The Rhodes Scholar and liberal media commentator said in a segment that aired Thursday, March 6, that cryptocurrency is a scam. She also slammed the White House for “playing this game.”

MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow calls Trump’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve a ‘deeply old-fashioned simple scam.’

She draws a striking comparison between crypto and Beanie Babies, saying, “Cryptos operate on the same idea. They have no inherent value at all, but people speculate, hoping… pic.twitter.com/KnJrRWRnDd

— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) March 8, 2025

President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier that day establishing a national digital asset reserve.

White House crypto czar David Sacks said, “The US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the Reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The Reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency, often called ‘digital gold.’”

“It’s worth looking at this crypto thing a little bit,” Maddow said on her show. “Only because it is a deeply, deeply old-fashioned simple scam. At this point, which points right to the White House.”

Here’s what Maddow said about Bitcoin and what she got wrong.

1. Unlike Beanies, Bitcoin’s Price Goes Up

“Helpfully, the broad strokes of crypto trading are not complicated,” Maddow said. “It’s like when there was the Beanie Baby craze in the late 1990s.”

“It was a Beanie Baby trading bubble,” she explained. “Other than some emotional value if you had one as a child, Beanie Babies did not have much inherent value.”

“But it was worth buying up a bunch of them because there was speculation on the premise that as collectibles, maybe one day your Beanie Babies collection could be worth a lot of money.”

There is, however, a key difference between Bitcoin and Beanie Babies. While Beanie Babies debuted in 1993 at the World Toy Fair in New York City, this toy fad reached its height six years later in 1999.

Following the dot com crash in 2000, the auction price frenzy for Babies never recovered to those levels again.

To get a realistic idea of the aftermarket value of stuffed toys, one need only study a local thrift store in their city. But unlike Beanie Babies, Bitcoin’s price has been going up ever since it launched on Jan. 3, 2009.

That’s 16 years of growth in daily exchange rate for the dollar that dwarves comparable ROIs from the highest- flying tech stocks in the stock market’s entire history.

During its periodic bear markets, which have so far occurred on a fairly predictable 4-year cycle, critics have repeatedly called Bitcoin a fad and declared it dead.

But every time the skeptics have turned out wrong when the price sets new all-time high records within four years. When it comes to historical records, there is no sensible comparison between Beanie Babies and Bitcoin.

While the toy collectibles peaked in 1999 and never recovered, Bitcoin created 84,000 new crypto millionaires in 2024, according to a report on CNBC.

2. Beanie Babies Markets Are Not Liquid or Transparent

“Cryptocurrencies operate on the same idea,” Maddow went on in her segment to say.

“They have no inherent value at all. The only value they have is that if you have some reason to believe that somebody else might want to buy them from you in the future.”

“What that means in very practical terms is that convincing other people that your crypto is popular and in demand— that is key to actually making money.”

But it’s not true that cryptocurrencies operate on the same idea as toy and fashion manias or that assets like Bitcoin have no inherent value.

Beanie Babies are not a financial product and do not bear qualities that would make them suitable for use as one. It is not as easy as sending an email to exchange a truckload of toy plushies, but it is very nearly that easy to exchange Bitcoin.

It’s also unfeasible to keep track of how many Beanie Babies are in the market and post up-to-the-minute daily trading data about each one.

It is not only feasible with Bitcoin and other cryptos like the ones going in the national reserve— computer developers engineered them that way.

That’s part of the value they provide that makes it possible to use these digital commodities as financial products and investment vehicles: liquidity and transparency.

3. Beanie Babies Are Not Durable and Fungible Like Crypto

Meanwhile, Beanie Babies are not durable and fungible like cryptocurrencies. Who wants someone else’s stuffed toy that they’ve been blowing their nose on and rubbing Cheeto grease into?

These inventories have market values that are highly sensitive to wear and tear, and the products are very vulnerable to deteriorating into a condition with a resale value marked well below retail.

Even when maintained in mint condition, after-market values for toy collectibles are more like the market for used automobiles. After being driven off the lot, they immediately and sharply depreciate.

The inventors of crypto assets BTC, on the other hand, paid careful attention to designing their economics or “tokenomics” to optimize them for resale value over time and for the foreseeable future.

Cryptocurrencies like the two mentioned above have supply limits that introduce scarcity economics. They are also not subject to deteriorating physical condition.

In fact, any unit of Bitcoin is always equal to any other equivalent unit in market value. This is called fungibility, and it is a system requirement for an asset to function as a currency.

4. Beanie Babies Are Not Scarce Like Bitcoin

“The idea of hyping cryptocurrency is that people should buy in soon, right?” Maddow continued on her show.

“Get in on the ground floor while it’s cheap because it’s about to go way up in value because there’s so much interest in it. If you get in on the ground floor now, then you’ll make a bundle. It’s the whole hype. It’s the whole scam.”

While it is true that participants in crypto markets may engage in inauthentic, hyped-up marketing tactics, that doesn’t make the underlying assets a scam.

Nor does it mean there aren’t more intelligent reasons why financial geniuses like BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Shark Tank panelist Kevin O’Leary, or Strategy’s Michael Saylor believe investing in Bitcoin and the blockchain is not only not a scam— but the next phase of developing the Internet and human civilization.

5. Bitcoin Commands Real Demand, Not Just Hype

After making all these mistakes in her broadcast, Maddow finally undid her own case completely with her closing thoughts on this segment.

“Imagine Trump had just announced that the US government was going to buy up tons of Beanie Babies,” the MSNBC host said. “We are going to establish a federal government reserve of billions of Beanie Babies.”

“What do you think would happen to the value of Beanie Babies? Turns out there’s a huge guaranteed buyer for these things. They’re buying billions of them.”

The answer to her question is: Their value would probably go up like most analysts expect of Bitcoin. Since there’s a huge guaranteed buyer and that buyer is the US government.

Not bad for a scam.