Follow the Crypto
followthecrypto.org
followthecrypto.org
https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.bsky.social/post/3kvjythgh...
There is a lot of nuance to the data and the context, so "dwarf" is probably not the best term, especially in a more general PAC context
Even so, if you click through she has another page that lists hybrid PACs. I have no idea if even that is the full picture; US politics are complicated. The project is open source so perhaps you can submit a PR to make it better.
It’s showing the same data that verdverm linked over at the FEC, which places Fairshake at #9 out of any kind of committee. Arguably ActBlue and WinRed shouldn’t really be listed there, since they are fundraising platforms that serve as an intermediary.
Kudos to both of you for having that.
I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying, I think they are just doing it via a single PAC rather than spinning up dozens of targeted PACs for each race.
That’s a big claim, but it’s presented without evidence. Do you have any examples?
On that note:
> I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying
What data are you using to support this belief? Do you have additional data that she left out? That would be a good way to support the allegation of cherry-picking.
What do you mean? Her entire persona and relevance revolves around being anti-crypto. Of course she's heavily biased; this isn't even a remotely controversial claim.
> That would be a good way to support the allegation of cherry-picking.
The real story here is how much power individuals have over our political landscape. George Soros, for example, has injected more than $125M into the midterm race in 2022[1]. To be clear, this is not a partisan issue; the Kochs raised over $70M last year[2]. If you want to be critical of super PACs, crypto spending is literally a drop in the bucket and completely missing the forest for the trees. There is a story here, but crypto ain't it.
The more boring reality is that (like every nascent industry) crypto is going through some growing pains, so it makes sense a16z/Coinbase/etc. need to heavily lobby DC for favorable SEC rulings & legislation. This is, quite literally, business as usual.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2022/01/31/georg...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/koch-network-...
As a generation, we really need to learn how to say: "I don't like this person and I believe they are biased and I hate their politics/tone/demeanour/ethos but that doesn't mean they are wrong about the facts."
The ability to make use of information and ideas from people we disagree with, and even agree with the correct findings or conclusions of people we dislike, is a skill we urgently need to learn.
Okay, what are the facts here? That crypto firms and VCs are lobbying politicians for favorable legislation? Um, okay. Everyone from farmers to auto-makers to tech companies do that. It's an absolute nothingburger.
Are the facts that there's over $200M injected in our political system by crypto firms? Um, okay. This doesn't even move the needle when compared to the billions injected by a class of ~30 ultra-rich individuals (both conservative and liberal) over the last 10 years.
At worst, this is misdirection, at best, it's gross ignorance of the ripple effects of the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling.
This is a political statement you're making. I get it: You want to assert that her work is about something else, and maybe Molly White wants it to be about something else as well. But that has nothing to do with the dataset.
When I look at that website I'm just looking at charts with numbers and breakdowns of those numbers. Sharing data is never "misdirection". It's just data.
The way to criticize her work is not to begin by attacking the person or their motives or the political or ethical implications of their work, but by describing and analysing her data.
Individuals can figure out for themselves if the data or its presentation is useful for them.
In general, you do your arguments a terrible disservice when you attack a person rather than engaging with their work. That approach makes one quickly lose the credibility they wish to assert that the person they're criticising doesn't have.
I'm not sure why you're being disingenuous here, it's clear as day she's not just "sharing data" (whereas Open Secrets, where the data is sourced from anyway, actually is). I mean, the title of the webpage is literally Follow the Crypto, but yeah, I'm sure no statement is being made here, it's totally "just data" ;)
But more saliently, as I said prior, the data isn't even that interesting. Wow, a16z and Coinbase are lobbying DC in an attempt to curry favors because they invested hundreds of millions in crypto startups, big whoop. It totally misses the larger problem with the data (namely that Citizens United, in its current incarnation, is a total disaster for democracy; crypto lobbying is a footnote).
Thanks. Smh.
I fully agree with you that the broader problem is Citizens United and the ability for corporations and the super wealthy to pour this much money into politics. In fact, I mention this here: https://www.followthecrypto.org/about/faq#what-about.
I think projects like mine would be extremely valuable for all industries, and I'm enormously grateful to groups like OpenSecrets that do excellent work making a far broader swath of the data more legible. But I am one person without the research team, time, or funding that would be necessary to analyze the data this deeply across industries, and so I focus on crypto (the subject of much of my research and writing).
The code is all open source, and I would be delighted if other projects like this one sprung up. It seems it would be a bit more productive to actually shine a light all the kinds of spending that happen throughout industries and across individuals, rather than using that other spending as a sort of whataboutist argument to dismiss projects like this one that (necessarily) focus on a subset of spending.
