Trump's 'Crypto Reserve' Is Such Brazen Corruption
zeteo.com
zeteo.com
The fuck are we going to even do with reserve crypto? I'm not even on the crypto bit here, the point of strategic reserves is to have stock for emergencies. What fucking emergency can someone possibly imagine that would be resolved with a pile of ETH?
Whether crypto is a good idea for that purpose is a matter of opinion. I lean toward no. Strongly. Make the case either way and it can be a sensible discussion.
what's the point of having a "reserve" in magical internet money if it can fluctuate by 50%? that's not a reserve, that's gambling.
it's a non-starter of an idea. Trump wants it to launder money.
He said we have a gold reserve and that makes sense, but if we become interplanetary, then you don’t want to pay to ship gold to Mars. Crypto solves that issue. The reserve will last well into the future so preparing now makes sense.
Unique take to be sure, but sharing because it was interesting.
For Mars colonization, I was also speaking to the nature of its backers.
But yes, I agree with you on the backers. That's precisely why I don't think they will be the ones landing Mars.
The problem with a Martian (or even lunar) colony is that... there's not actually anything valuable there. So a traditional "earning" colony is basically off the table, and aside from the technological hurdles, is probably why the drive to do it just hasn't been there. Of our closes celestial neighbors, well, Venus is just useless entirely what with how hostile the atmosphere is to our... everything, Mars is quite far away, several months via current technology, and it's incredibly, devastatingly thin atmosphere and lower gravity means any given colony will require a lot and I do mean a LOT of support from us here on Earth to function. Colony isn't even really an appropriate word here, as colonization implies some level of living at the destination and between the lack of breathable atmosphere, lack of any and all flora, and lack of water, you're basically requiring regular supply drops or everyone is just dead.
Really the moon is far better in the transit aspect, which since you're supplying your colony from here, is a huge data point. And even then, what does that colony then do? The moon doesn't have much of anything we're really hurting for, certainly nothing to make up for the exorbitant cost of mining there. I could see it as a valuable location for low-G construction of larger, further-going spacecraft I suppose? But in terms of "expected to earn," I think either the red planet or our friend in the sky is going to be pretty dire.
I think the most interesting point in this is the level in which supporters have stooped to provide 'justifiable' arguments.
But to state the obvious: the Martians can keep their gold in Earth banks, just like Russia used to keep its gold in UK and Swiss banks. Many European countries still do. Even on Earth, nobody prefers to move gold around.
yeah it would cost more to ship it to Mars then it would cost to get a team of the most expensive contractors you can find to dig it out of the surface of Mars with their bare hands.
Not to mention the absurdity of thinking crypto would be more usable over interplanetary internet than VISA/ACH, or that such a society on Mars, when more than a research outpost, would benefit at all from being economically bound and gagged to a distant terrestrial currency.
> Crypto solves that issue.
Asteroid mining solves the issue. Gold will be functionally unlimited. Cryptocurrency will be long forgotten in history books after the first self sustaining space colony exists.
Maybe I am missing something, but what issue were they alluding to?
Yes, databases (anything digital for that matter) are easier to transfer over large physical distances. Why would there be a need to ship or transfer anything in that manner, considering we as earth bound humans have stopped moving around large quantities of gold for purely financial purposes quite some time ago?
Besides being a damning inditement of whatever interplanetary society they were envisioning, I’d be interested in what their view on modern day precious metal trading as a whole is.
>Trump plans to use your money to buy fake money
Not true if it's confiscated funds.
Maybe in this article, but the real corruption is in the insider trading.
> The “strategic reserve” exposes crypto as the scam it always was (alexkolchinski.com) | 125 points by kolchinski 2 days ago | 124 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43236752
Edit: I'm absolutely positive this isn't exactly right. But the idea should register.
"Fact check: Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust during presidency"
Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust during the presidency – he didn't sell it. An expert told USA TODAY blind trusts allow someone to retain ownership of an asset while transferring management to another person or institution.
