I personally don't see any intellectually credible line demarcating meme vs. non-meme coins. Even the flagship, BTC, had not demonstrated any utility after more than a decade. It fails to be a viable asset (it doesn't generate any economic utility) and it fails to be a viable currency (it's extremely volatile against everything else). When you point one failure (to be an asset/currency) out, the "Bros" tries to argue that really it's the other thing; but really, no.
I don't like crypto, but I will say that crypto is handy for paying freelancers in countries globally. And if their currency is a mess, it is more stable than most of them as well. I worked with a lot of freelancers in Brazil and Argentina and it was a super easy way to pay them for design/coding work (and their banks didn't punish them for getting foreign currency).
It is the only use case I've found, but only if they are super technical.
I agree. We can conclude that the use cases are substituting for failed currencies, crime, and speculation. It's still something, but hardly what we are promised.
Crypto is extremely useful for working around banks who don't want to deal with you or your counterparty because of AML/KYC risks.
Some people will say those restrictions are in place for a reason. I suspect those people haven't recently tried to access banking services as a small customer doing anything the slightest bit non-traditional.
Banks nowadays face a highly asymmetric risk/reward profile when dealing with small clients, who are unlikely to ever account for much profit but can expose the bank to enormous fines if they turn out to be doing anything dodgy.
The "financial" system has effectively been repurposed as a surveillance and law-enforcement system.
Removing the AML/KYC restrictions enables the two *real* uses of cryptocurrencies: money laundering and fraud. It's no coincidence that the crypto world is awash in both.
Fraud is already illegal and money laundering, by definition, involves some underlying crime. The issue isn't whether we should make bad things illegal but whether we should accept the costs - in time, money, and freedom - of deputizing the financial system to perform pre-crime surveillance on every transaction.
I don't find your arguments convincing. The "but criminals still manage to launder money and commit fraud" argument is particularly weak. Obviously criminals try to avoid doing things that the system will catch, so most of what they do doesn't get caught. This is true of every sort of crime.
Of course it's possible that AML & KYC regulations aren't actually effective, but to tell you'd need to find some way to measure relevant criminal activity with and without the regulations, but in roughly the same context otherwise. Cryptocurrencies provide us with a sort of natural experiment in this way, since they make it easy to avoid the regulations. Partially, anyway. You can use crypto to move money outside the system, but spending it still requires injecting it back into the system, where it may be caught. If some country actually moves to using cryptocurrencies directly in commerce, then we'd have the full experiment.
But the partial experiment results seem pretty conclusive to me. The regulations can be easily bypassed with cryptocurrencies, and criminals have adopted it in a big way, in spite of the fact that crypto is hard to spend. That is evidence that the regulations actually do constrain criminal activity. We also haven't seen a big surge in lawful commerce being enabled by cryptocurrencies, which is evidence that the regulations aren't greatly constraining lawful activity.
There are many things we could do to reduce crime that we choose not to do on privacy or due-process grounds. I find it bizarre that we've come to accept as normal the fact that the government deputizes private third parties to decide what you may and may not do with "your" money. If the government doesn't like how you're (legally) using your money, they can lean on those third parties to exclude you from the financial system entirely (debanking) with no due process or recourse.
Regarding your observations in the last paragraph, I suspect this is just salience bias. If you aren't using crypto yourself then probably all you hear about is crimes and grifts. But as my earlier comment and the parent pointed out, crypto is genuinely useful for a lot of people who fall through the cracks of the traditional financial system.
I'm sure a few people get some benefit from cryptocurrencies, but they clearly haven't had a transformative effect on lawful commerce, while they have on fraud. Without cryptocurrencies, whole categories of scams that exist today either wouldn't work at all or would at least be far more difficult to carry out. Ransomware, pig-slaughtering scams, and more can work at the scale they do only because cryptocurrencies make it easy for fraudsters to move money across borders.
No need for in-depth studies on the subject (although they are available). Just ask yourself one question: has it become more difficult to obtain drugs in major Western cities since the introduction of KYC/AML?
The answer is definitely no: it's extremely easy to obtain all types of illegal drugs in major Western cities, American cities included. Anyone can do it with a bit of perseverance.
