Steve Bannon backs bitcoin and eyes his own ‘deplorables’ cryptocurrency

It’s been a tough few days for bitcoin. On Sunday, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail was hacked, which caused the price of bitcoin to tumble. Prices fell again on Wednesday after a study found bitcoin’s huge spike last year (the currency reached nearly US$20,000) might have been the result of strategic price manipulation.

Despite all the bad news, bitcoin still has its believers, including Steve Bannon. In an interview with The New York Times, the former White House strategist said that he has a “good stake” in bitcoin and is interested in working with entrepreneurs and countries interested in creating their own cryptocurrencies. Bannon may also have ambitions to create a currency of his own. Earlier this year, in a meeting at Harvard University, he apparently discussed creating a new digital currency called “deplorables coin”.

Bannon says he isn’t interested in cryptocurrencies solely for the financial potential; he sees decentralised money as a key component of his political mission. Cryptocurrency is “disruptive populism, it takes control back from central authorities”, said Bannon. “It was pretty obvious to me that unless you got somehow control over your currency, all these political movements were going to be beholden to who controlled the currency … control of the currency, is control of everything.”

The deplorables coin’s name references the time Hillary Clinton called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” during the 2016 election. Clinton later said she regretted it; it had handed Trump “a political gift”.

White nationalists were interested in the political potential of cryptocurrency long before bitcoin entered the mainstream. In 2014 Andrew Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi who goes by the name “weev”, wrote on his blog: “I heartily encourage you to consider cryptocurrency, including bitcoin.”

And in March 2017 Richard Spencer declared on Twitter that “bitcoin is the currency of the alt-right.”