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/24/fac...>
The sale happened after Carter left office, with considerable personal debts:
The Carters sold the peanut farm in March 1981, shortly after Carter left office following a failed bid for a second term. Years of drought and changes in warehouse management had left the Carters with more than $1 million of debt at that point...
I'm not sure a blind trust makes particular sense for a specific business as an isolation measure. Contrast with, say, an investment portfolio where management of the portfolio is completely handed over to an independent entity. In that case there's no direct managerial control over the individual investments themselves (save shareholder votes), and the contents of the trust can vary over time.
Putting an individual business in a trust strikes me as putting a single item in a bag and then into another bag. You're not abstracting or collectivising, only putting more packaging around it. Maybe there's some managerial distance, but everyone on both sides of that gap knows exactly who ultimately benefits.
(I'm not calling Carter corrupt. He's likely the least corrupt president the US has seen in 50--75 years. I'm saying that this specific measure, well-intentioned as it may have been, was rather empty. It's also immeasurably better than present practices, of course.)
In fact, if they didn't, then HN's front page would consist of little else.
"bongodongobob, why is the president's decentralized technology defrauding American citizens?"
"Dunno, haven't you ever wondered why FastDOOM is fast though?"
(Not in the financial sense.)
Perhaps you think the this-time-is-differentness of this time is different enough to justify it, but (a) none of us can actually know that in advance, (b) the impact of getting it wrong is existential (if one can use that word about a relatively trivial thing like an internet forum), (c) people have often said such things in the past and it's clear that we were right not to pull the plug when they did, and (d) my job hasn't changed.
If you want further explanation, the links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43272671 should take you to plenty. If you read some of that and then have a question I haven't answered yet, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- What is an HN in the world in which we seem to be headed?
- What is the possibility, however slim, that HN might serve as a bulwark against that world? Is that a die worth throwing?
- What is HN's, and YC's, culpability in creating that world? I'm looking at social media, crypto, AI, AdTech, FinTech, Thiel, Musk, Andreesen, and who knows who else here, as well as general enshittification and authoritarianisation of the Internet (surveillance, propaganda, disinformation, censorship, targeted manipulation,[1] kompromat, the intertwingled and self-reinforcing surveillance capitalism/state/anarchism, killbots, etc.).
- What if any sufficient difference would change your mind? Do you, dang, have any personal moral limits at which you'd change your moderator stance, or simply wash your hands and walk away? Or not?
I borrowed Anubis's scales, and it seems to me HN compares poorly to the feather of the liberal social democratic experiment.
Turning HN into a Nazi bar[2] is also an irreversible outcome. As is turning the polity in which it resides into a fascist state.
Scylla, Charybdis. How steer you helmsman?
________________________________
Notes:
1. See: <https://archive.is/8ceqI>
2. A question I've pondered for a while. Toy poll suggests at the least a perception issue: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/112922175293010508>.
In the world we're headed into, truth is gone. Making an honest judgment based on your best evaluation of the evidence available to you is gone. You will parrot the current insanity that some authoritarian demands, or suffer the consequences. In that world, we really need HN, to keep our sanity, and to avoid the complete destruction of our moral character.
And if you really think that's the world we're headed to, do you think converting HN into all-anti-Trump-all-the-time is really going to be the difference between ending up there and not ending up there?
Though for the most part, the short answer is that HN would be either irrelevant, irredeemably corrupted itself, and/or a tool for the abusive power of that world.
Which is to say that fighting against that outcome is paramount.
The evil that is to be fought is far more than just one person. But by fighting that orientation (it's not an ideology, it's simple power-lust) is essential.
HN has had its critics going back to its origins. I'm tending to think jwz was right.
I've heard from others who were themselves prominent on HN that they're finding the site no longer tolerable, and I ask myself whether or not it is at least weekly, if not more often. And as much as I've admired much of what dang does here, there's some which makes my hair stand up. Including what he has, and has not, said in this thread.
(This is only a partial answer, and I hope to give it more consideration and justice soon.)
To clarify an example of what I mean:
For example, if the maximum flag ratio: is 0.5, and if an article has 10 flags / 19 upvotes, then the ratio of 10/19 is > 0.5 and the flag gets triggered.