Given that drug traffickers are not known for their willingness to work freely for the benefit of mankind, this means that they still manage to launder their money. Q.E.D.
The effectiveness of KYC/AML is therefore extremely limited at best, while imposing an inordinate cost on society.
As an Argentine, yes it's popular in developing countries with excessive capital controls. When your inflation rate is 100% a value that can depreciate by half in a year doesn't look so risky. And it's easier to transfer abroad than getting the 50 forms the bank asks for, even at relatively high fees.
So Argentina, Venezuela, Russia, etc. But that doesn't mean it has a proven use case in the developed world, which most people would have you believe
Could you elaborate on which cryptos do those freelancers in Brazil and Argentina accept? Do they also happen to accept alternative payment networks, such as Wise payment?
Crypto people want to make a distinction between their holdings (which are real and potentially valuable) and other people's holdings (which are just meme bubbles). In reality, both are bubbles with no underlying value.
The traditional tests of a money are: durability, portability, acceptability, limited supply, divisibility and uniformity. Crypto passes at most half of these (portable, uniform, divisible) but it's the easy half. The not broadly accepted nor particularly durable (lost crypto password anyone?) is damaging. It also fails limited-supply -- a single brand of coin is limited but overall system is not, which is why TRUMP and MELANIA exist today.
As a conveniently untraceable medium of exchange, crypto has a niche. As a store of value, it's pretty useless. The old joke is "why is gold valuable when you can't eat it?" It's fair to ask, "why is crypto valuable when you can't even see or touch it?" (To say nothing of eating it.)
There are some other important tests of money, which cryptocurrencies also fail.
A really big one is that money supply must be able to expand and contract with the economy, to prevent regular boom/bust business cycles. This is what proved to be bad about using precious metals as currency. The essentially fixed limit to the amount of, say, BTC, makes it an inherently deflationary asset, which is not something you want in a currency.
Another that I think has become important in the last century is "regulatability". It's important that it be possible to track money flows in order to investigate and prosecute crime. Ideally this needs to be balanced with some degree of anonymity so that in the absence of specific and compelling reasons for law enforcement to track money, it can be anonymous. Current cryptocurrencies actually fail at both sides of the regulation/anonymization issue. Normal users have zero anonymity because all movement (except within an exchange) is logged in the public blockchain, but organized criminals with the right technical resources can almost perfectly anonymize their money movements.
A colleague of mine has a design for a digital cash system that strikes the right balance, IMO. This isn't a new currency, just a convenient digital way to use a fiat currency. In his system, all payments are anonymous by default, but can be unmasked at will by the user, or by the system operator when given a lawful order to do so. But the system operator cannot unmask payments secretly; the design of the system ensures that all unmasking operations are logged in a public ledger, though they can be time-locked. Anyway, the details are way beyond the scope of a blog comment, but the point is that with careful use of cryptography and secure(ish) hardware, I think it's possible to create a digital coin that strikes the right balance between anonymity and amenability to regulation. The EU may adopt his scheme; they're currently evaluating several, his among them.
It hasn't been published yet, unfortunately. It should be soon, though it's also undergoing a lot of rework to adapt to post-quantum cryptography. This is a little challenging because it requires some sort of group signature scheme (where anyone from a group can sign a statement, and anyone can verify the signature, but can't determine which member of the group signed it). There are many of those in classical cryptography but the post-quantum field is much less mature.
In the cases of electricity and internet, after they were invented the infrastructure simply wasn't there for them to take off immediately. For crypto, everything is already in place for it to thrive. But it didn't.
Is it true that everything is there? It doesn't seem like it to me. There's a lot of existing path dependence. Regardless, I think it's arguable and the "it's been a decade" isn't super convincing.
BTC is a monetized Schelling point, in that respect the choice of BTC is no less arbitrary (beyond the first-mover nature of the early whitepaper) than any other cryptocurrency.
"A lot of crypto folks weren’t too happy about TRUMP and MELANIA, believing that a stunt like this could undermine the respectability of crypto in general." It is hard to imagine that these memecoins would do much to move the needle in terms of the respectability of cryptocurrencies from already low levels.
