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He claims otherwise, although that's obviously not necessarily the truth. The public donations only account for $40m, and this document says they have $100m in political donations. It'll be interesting to see what the actual numbers end up being.
I want to remind everyone following this thread that this is a prime example of the same chicanery and fraud you see on Wall street and that is also found within the VC circles, and not a reflection of the BTC community as a whole.
Mainly because he is an insider of the VC circle, his parents are Stanford'ites who probably used thier connections to get him VC funding from Seqouia who lauded him as a genius while he was high playing video games while on a zoom call with them!
He is from MIT and used the cult that is effective alturism to justify his scam and his disgraced ex-gf/ex-ceo of Alameda is Stanford alumni and the two were seen as the next best thing since sliced bread despite proving that they managed (and I use the term loosely) the to make Enron scam look like child's play. The interim CEO said this was the worst example of bookkeeping and overall management he had ever seen, and he worked as interim-CEO for the Enron case [0]!
Again, you people as a whole say we are scamers, when the reality the ones doing the most scams are people who HN exalts and places on a pedestal as some exhaulted member of Society, when in reality they are malicious, drug-addled, orgy having incompetents with deep connections to Ivy league and Silicon Valley venture Capital who will stop at nothing to grift in masse.
I've been in this space for nearly 12 years now, and not only have we felt the severe impact of this to our collective reputation, but I have never seen this level of incompetence. Even with Karpeles, who I think deserves some leniency after serving time in prison in Japan and having his life ruined in the process, he was just way over his head in emerging technology that had no real analog or precedence at the time: did he scam, all signs point to yes. And did things like the Willy bot makes use of ingenious ways to recover lost/stolen/hacked funds: kind of. He was clearly using horrible OPSEC, and exchange hacks back then were all too common; but FTX was an entirely different thing for reasons that vastly differ starting with socio-economics onward.
Mark was a nerd who bought a Magic the Gathering website and decided to sell bitcoin, not some prat who can't keep his mouth shut about all the crimes he committed online and continued to grift despite being on house arrest... seriously, if this doesn't change your collective attitudes about 'who is the real scammer/grifter' in this space you are beyond anyone's help as your level of cognitive dissonance has no solution.
This is a prime example that we are speed running the gilded age, this imbecile should have all his and his parents assets seized for being inept, and thrown in prison with no parole for at least 25 years. If only to set a precedent that this type of shit needs to stop already; it's why many of us have lost any trust in these institutions in the first place that made cryptocurrencies necessary to begin with: note what Satoshi wrote in the genesis block.
I called it in the Summer of '21 that these idiots were going to prison, there was no way you can be this blatantly stupid and reckless (regardless of who your parents were) for too long. I personally thought that once they started bribing politicians it was likely they would be lost in a flight from the Bahamas and end up in some black site rendition camp if he kept it up and this all became public knowledge, instead the US justice system continued to do what it does best: protect it's own.
And he was on house arrest awaiting trial and kept scamming [1]!
This is who Silicon Valley, Ivy League lauds as it's next Titan of Industry [2].
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/17/ftx-enron...
1: https://decrypt.co/150780/bald-token-liquidity-rug-pull-link...
2: https://twitter.com/CryptoWendyO/status/1686146337912602624
I hate to be 'that guy' but usename checks out:
Philistine (adjective) - Lacking in appreciation for art or culture.
The same was said about the Internet in the 90s, its a fad underscored with seediness and scams abound, I have no use for it and no one will use it. That was essentially Krugman's position on the internet and lo and behold it was the same about Bitcoin [0].
Again, I don't deny 99% of alts are scams, they are. But what you fail to see in erroneously painting these broad strokes is the same thing that boomers and 'economists' like Krugman did and lose the scrip entirely in the process--or was a mouth-piece for vested interests in the fiat monetary system that helped him become a Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at Columbia.
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug...
I can't remember exactly what video it's in, but I very distinctly remember him talking about it.
If his intentions was to shepherd favorable laws, why wouldn't he have donated to Republicans? If you disagree with the feds and don't think that influencing lawmakers was his motive, then I'd appreciate your take on what his motivation could have been.
Why wouldn't you believe he is a shallow, privileged, self-important person who cares a lot about how he is perceived, and whose thinking turns out not be all that sophisticated? There is less to him than meets the eye, to quote Tallulah Bankhead.
So a majority of Republicans were not "Trump or nothing" they just voted for their political appointee. (Doesn't mean they weren't happy with him, just that they would have been okay with someone else)