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> Her entire persona and relevance revolves around being anti-crypto. Of course she's heavily biased; this isn't even a remotely controversial claim.

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.

> wrong about the facts

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.

> At worst, this is misdirection […]

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.

> Sharing data is never "misdirection".

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).

> I'm not sure why you're being disingenuous here

Thanks. Smh.

> 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].

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

Okay, you don’t like her. Cool, nobody’s required to but that’s a feeling, not data, and the accusation I responded to was a specific claim of dishonesty of the sort which, if true, could easily be supported by logic and evidence, not just emotion.

> Okay, you don’t like her.

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.

The claim that she is cherry picking data is quantifiable, not just a subjective assessment. If that’s true, especially given the public records available, it should be possible to back the claim up with examples.