I find it hilarious that this is the line in the sand for them. Like there have been hundreds of other meme coins that have been purely pump and dump and only exist to extract wealth out of the hands of idiots, and instead of regulating meme coins the crypto bro movement enjoys this because they can make a few thousand bucks trading meme coins like they are fx traders.
Threatening an emerging part of the financial eco-system, debauching the office of the Presidency and corrupting the body politic for your own gain. It's a Trump trifecta. Way to go draining that swamp, DT!
It’s really remarkable how he has managed to use the *idea* of corruption already existing to enable himself to actually introduce so much of it to the system!
Whenever I bring up the corruption idea to Trump supporters, all I hear are the words "Hunter Biden". And, it's true what HB did was corruption, but that the scale and brazenness were so many orders of magnitude lower just doesn't ever compute.
But its okay when Trump does it! And then all the corruption money will finally trickle down to the rest of us and we'll all be better off!
/s obviously, I'm trying to do my best impression of his voter base with shit like this. There is no bottom to his grift, he was selling Trump bibles last year and has been enriching himself every time he has a bit of power. This is blatant in your face corruption and the funds can't be traced easily since they don't have to share the blockchain details. Its so disrespectful and disgusting on every level.
This sounds like another excellent argument to ban all crypto, in case all the other forms of lawlessness and quasi-lawlessness it supports weren't enough.
Don’t ban it. Just let it burn to ashes when there is an inevitable problem. The big risk to me isn’t some stupid strategic reserve of bitcoin. The big risk is the government bails out some institution that loses a ton in a crypto crash.
Very interesting. In addition to crypto facilitating hacking, drug dealing and other crimes, now we can add bribery. I remain convinced that crypto is the most sophisticated ponzi scheme ever conceived by mankind. Its value depends on finding a greater fool, or conducting illegal activities. P.T. Barnum is proven right, beyond doubt.
Say it ain't so, Noah. BTC is a real investment but $Trump isn't?
And if, as you last line says, "Crypto is about sending people money," then why is it also a speculative "asset."? Only currency traders speculate in dollars, in a limited way.
It is essential that we keep crypto out of the financial system, including that idiotic proposal for a BTC reserve.
How many people are furious about Obama not jailing bankers for creating collateralized debt obligations 20 years ago, but enthusiastically support a president (creating much more obviously wreckless) memecoins?
Doesn't this whole thing crash when Trump dies or is out of office? If the value of $Trump is based on favors from Trump, how valuable is to Don Jr. and Eric when Trump is no longer around to grant favors?
No, but Noah's theory assumes that it stays valuable long enough for Trump or his children to cash out. That may be tricky needle for them to thread as the value of Trump's favor, and therefore the value of bribing him through $Trump, diminishes each day as you approach 1/20/29, and evaporates entirely if Trump (who is 78 and not exactly physically fit) dies. It probably woulnd't go to zero on either date, but it almost certainly drops precipitously.
It appears Donald Trump and I have a different definition of "long term" then. (Which isn't that surprising, since, even though I voted for him, I think he has the attention span of a gnat.)
I think it really depends on what happens the next four years. Most of his policies are broadly popular, even things I strongly disagree with. If the markets rip, inflation cools, illegal immigration subsides, the war in Ukraine ends, they pass the tax cut, then Trump could be quite popular. Add this with the bribery potential and $trump could skyrocket.
Judging by history, he'll prolly lose a branch in the midterms and like his first term, won't get much done in the back half other than EOs, appointing judges and getting attention. But he can't run again, the GOP has already anointed him as a cult leader/god-king and he was able to bounce back to popular levels already from multiple impeachments and trying to overthrow an election.
Even if Trump leaves office quite popular (color me skeptical), there's likely a lot less reason to bribe a "king-maker" than a president. He'll also be 82, and once he dies or gets dementia, your bribes really won't get you that far.
He could be popular but I sincerely don't think he has the discipline or luck for it to happen.
But Trumpism is the GOP now, representing the majority of the party. Vance is prolly the front-runner for the 2028 nom and even a mildly popular, 82-year old trump is gonna command attention via Tweets and whatnot.
