What did Donald Trump do today?

He made a few paper billions on a cryptocurrency that even crypto diehards are calling a scam.

Trump, at 78, is famously unconcerned with the details of modern computing. Although he has the social media appetite of someone a quarter his age, he tends to envision computers the way they appeared in 1980s movies like War Games. For example, his answer to beefing up cybersecurity during his first term was to suggest that businesses send sensitive information via bike messenger.

Since allying himself with tech billionaires, though, Trump has learned to love at least one newfangled computer concept: cryptocurrency. Last night, he began selling a "token" with no intrinsic value, and not even the scarcity value of proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Instead, "$TRUMP" is a tradable digital certificate that confers nothing more than bragging rights. 

Today, Trump's net worth had—at least in theory—increased by billions of dollars as a result of the market price of the tokens, most of which he still owns.

There are two reasons, other than fandom, that people might buy these tokens. One, which drives many such fad currencies, is what is known as the greater fool theory. Something that is intrinsically worthless can still yield profit for an investor as long as there is a "greater fool" to resell it to. Ultimately, of course, the last investor is stuck having paid top dollar for a worthless and unsellable investment, at which point the bubble collapses.

Collapsing price bubbles tend to damage economies even when most people are not buying into the bubble. A bursting bubble in Florida land prices was a major cause of the Great Depression, for example. In modern regulated financial markets, the pump-and-dump mechanisms that enable those who want to stalk the "greater fool" are illegal. 

But crypto is still, for the most part, a sort of Wild West—something Trump used to understand.

This time around, though, Trump made keeping cryptocurrencies unregulated and forcing the government to spend actual dollars to buy them a central part of his campaign platform.

The other reason that investors might want to pump up the value of Trump's "tokens" is as a form of indirect bribery. Buyers are only as secret as they want to be, and Trump—who has made no secret of the fact that his access and goodwill can be bought—would be in a position to know who to reward or punish based on their token purchases without money directly changing hands in a way that would be visible to law enforcement. 

Crypto industry diehards have said that the unusual structure of Trump's "coin" offering gives buyers terrible terms, with Trump in a position to flood the market or cash out without any of the usual restrictions. Anthony Scaramucci, a crypto booster who was briefly Trump's press secretary during his first term, called it "Idi Amin-level corruption."

Why does this matter?

• The security and economic stability of the United States is more important than Donald Trump getting a few more billion dollars.
  
  
• Elected officials who aren't looking to sell their influence don't do everything possible to make sure people can buy it.
  
  
• It's probably a bad sign if people who were in a president's inner circle are comparing him to one of the most corrupt dictators of modern history.