Crypto Industry Eclipses Defense, Big Pharma in US Political Giving

This makes them both perpetrators of, and victims of fraud.

Go back in financial history to the 1920s, and you'll see the same kinds of startup scams peddled to the public. Which is why most of them were criminalized in the US in the 1930s.

There's not much originality in the financial fraud field. Most of the large-scale scams were developed in the 19th century [1]. You need some kind of mass medium to scam large numbers of people, so, while scams go back far further, scams at scale had to await the development of newspaper printing presses.

If you know about Madoff, Enron, Milken, Amway, Florida real estate, Ponzi, the Mississippi Bubble, Tulip mania, and bucket shops, you can match most crypto schemes to one of those. This should be covered in schools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...

You can consider crypto a scam and you’d be largely right. But its also true that the current financial system is wildly corrupt and increasingly serves only those at the top of the totem pole.

Crypto might not be the answer but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pose the right questions.

>refuse the donations

Hahaha. They have already accepted millions of dollars donated by him to various PACs, among them Pelosi's "House Majority PAC". He was among the largest donors to Bidens campaign.

He also donated USD 10 million to "Protect Our Future" PAC, which supposedly is about protecting the environment and caring about "biodiversity" according to their website, but has actually forwarded that money to politicians. They exclusively give to Democrats as a ProPublica investigation has shown¹. $13.5 million to some candidate for Oregon that ended up losing for example.

¹ https://projects.propublica.org/itemizer/committee/C00801514...

Take the money. If he collapses, there is nobody to whom any favours must be paid. That’s a win. This giving by Bankman-Fried looks like the same mistake Jen Bush’s campaign donors made in ‘16, thinking a cheque and a cheque alone buys power.

He's also vegan, which I think says something about his willingness to make personal sacrifices for a more ethical lifestyle.

I think nuclear weapons are a fantastic success story in preventing major war between nations for the past 77 years. Probably the single greatest enabler of peace in the 20th and 21st century. Do I wish that they weren't needed? 100%. I would love if we could focus on using nuclear for non-destructive purposes. But I firmly believe they are the reason there was no WWIII or even WWIV during the Cold War or now during rising tensions between the USA and Russia and/or China. I respect that nuclear weapons are terrible devices, awful in their destruction beyond comprehension, but unless humanity as a society evolves into some kind of "better" race, I would not wish for a world without them. Popularity does not mean that something is needed.

I will grant that we should strive toward that better world, and constrain the military from acting toward it's easier, destructive attitudes and maybe one day we will no longer need it. But to simply say that the most positive outcome is that it "intimidates others so that they don't attack" and to treat that as something that's barely worth mention and almost "evil"? That's beyond reckless and a dangerous, misguided, and ultimately against the best interests of humanities future.

I won't claim to be as deeply knowledgeable about pharma, it's an industry in clear need of reform and regulation, but it also proved itself during COVID to make vaccines for the world, and while I completely agree that it prioritizes profit over saving lives, and likely allowing people to die because it's just not profitable to produce a drug it researched, it has developed many life saving drugs that have saved more lives. I would not call them "pure" evil, if for no other reason than as soon as you start treating an industry, a people as "pure" evil, they have no reason whatsoever to listen to you and work with you.