Diluting the market was my first thought, too, and it appears I am not alone. It will take a few other famous people worldwide to do the same, and the crypto market could see some rainy days. Of course, Trump is not just famous, he is also the President of the United States, which makes a big difference, so it is not just anyone who could pull this off, though I am sure people will try.
I feel that Trump is setting a precedent that may undermine long-term investment in cryptocurrency. I suspect the person who pitched the idea to him said something like: "Hey boss, there is a whole load of chumps that are willing to throw money at you just like that, and it is completely legal!" Even though it might not actually be legal, who cares, it's not like the justice department will ever go after Trump while he is president, right?
Besides, as crypto is still unregulated, and I feel it will continue being the case under Trump, it will be very difficult to accuse anyone of fraud. After all, you cannot be punished for breaking rules that do not exist.
It’s really amazing that most of his business ventures are treated as legal while he is president - I had thought there were laws trying to restrict even the optics of presidential corruption but apparently not.
The truly spectacular thing is that this is a sort of influence trading Ponzi scheme, because if I buy $1m in the Trump coin to influence him, and it seems to work, I will be able to sell that stake at a profit to the next person who wants to purchase influence, further inflating the value and getting richer. Trump can accelerate this process by rewarding people in clear ways for their influence purchasing via the coin. However, the scheme collapses when spending money to influence Trump is no longer effective, and you have the last round of influence purchasers (and all of the random speculators) left holding the bag. The trick of course is for Trump to find a way to do some profit taking while he's in office so that he's not holding a lot of a worthless asset once he's out.
The scheme has an additional feature, which is that if you bribe Trump by buying a lot of his coins but he fails to stay bought, you can dump your stake and (probably) tank the value of the coin. The same is true of his meme stock (DJT), if you want a bribery mechanism that is more traditional and respectable.
Chain letters are also about sending people money. Crypto, including Bitcoin, is chain-letter technology. If you buy Bitcoin today, you are sending Michael Saylor money, just as if you buy TRUMP you are sending Donald Trump money.
Isn't evading the law the whole point of crypto currency? For some people it could be just unwise banking regulations but for others it is _wise_ banking regulation, paying blackmail, funding terrorists, etc.
I don't think this kind of corruption works for anyone who isn't already very famous. In fact it probably doesn't work for anyone who isn't President of the United States, because even if Trump's DoJ won't police obvious corruption of this sort, that doesn't mean the next administration won't.
Also this assumes the current memecoin frenzy will last indefinitely.
Agree on both counts. The back door bribery is more obvious the less famous someone is, and maybe even Trump’s children wouldn’t escape a future crackdown. I don’t think it’ll stop people who mistakenly assume the current order will last forever from trying, though.
It would work well for money laundering if you can appear to be somewhat famous or launch around a fake cause, dump money in, get money out. Especially if you can scale small donations. The DOJ and FBI are in a wild world.
Fear of prosecution disincentives political corruption. Biden's pardoning of his entire family pretty likely sets a new norm for Presidents going forward. Thanks, Joe "defender of democracy and the rule of law" Biden.
Enjoyed the ideas, though in the current SCOTUS climate there doesn't seem to be much of an obstacle to just giving Trump money some more direct way.
For the meme coin avenue, though, he can employ the approach of using the coins as collateral for a loan, without selling them. If the "lender" has no intention of getting the money back, this works well for all involved. And Trump has plenty of experience with defaulting after extracting cash!
I personally don't see any intellectually credible line demarcating meme vs. non-meme coins. Even the flagship, BTC, had not demonstrated any utility after more than a decade. It fails to be a viable asset (it doesn't generate any economic utility) and it fails to be a viable currency (it's extremely volatile against everything else). When you point one failure (to be an asset/currency) out, the "Bros" tries to argue that really it's the other thing; but really, no.
I don't like crypto, but I will say that crypto is handy for paying freelancers in countries globally. And if their currency is a mess, it is more stable than most of them as well. I worked with a lot of freelancers in Brazil and Argentina and it was a super easy way to pay them for design/coding work (and their banks didn't punish them for getting foreign currency).
It is the only use case I've found, but only if they are super technical.