Or maybe it's just a flat number, such that any article with >20 flags is flagged.
I'm sure it's more complicated than either example, but was just curious if you could share the approximate way the 'flagged' note is added to articles?
As you say, it's more complicated than a simple ratio, but I guess you could call it ratio-like :)
There is information in the FAQ about how to flag a post and who gets to do it, but it's unclear, at least to me, if another user with a similar karma level is able to unflag it.
I agree that a user may find the title inflammatory because it's an opinionated accusation without an explicit court decision backing it up, but I want to emphasize that official HN moderators should not be able flag this specific post as Coinbase is a YC company and happens to be one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, hence the conflict of interest in burying this story. I can't see any way how someone could contest the fact that this story presents a conflict of interest for YC.
After they tank the economy, a lot of is should probably just go chuck ourselves into the burn pits. It will save us from having to go into debt hust to board the meat grinder early.
The U.S. already has a gold reserve, and an oil reserve. There is no need for a crypto reserve.
I agree that the current situation is not normal and that there's a danger in normalising it - plus I have some private thoughts about how the tech scene is partially complicit in what's currently happening. I'm also not sure if anyone can afford to be neutral forever (something that HN usually tries to do), simply because the stakes are so high that most participants from both sides won't accept neutrality anymore.
But even outrageous news wear off - it's human nature. I'm sure it happened during WWII, too. And there's a certain point at which, even if you do care, you don't want to have to engage with it all the time. So limiting the amount of discussion about political matters becomes a matter of mental health.
But with respect I would suggest that people here can do the same, choose not to click on things they don't want to discuss or ease of visiting the site a little during this time.
Or if that's not possible then it comes back to the question I was asking: Where can we discuss these things? Is there appetite for a new HN fork where we don't have to be neutral or considerate in the face of facism?
Because right now I don't know where else to go. If this was a non-political post about crypto then I wie immediately come here for discussion because I know I can trust my peers here to have a deep and nuances understanding of the technologies involved. But now I come here and I see it is flagged and hear we can't have it visible because it's "too much." That's ok, but where can we do it?
It feels very necessary for my own mental health that these discussions have a space, can you see that side too? And I feel Furthermore a responsibility to the people whose mental health and everything else is being affected directly by these off the wall decisions.
I feel that there is definite emotional need for seeing that at least some of your peers share enough of your values to have a similar reaction to you - although that can cut both ways. For example, during COVID, many of the discussions were IMHO cesspools of misinformation with incredibly angry takes. In that situation I preferred having fewer of these threads on the main page.
Intellectually, I'm not so sure. I mean, at some point you either agree that all of this is crazy or you don't. You can certainly discuss immigration, government spending, even some hot button issues like DEI with some amount of civility, but when you're faced with what looks to be a descent into authoritarianism, is there really anything left to discuss? I'm not sure.
It's fair what you're saying about Covid but HN is not where I come to hear the opinions of medical experts. But this crypto stuff, DOGE having physical access to servers etc.? The question again is where do we discuss it if not here? If it wasn't connected to Trump this would be the obvious place to come.
Health, law, relationships. Those are pretty much my main exceptions to stuff I can justify culling misinformation from. It's very specific, personal (or region-based', and bad advice can cost lives. No physical life is worth upholding some free speech on the internet.
This meanwhile is simply a mix of news and opinion. It's not harming anyone and HN never really gets "full on the front page". The algorithm does tailor to variety and the moderation strives to make sure duplicate stories are merged.
>but when you're faced with what looks to be a descent into authoritarianism, is there really anything left to discuss? I'm not sure.
Yes. It's more important to discuss than ever. You need to talk about organizing and rebelling. About how to use the system against itself. How to find allies. Keeping people ignorant and isolated is how you get hat regime to begin with.
I wouldn't have thought myself that calling my reps works without the right forums. I wouldn't know when and where protests in my area are. HN wants to say it's a community, but times like this reminds me we're more of some amourphous Meetup, mostly a revolving door of people who come in anf out with this pressure to talk about specific topics. But never make any deep connections.
We need community more than ever.
