

I applaud the author for realizing that the real threat is coming from inside the (White) House…
The politicization of law enforcement has acquired a new dimension during the ongoing immigration crackdowns, when the Administration has sometimes seemed to allow its agents to disguise their identities or affiliations so that it is often unclear to detainees whose custody they are in, or under what authority. (If the vigilantes have been encouraged to act as cops, the actual cops have also been encouraged to act a bit more like vigilantes.)
No, the Crypto part is important, because it makes it trivialize easy to issue any number of tokens (trillions? quadrillions? 2^64?) and then trade with them. Gift cards still have the limitation that you need a network to accept them, and they are commonly understood in accounting practices so retailers need to account for them.
How can we be sure that some random stablecoin is really backed by currency 1:1 like they claim? The largest stablecoin in use today is Tether, which claims to have over $100B in circulation, all “backed 1:1”. But every audit they have released has been deficient in some way. You would think with that much money in a bank somewhere people could figure out where it all is.