I agree. We can conclude that the use cases are substituting for failed currencies, crime, and speculation. It's still something, but hardly what we are promised.
Crypto is extremely useful for working around banks who don't want to deal with you or your counterparty because of AML/KYC risks.
Some people will say those restrictions are in place for a reason. I suspect those people haven't recently tried to access banking services as a small customer doing anything the slightest bit non-traditional.
Banks nowadays face a highly asymmetric risk/reward profile when dealing with small clients, who are unlikely to ever account for much profit but can expose the bank to enormous fines if they turn out to be doing anything dodgy.
The "financial" system has effectively been repurposed as a surveillance and law-enforcement system.
Removing the AML/KYC restrictions enables the two *real* uses of cryptocurrencies: money laundering and fraud. It's no coincidence that the crypto world is awash in both.
Fraud is already illegal and money laundering, by definition, involves some underlying crime. The issue isn't whether we should make bad things illegal but whether we should accept the costs - in time, money, and freedom - of deputizing the financial system to perform pre-crime surveillance on every transaction.
Absolutely. KYC and AML are destroying the world https://disruptive-horizons.com/p/kyc-aml-destroying-world
I don't find your arguments convincing. The "but criminals still manage to launder money and commit fraud" argument is particularly weak. Obviously criminals try to avoid doing things that the system will catch, so most of what they do doesn't get caught. This is true of every sort of crime.
Of course it's possible that AML & KYC regulations aren't actually effective, but to tell you'd need to find some way to measure relevant criminal activity with and without the regulations, but in roughly the same context otherwise. Cryptocurrencies provide us with a sort of natural experiment in this way, since they make it easy to avoid the regulations. Partially, anyway. You can use crypto to move money outside the system, but spending it still requires injecting it back into the system, where it may be caught. If some country actually moves to using cryptocurrencies directly in commerce, then we'd have the full experiment.
But the partial experiment results seem pretty conclusive to me. The regulations can be easily bypassed with cryptocurrencies, and criminals have adopted it in a big way, in spite of the fact that crypto is hard to spend. That is evidence that the regulations actually do constrain criminal activity. We also haven't seen a big surge in lawful commerce being enabled by cryptocurrencies, which is evidence that the regulations aren't greatly constraining lawful activity.
There are many things we could do to reduce crime that we choose not to do on privacy or due-process grounds. I find it bizarre that we've come to accept as normal the fact that the government deputizes private third parties to decide what you may and may not do with "your" money. If the government doesn't like how you're (legally) using your money, they can lean on those third parties to exclude you from the financial system entirely (debanking) with no due process or recourse.
Regarding your observations in the last paragraph, I suspect this is just salience bias. If you aren't using crypto yourself then probably all you hear about is crimes and grifts. But as my earlier comment and the parent pointed out, crypto is genuinely useful for a lot of people who fall through the cracks of the traditional financial system.
I'm sure a few people get some benefit from cryptocurrencies, but they clearly haven't had a transformative effect on lawful commerce, while they have on fraud. Without cryptocurrencies, whole categories of scams that exist today either wouldn't work at all or would at least be far more difficult to carry out. Ransomware, pig-slaughtering scams, and more can work at the scale they do only because cryptocurrencies make it easy for fraudsters to move money across borders.
No need for in-depth studies on the subject (although they are available). Just ask yourself one question: has it become more difficult to obtain drugs in major Western cities since the introduction of KYC/AML?
The answer is definitely no: it's extremely easy to obtain all types of illegal drugs in major Western cities, American cities included. Anyone can do it with a bit of perseverance.
Given that drug traffickers are not known for their willingness to work freely for the benefit of mankind, this means that they still manage to launder their money. Q.E.D.
The effectiveness of KYC/AML is therefore extremely limited at best, while imposing an inordinate cost on society.
You're repeating the logical error. The question you need to ask is "Is it more difficult to obtain drugs than it would have been without KYC/AML?".
As an Argentine, yes it's popular in developing countries with excessive capital controls. When your inflation rate is 100% a value that can depreciate by half in a year doesn't look so risky. And it's easier to transfer abroad than getting the 50 forms the bank asks for, even at relatively high fees.