> If you want to be critical of super PACs, crypto spending is literally a drop in the bucket and completely missing the forest for the trees. There is a story here, but crypto ain't it.
As this project highlights,[1] crypto is far from a "drop in the bucket" when it comes to super PAC fundraising this cycle. The industry has dramatically ramped up its spending compared to previous election years, which is a large part of why I felt it was important to keep an eye on the spending.
[1] https://www.followthecrypto.org/committees/ranking/super
Wait what? I think she's doing a great job exposing crypto grifts/scams/hacks/etc. and I check her web3 feed at least once a week, but she does have a persona to uphold. Why would I pretend she's some platonic ideal of objectivity? For reasons mentioned, I do think this SuperPAC stuff is a bit reaching, but that's neither here nor there.
I am not OP but yes, I sent some information to her via their different contact mediums and she never got back, she is not responsive and could have at least said: "I am not interested".
You also completely failed to address my larger point, which is that the data or code is not flawed, your assumptions are.
Mind you, given the deep bias HN has against cryptocurrencies of any shape or form, I feel here she has her ideal audience here and we're the ones swimming against the current.
There are constantly HN commenters on a crusade to extol and defend the alleged virtues of various "crypto" projects. We could accuse these folks of having a "bias against government-backed currency".
Perhaps HN has a bias _for_ true stories of fraud, corruption and crime rather than a bias _against_ all crypto projects.
Crypto sector has many libraries that power it too with extremely active discussions in other tech forums, and thats totally missing from HN in favor of discussion of random mismanaged businesses and phishing attacks as representative of the entire concept of crypto. When that’s further from reality, as the tooling has improved a lot and is constantly evolving. There are many best practices that are actively discussed and worked on, elsewhere.
While the crowd on HN peculiarly acts completely segregated from that with a blissful ignorance filled with glee over frauds in the crypto sector, an extremely strange and impossibly different standard then how everything else is discussed.
The major difference seems to be that there doesn’t seem to be anything in the entire crypto industry that isn’t fraud or crime. And a lot of vague promises that typically turn out to be just more fraud in a year or two. It’s not prejudice if it’s true.
the governance proposals don’t have anything to do with fraud, crime, vague promises
the software standards don’t have anything to do with fraud, crime, vague promises
same for nodes, consensus mechanisms, package management, type safety, languages, operator instructions, smart contract auditing space, financial auditing and transparency space, block and transaction indexing, legislation that leverages the technology to reduce redundancy, and the list goes on
its an approach and what I would expect to see on HN more often regarding the crypto asset space
I think vague promises is exactly how you could sum up most crypto-related libraries as well. There’s supposedly some useful usecase, but right now it only contributes to North Korean nuclear program.
> If the only answer is “crpyto” and essentially all crypto is fraud
Emphasis mine.
There can be no intelligent conversation with someone whose confirmation bias is so deep they live in a black-and-white world.
You have no interest in a conversation, only shouting slogans and exaggerated claims.
What's new in crypto is permissionlessness which enables decentralisation [1]. That has
a) basically no benefits that cannot be achieved through (permissioned) distributed computing, except censorship resistance, or, as normal people call it, regulation dodging, and
b) it comes at enormous costs (in terms of inefficiency, cumbersomeness, etc.)
Crypto is systematically and inherently designed for and suitable for crime.
[1] You can claim that LCR also expanded the design space in the partially synchronous model from always consistent and eventually available to always available and eventually consistent, but again, not a huge benefit.
this is a common theme I’ve seen that reinforced my perspective: the criticism applies to things the critic respects and the critic saying it doesn't seem to know that, and they also don’t seem to even be aware of other benign things in the crypto space that are working fine and fit the social contract of all participants. I don't know if thats you, but it is applicable to the responses you chose
so that observation, in combination with how so many intelligent researchers and programmers take a different approach ultimately towards improving the crypto space due to its malleability, keeps me interested and confused by the unsubstantive and reductive nature of HN consensus on this one topic
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/21/north-korea-it-workers-us-h...
Sure, but what are some actual generally useful non-fraud uses? I know Marc Andreesen failed to come up with a single credible one after investing billions into the industry.
> for example, north korean expropriation and fraud is happening across the entire tech space, even a bunch of remote roles in the US are and were filled with north koreans, hence supporting the nuclear program
The difference is again the share of North Koreans working remotely in the US tech industry vs the amount of fraud in crypto.
the settlement time of 1 block is great for me.
chaining transactions within 1 block creates trading opportunities that are otherwise reserved for banks participating in the Overnight Reverse Repurchase Agreement facility
I don't really think you not being the target audience is an "actual useful" goal post to determine whether something is worth discussing on a tech forum, since the question is about non-fraud, but your bar is something that has to then be debated per use case based on whether you unilaterally derive utility from that.
the observation is that there is a group of people that have caked yourself in layers of news only about fraud, and my observation is that that's not the only news there is. that's the aberration in this tech community that's otherwise more discerning, I mean - crypto people are absolutely here - the contributors to all those parts of the stack are here and have been for over a decade. Brian Armstrong initially posted about Coinbase here. Its just the consensus is odd and has only chiseled away, while people have continued to build and grow the industry just in other forums.
