So Trump plans to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Well OK, he might manage to get the wall built, but the plan to make Mexico pay for it has a fatal flaw. The plan hinges on cutting off access to millions of “illegal” migrants to Western Union, the service most used to send money back to their families back home, and using that as a bargaining chip to “convince” Mexico to pay for the wall.
>> Trump's Plan (donaldjtrump.com)
This is possible, oddly enough, because of financial regulations imposed by the Patriot Act, which subjects financial institutions to “know-your-customer” (KYC) requirements. Trump’s plan is to redefine “financial institution” and “account” to include Western Union, and wire transfers, respectively… basically producing a burden to present verifiable identification as a prerequisite for using these money transfer services.
If Trump manages to do that — to bring Western Union under regulatory control and institute KYC requirements, essentially making it a “citizens only” service — all that will happen is that illegals will switch from Western Union to Bitcoin, which provides a far better service anyway, and is effectively unregulatable. This will have two interesting side effects:
(1) The increased demand for bitcoin will cause the value of bitcoin to skyrocket (yay!), and,
(2) It will, in effect, train an entire population of “illegal” residents, and those who employ them, in how to use a private, distributed, cryptographically secured and essentially untouchable and unregulatable currency, producing an entire industry sector that no longer depends on the U.S. Dollar, potentially ending the dominance of the Federal Reserve on the global economy, and quite possibly weakening or ending U.S. hegemony. …and THAT would be an interesting result indeed.