So Argentina, Venezuela, Russia, etc. But that doesn't mean it has a proven use case in the developed world, which most people would have you believe
Could you elaborate on which cryptos do those freelancers in Brazil and Argentina accept? Do they also happen to accept alternative payment networks, such as Wise payment?
Crypto people want to make a distinction between their holdings (which are real and potentially valuable) and other people's holdings (which are just meme bubbles). In reality, both are bubbles with no underlying value.
The traditional tests of a money are: durability, portability, acceptability, limited supply, divisibility and uniformity. Crypto passes at most half of these (portable, uniform, divisible) but it's the easy half. The not broadly accepted nor particularly durable (lost crypto password anyone?) is damaging. It also fails limited-supply -- a single brand of coin is limited but overall system is not, which is why TRUMP and MELANIA exist today.
As a conveniently untraceable medium of exchange, crypto has a niche. As a store of value, it's pretty useless. The old joke is "why is gold valuable when you can't eat it?" It's fair to ask, "why is crypto valuable when you can't even see or touch it?" (To say nothing of eating it.)
There are some other important tests of money, which cryptocurrencies also fail.
A really big one is that money supply must be able to expand and contract with the economy, to prevent regular boom/bust business cycles. This is what proved to be bad about using precious metals as currency. The essentially fixed limit to the amount of, say, BTC, makes it an inherently deflationary asset, which is not something you want in a currency.
Another that I think has become important in the last century is "regulatability". It's important that it be possible to track money flows in order to investigate and prosecute crime. Ideally this needs to be balanced with some degree of anonymity so that in the absence of specific and compelling reasons for law enforcement to track money, it can be anonymous. Current cryptocurrencies actually fail at both sides of the regulation/anonymization issue. Normal users have zero anonymity because all movement (except within an exchange) is logged in the public blockchain, but organized criminals with the right technical resources can almost perfectly anonymize their money movements.
A colleague of mine has a design for a digital cash system that strikes the right balance, IMO. This isn't a new currency, just a convenient digital way to use a fiat currency. In his system, all payments are anonymous by default, but can be unmasked at will by the user, or by the system operator when given a lawful order to do so. But the system operator cannot unmask payments secretly; the design of the system ensures that all unmasking operations are logged in a public ledger, though they can be time-locked. Anyway, the details are way beyond the scope of a blog comment, but the point is that with careful use of cryptography and secure(ish) hardware, I think it's possible to create a digital coin that strikes the right balance between anonymity and amenability to regulation. The EU may adopt his scheme; they're currently evaluating several, his among them.
Do you have a link to your friend's system? Decentralized, potentially anonymous, electronic, and amenable to monetary policy. Sounds interesting.
It hasn't been published yet, unfortunately. It should be soon, though it's also undergoing a lot of rework to adapt to post-quantum cryptography. This is a little challenging because it requires some sort of group signature scheme (where anyone from a group can sign a statement, and anyone can verify the signature, but can't determine which member of the group signed it). There are many of those in classical cryptography but the post-quantum field is much less mature.
I'm not a crypto person, but I am a "let's think about this carefully" person.
What are the reasons we should use a decade as the cut-off for determining if BTC is worthwhile?
Note that it's actually nearly two decades; Bitcoin was invented in 2008.
Good point. I think my question still stands.
It was many decades from the discovery of electricity before it made real inroads. Same goes from the first computers to widespread impact.
Of course, many more "discoveries" just don't end up having any impact at all...I'm just hesitant about arguments of the type presented.
In the cases of electricity and internet, after they were invented the infrastructure simply wasn't there for them to take off immediately. For crypto, everything is already in place for it to thrive. But it didn't.
Is it true that everything is there? It doesn't seem like it to me. There's a lot of existing path dependence. Regardless, I think it's arguable and the "it's been a decade" isn't super convincing.
BTC has been fantastically effective at enabling large-scale fraud.
It is logically valid to ask for the cost/benefit of a policy, and then look at the scientific consensus.
Happy continuation of your hobby commenting on subjects you haven't researched and aren't interested in researching 🙏🏻
BTC is a monetized Schelling point, in that respect the choice of BTC is no less arbitrary (beyond the first-mover nature of the early whitepaper) than any other cryptocurrency.