> The difference is again the share of North Koreans working remotely in the US tech industry vs the amount of fraud in crypto.
be the change you want to see
I am downvoting you for your purely BS hyperbole. FYI, here are a few examples of what's not fraud in crypto industry.
1. Bitcoin. There are 11 BTC ETFs approved by SEC.
2. Ethereum. Many ETH ETFs are on the way to be approved
3. Stablecoins. Circle foundation issues billions of USDC and is closely affiliated with wall street and USG
4. ZK technology (pure research in many premier universities)
3. Tether totally has $110+B in holdings, though they’ve never produced a financial audit and they try to pass off attestations and non-financial audits as such to believers. Both times they’ve been forced to open their books, they turned out to be unbacked. Also, Circle and Tether are centralized entities who have full control of their currency and can and will censor transactions and block accounts, just like a regular bank.
4. Sure, cool, but is it actually used for anything anywhere or is that more of a “vague distraction”
On the other hand, building and paying for (in resources and time) two websites against crypto, buulding your entire social media persona around it and being recognizable by name for that effort, you will have to agree is a couple orders of magnitude more effort and "involvement" in a cause, compared to a disinterested anonymous coward like me.
ETFs aren't really financial instruments that the mainstream public will likely interact with or directly invest in, but CBDCs will probably proliferate wildly throughout the global economy in a matter of years so it's a bit of a missed chance for the public to weigh in on them.
How does it show that? It suggests there was 200 million raised for the 2024 election, but that doesn't seem to be in comparison to anything. The US government borrowing alone is multiple trillions per year; people would be expected to spend way more than a few hundred million to influence it.
Presidential campaigns alone can run into a billion dollars.
I'm not familiar enough with the details to claim that the numbers in OP take the #1 spot but they're definitely in the top 3 and that's very significant as we've seen with the recent change of tone from parties
I was looking at https://www.opensecrets.org/industries because this site inspired me, it suggest finance/insurance/real estate spent $1,249,076,508 so far in the 2024 election cycle which seems a lot more plausible than $50 million. The risk-reward here suggests industries should be pumping billions into elections. The payoffs for regulatory capture are huge and the crypto people are novices compared to anyone else in finance.
I agree with you on the risk/reward of buying influence through donations
My guess is the crypto community isn't outstanding in terms of spend as much as being naive about how to get the money to politicians in a way that gets them the regulation they want. And the players in this game might put some effort into subtlety.
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs
[1] The Make America Great Again Super PAC is ~80 million but the largest on the PAC list is American Crystal Sugar at ~$2 million.
And that's just a particularly high-profile example; smaller organizations and individuals routinely face this sort of thing from centralized payment processors. Said risk is nonexistent with any competently-developed cryptocurrency (and even most incompetently-developed ones).
You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
Is there a vibe shift happening on HN?
Everyone else is generally tired of hearing about it in the second decade of not delivering the marketing promises.
Every time you purchased something with a card, you give the card provider 2% of the price. There's a lot of interest in maintaining that.
Wikipedia: > In the United States, the fee averages approximately 2% of transaction value.[2] In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, while there is no cap for corporate cards.
Agreed. But we are talking about crypto here which seem to have a lot more than shitcoins. (Hint: search for "bitcoin" or "stablecoins")
It's not even a problem if they run out of imaginary money because the fed can simply ease in more to the FDIC via debt shell games.
Your local bank has a 0% reserve requirement[1]. Ofc it'll most likely get bailed out by the FDIC (by taxpayers) in case of emergency but US regulated stablecoins are in no way more risky than US banks
1: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm....
I'm not particularly bullish on crypto, but this is definitely not the flex you think it is.
There are incidents where a national currency winds up getting devalued, like when Soros bet against the UK pound. But proportionately that's a small decrease in value, the pound didn't go to zero like failing stablecoins do.
It is only a question of time until it fails like everything else does, but so far so good.
These data exhibit a clear rightward bias.
> most of the other players in the big tech sector
Yeah, such as union-busting Amazon or Google. /s
Nazi Germany from 1933-1945? Fascist Italy until 1944? Venezuela today? USSR until 1991? North Korea today?
Did you not learn any history ever?