its debt," he is not revealing a new mechanism, but describing an old method that the U.S. has long mastered.
The real change is: Stablecoins can spread this mechanism globally.
It needs to be clarified: This is not about directly converting the 37 trillion dollars "into stablecoins," but rather using dollar stablecoins backed by U.S. Treasury bonds as the underlying asset to disperse the U.S. liability structure into the hands of global holders. When the dollar is diluted by inflation, the loss is shared by all holders of these stablecoins.
I want to say something extremely important, an underlying economic fact that many people overlook, and this is also Jeff Booth's view: The natural state of the economy is actually deflationary. Meaning, if there was only a fixed amount of money in the world, over time, technological progress and improved production efficiency would naturally make goods cheaper. Falling prices are the natural law. But reality is not like this; the world we actually live in does not operate this way. The reason is only one: governments can create money infinitely.
When new money floods the system, this liquidity must "find a place to go" so it doesn't become worthless. So, it gets poured into things like real estate, stocks, gold, and Bitcoin. This is also why, in the long run, these assets seem to always be rising. But actually, they are just maintaining their purchasing power, while the currency underpinning everything is getting weaker. It's not that the assets are rising, but that the dollar is depreciating.
The True Value of Stablecoins: Distribution + Control
The question is, what if you could extend this superpower? What if you could expand the same trick beyond U.S. borders? This is where stablecoins come in.
If the U.S. can already devalue debt through conventional inflation, what more can stablecoins do? The answer is two words: distribution + control.
Because when there is domestic inflation in the U.S., the economic pain is immediate: we see higher grocery bills, more expensive housing, rising energy costs, and potentially higher interest rates cooling the economy, CPI and consumer price index reports rise, and American citizens become dissatisfied.
But stablecoins are different. Because stablecoins typically hold reserves in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, the demand for dollars and U.S. debt can actually increase as stablecoin adoption grows, making the whole thing self-reinforcing. When USDT and USDC are widely used globally, they are essentially holding a digital IOU backed by U.S. Treasury bonds. This means U.S. debt financing is "invisibly outsourced" to global users.
So, if the U.S. devalues its debt through inflation, the burden wouldn't just fall on U.S. citizens; it would also be "exported" globally through the stablecoin system. Then inflation becomes a kind of tax borne collectively by global stablecoin holders. Because their digital dollars also lose purchasing power. Technically, today's system is similar. Dollars are everywhere in the world, but stablecoins would become a much larger market and would exist on people's smartphones.
Another piece of the puzzle is that stablecoins can appear neutral because they can be created by private companies, not just governments. This means they don't carry the political baggage associated with the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department. According to the proposed "ECASH Act," only approved issuers, such as banks, trust companies, or non-bank companies that can obtain special approval, can issue regulated, dollar-backed stablecoins in the U.S.
If Apple or Meta wanted to, they could theoretically issue their own currency, say a so-called "Metacoin." What's really needed is not some technological breakthrough, but political permission. To put it bluntly, by currying favor with the power center and investing enough capital, one could potentially get a pass.
It is precisely for this reason that stablecoins would play such an important role in the process of U.S. debt dilution. They essentially provide "control at a level close to a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)" but without bearing the highly sensitive label of CBDC globally.
The Fatal Problem with Stablecoins: Trust Cannot Be Fully Verified
But the problem is, the rest of the world isn't buying it. We've seen this from the behavior of central banks continuously buying gold on a large scale.
Stablecoins claim to be pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar or U.S. Treasury bonds. Theoretically, every stablecoin in circulation should be backed by $1 in cash or an equivalent value of Treasury assets. But the practical problem is: Neither individuals nor foreign governments can independently audit these reserves with 100% certainty.
Tether and Circle publish reserve reports, but you must trust the issuers themselves, and you must trust the auditing firms, and these institutions are almost entirely within the U.S. system. When it comes to a trust issue involving trillions of dollars, this in itself is an extremely high barrier for nations.
Even if blockchain technology could enable real-time, transparent auditing of stablecoin reserves in the future, this would not solve the deeper problem—the U.S. always has the power to change the rules.
History has given a clear warning. The U.S. government once promised that the dollar could be exchanged for gold at any time, but in 1971, the Nixon administration unilaterally severed this convertibility. From a global perspective, this was tantamount to a complete "rule flip": the promise remained, but its fulfillment was ended with a "just kidding."
Therefore, a digital token system built on "please trust us" will find it difficult to truly win the world's trust. Technically, nothing can stop the U.S. from making a decision regarding stablecoins in the future similar to the dollar's depegging from gold. This is the fundamental reason for the widespread high alert regarding the new generation of digital currency systems globally.
So, the next question is: Will the U.S. actually do this in the end?
In my opinion, this possibility not only exists, it is even inevitable. The U.S. is already experimenting with this idea, just not in the way we've heard about.
For example, Michael Saylor once publicly advised Trump and his family, advocating for the U.S. to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve. His idea was: If the U.S. sold gold and instead bought Bitcoin on a large scale, it could not only suppress gold prices and weaken competitors like China and Russia, but also push up Bitcoin prices and reshape the U.S. balance sheet.
But ultimately, this did not happen. Instead, during Trump's term, this idea about a U.S. Bitcoin reserve remained just a mentioned concept, never becoming reality. U.S. officials clearly stated they would not use taxpayer funds to buy Bitcoin, and at least on the public level, no related actions were seen. So, I don't think it will happen in the way Michael Saylor publicly suggested.
However, this doesn't mean the story ends here. Because the government doesn't necessarily have to be directly involved for it to participate. The real "backdoor path" lies in the private sector.
MicroStrategy has de facto become a "Bitcoin public company," continuously accumulating Bitcoin under Michael Saylor's leadership, now holding hundreds of thousands of coins. So the question arises: Would it be safer and more low-key for a publicly traded company to first complete the large-scale hoarding of Bitcoin, rather than the government buying directly?
Doing it this way would not be seen as a central bank operation, nor would it immediately trigger global market panic. And when Bitcoin is truly established as a strategic asset, the U.S. government could completely gain exposure to Bitcoin indirectly through share acquisition, controlling stakes, etc.—just like it once held partial ownership in companies like Intel, precedents already exist.
Instead of publicly selling gold, gambling on trillion-dollar Bitcoin trades, or强行 pushing a stablecoin system, a smarter approach, more in line with the U.S.'s consistent style, is to let private enterprises conduct the experiments first. When a certain model proves effective and becomes too important to ignore, then the national level can absorb and institutionalize it.
This method is more隐蔽, gradual, and offers more "plausible deniability," until one day, it all officially surfaces.
Therefore, the core point I want to express is: There are many ways this could happen, and it likely will happen. That Russian advisor's judgment is not without basis—if the U.S. truly attempts to fundamentally address its national debt problem, then some form of digital asset strategy is almost an inevitable choice.
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