"A lot of crypto folks weren’t too happy about TRUMP and MELANIA, believing that a stunt like this could undermine the respectability of crypto in general." It is hard to imagine that these memecoins would do much to move the needle in terms of the respectability of cryptocurrencies from already low levels.
I find it hilarious that this is the line in the sand for them. Like there have been hundreds of other meme coins that have been purely pump and dump and only exist to extract wealth out of the hands of idiots, and instead of regulating meme coins the crypto bro movement enjoys this because they can make a few thousand bucks trading meme coins like they are fx traders.
It’s also hilarious that anyone was surprised that Trump did this.
Threatening an emerging part of the financial eco-system, debauching the office of the Presidency and corrupting the body politic for your own gain. It's a Trump trifecta. Way to go draining that swamp, DT!
It’s really remarkable how he has managed to use the *idea* of corruption already existing to enable himself to actually introduce so much of it to the system!
Whenever I bring up the corruption idea to Trump supporters, all I hear are the words "Hunter Biden". And, it's true what HB did was corruption, but that the scale and brazenness were so many orders of magnitude lower just doesn't ever compute.
But its okay when Trump does it! And then all the corruption money will finally trickle down to the rest of us and we'll all be better off!
/s obviously, I'm trying to do my best impression of his voter base with shit like this. There is no bottom to his grift, he was selling Trump bibles last year and has been enriching himself every time he has a bit of power. This is blatant in your face corruption and the funds can't be traced easily since they don't have to share the blockchain details. Its so disrespectful and disgusting on every level.
'Bad' is the new 'good'. :-)
> You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal.
Oh you are naive, Mr. Smith.
Right! Things are only illegal if we prosecute and believe that laws can hold people accountable.
This sounds like another excellent argument to ban all crypto, in case all the other forms of lawlessness and quasi-lawlessness it supports weren't enough.
Don’t ban it. Just let it burn to ashes when there is an inevitable problem. The big risk to me isn’t some stupid strategic reserve of bitcoin. The big risk is the government bails out some institution that loses a ton in a crypto crash.
Let it burn…
Very interesting. In addition to crypto facilitating hacking, drug dealing and other crimes, now we can add bribery. I remain convinced that crypto is the most sophisticated ponzi scheme ever conceived by mankind. Its value depends on finding a greater fool, or conducting illegal activities. P.T. Barnum is proven right, beyond doubt.
Say it ain't so, Noah. BTC is a real investment but $Trump isn't?
And if, as you last line says, "Crypto is about sending people money," then why is it also a speculative "asset."? Only currency traders speculate in dollars, in a limited way.
It is essential that we keep crypto out of the financial system, including that idiotic proposal for a BTC reserve.
How many people are furious about Obama not jailing bankers for creating collateralized debt obligations 20 years ago, but enthusiastically support a president (creating much more obviously wreckless) memecoins?
Something, something tan suit...
Doesn't this whole thing crash when Trump dies or is out of office? If the value of $Trump is based on favors from Trump, how valuable is to Don Jr. and Eric when Trump is no longer around to grant favors?
The Venn diagram of "crypto investors" and "long term value investors" doth not overlap at all.
No, but Noah's theory assumes that it stays valuable long enough for Trump or his children to cash out. That may be tricky needle for them to thread as the value of Trump's favor, and therefore the value of bribing him through $Trump, diminishes each day as you approach 1/20/29, and evaporates entirely if Trump (who is 78 and not exactly physically fit) dies. It probably woulnd't go to zero on either date, but it almost certainly drops precipitously.
It appears Donald Trump and I have a different definition of "long term" then. (Which isn't that surprising, since, even though I voted for him, I think he has the attention span of a gnat.)
I think it really depends on what happens the next four years. Most of his policies are broadly popular, even things I strongly disagree with. If the markets rip, inflation cools, illegal immigration subsides, the war in Ukraine ends, they pass the tax cut, then Trump could be quite popular. Add this with the bribery potential and $trump could skyrocket.
Judging by history, he'll prolly lose a branch in the midterms and like his first term, won't get much done in the back half other than EOs, appointing judges and getting attention. But he can't run again, the GOP has already anointed him as a cult leader/god-king and he was able to bounce back to popular levels already from multiple impeachments and trying to overthrow an election.
Even if Trump leaves office quite popular (color me skeptical), there's likely a lot less reason to bribe a "king-maker" than a president. He'll also be 82, and once he dies or gets dementia, your bribes really won't get you that far.
He could be popular but I sincerely don't think he has the discipline or luck for it to happen.
But Trumpism is the GOP now, representing the majority of the party. Vance is prolly the front-runner for the 2028 nom and even a mildly popular, 82-year old trump is gonna command attention via Tweets and whatnot.
Diluting the market was my first thought, too, and it appears I am not alone. It will take a few other famous people worldwide to do the same, and the crypto market could see some rainy days. Of course, Trump is not just famous, he is also the President of the United States, which makes a big difference, so it is not just anyone who could pull this off, though I am sure people will try.
I feel that Trump is setting a precedent that may undermine long-term investment in cryptocurrency. I suspect the person who pitched the idea to him said something like: "Hey boss, there is a whole load of chumps that are willing to throw money at you just like that, and it is completely legal!" Even though it might not actually be legal, who cares, it's not like the justice department will ever go after Trump while he is president, right?
Besides, as crypto is still unregulated, and I feel it will continue being the case under Trump, it will be very difficult to accuse anyone of fraud. After all, you cannot be punished for breaking rules that do not exist.
It’s really amazing that most of his business ventures are treated as legal while he is president - I had thought there were laws trying to restrict even the optics of presidential corruption but apparently not.
The truly spectacular thing is that this is a sort of influence trading Ponzi scheme, because if I buy $1m in the Trump coin to influence him, and it seems to work, I will be able to sell that stake at a profit to the next person who wants to purchase influence, further inflating the value and getting richer. Trump can accelerate this process by rewarding people in clear ways for their influence purchasing via the coin. However, the scheme collapses when spending money to influence Trump is no longer effective, and you have the last round of influence purchasers (and all of the random speculators) left holding the bag. The trick of course is for Trump to find a way to do some profit taking while he's in office so that he's not holding a lot of a worthless asset once he's out.
The scheme has an additional feature, which is that if you bribe Trump by buying a lot of his coins but he fails to stay bought, you can dump your stake and (probably) tank the value of the coin. The same is true of his meme stock (DJT), if you want a bribery mechanism that is more traditional and respectable.
Chain letters are also about sending people money. Crypto, including Bitcoin, is chain-letter technology. If you buy Bitcoin today, you are sending Michael Saylor money, just as if you buy TRUMP you are sending Donald Trump money.
One more way for Trump to use his return to office as a cash cow.
Isn't evading the law the whole point of crypto currency? For some people it could be just unwise banking regulations but for others it is _wise_ banking regulation, paying blackmail, funding terrorists, etc.
I don't think this kind of corruption works for anyone who isn't already very famous. In fact it probably doesn't work for anyone who isn't President of the United States, because even if Trump's DoJ won't police obvious corruption of this sort, that doesn't mean the next administration won't.
Also this assumes the current memecoin frenzy will last indefinitely.
Agree on both counts. The back door bribery is more obvious the less famous someone is, and maybe even Trump’s children wouldn’t escape a future crackdown. I don’t think it’ll stop people who mistakenly assume the current order will last forever from trying, though.
It would work well for money laundering if you can appear to be somewhat famous or launch around a fake cause, dump money in, get money out. Especially if you can scale small donations. The DOJ and FBI are in a wild world.
Fear of prosecution disincentives political corruption. Biden's pardoning of his entire family pretty likely sets a new norm for Presidents going forward. Thanks, Joe "defender of democracy and the rule of law" Biden.
Enjoyed the ideas, though in the current SCOTUS climate there doesn't seem to be much of an obstacle to just giving Trump money some more direct way.
For the meme coin avenue, though, he can employ the approach of using the coins as collateral for a loan, without selling them. If the "lender" has no intention of getting the money back, this works well for all involved. And Trump has plenty of experience with defaulting after extracting cash!