I agree that actually discussing what can be done would be more productive.
(If you haven't seen any of those many explanations, I could understand why you might jump to such a conclusion, but it's based on a mistaken premise—probably due to the "measure zero" effect that I've described a few times [1].)
Here are a few links in case anyone hasn't seen those posts and needs some trailheads into the forest:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212835 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (Feb 2025)
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[1] The "measure zero effect" is the strange phenomenon that no matter how many times we repeat something, the set of users who hear (or at any rate remember) it seems to have measure zero. I also call this the statelessness of the internet, but I like the 'measure zero' analogy better because it includes the fact that many users do hear these things—they're just negligible in number, compared to the ones who don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923707 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380376 (Sept 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741427 (March 2020)
"A dedicated hacker news of politics site is long overdue. Civil discussions, amazing moderation, and the intelligent insight of experts to hash out complex issues. I’d be on it and participating nearly all day long."
Any thoughts on this?
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43375462
Many years ago, I created a section of a site making the history of each commenter a major part of the discussion. This meant the trick of attempting a cleverly-structured and seemingly reasonable statement could more easily be revealed as a bad faith effort to promote hidden motives. It didn't tamp down moderation needs as much as it made the discussion far more useful for getting at how facts were related to how the discussion was being framed.
We required users to declare either neutrality or allegiance to one side of position on major issues and sub-issues. This forced users (in a limited way) to choose between spending time on honest, good-faith arguments for what they declared allegiance to, or be a "spy for the other side" and pursue dishonest, bad-faith arguments.
If a discussion site were structured to potentiate advanced moderation, you would be one of the world's premier experts in how to measure success, and in predicting the likelihood of success of different approaches. Somewhere, we need to be able to take the next step past sites like TheMotte.org
I think it would be a very different site than HN, and much harder to moderate. Moderating HN pushes me to my limit, so I can't imagine what it would take to run such a site. That doesn't mean it can't be done, of course, and I'd be interested if someone could pull it off! But it would probably take a special person to do it—for most of us, the pressure would be too high.
dang thank you for all the hard work you do to moderate this site. But I have to ask…do you ever take time off or go on vacations? You almost seem like an inhuman machine that works a lot (I mean this in a positive way btw lol)
Seriously man you do a great job taking care of this place. Please don’t forget to take care of yourself too.
It just seems that one of the most valuable uses of the internet could be in the area of politics, and with the high value, the high difficulty is worth tackling.
The Neutral Politics subreddit is one example of such a place. I do not go to Reddit anymore because I feel the website overall is too addictive so I can't speak to the current quality of that specific subreddit but it was quite good several years ago and might offer you a little bit of what you want.
What a small-minded little greed-sack. I hate it that since these people have escape-velocity wealth we have to forever sit here and on some level pretend their ideas aren't dumb.
There are no consequences to it, only upside.
maybe China or NK or a billionaire who wants to use it to fund Mars adventures, etc.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/1j2891u/whale_wi...
His venture firm (Craft Ventures) previously invested in Bitwise Asset Management, and their top holdings include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and Cardano — the exact assets named by Trump for proposed inclusion in the strategic reserve.
Sorry, that's too on the nose. Especially with the nonsensical decision to include Ripple and Cardano.
So if you had to pick what to put into a reserve it would make sense that the 5 biggest coins would be there, no?
How long has Cardano been a top five coin? Did you look at the marketcap chart and assume it had been there longer than a few days? Who owns the majority of Ripple?
> So if you had to pick what to put into a reserve it would make sense that the 5 biggest coins would be there, no?
Who decided five to begin with? And then I should actually refuse your logic and pick coins that weren't in the list of the five biggest?
Ripple has been the same.
Bitwise has a methodology for picking their coins that takes the top 5 by market cap excluding Binance and stable coins.
This was all trivially googleable for you, you should take the time to look before you comment next time:(
> Sacks said that he has sold his personal crypto holdings.
I went to his twitter account, that's exactly what he said, but that does not mean the same thing as divesting from companies that hold crypto.
how we know if he's telling the truth that he sold all his crypto currency
is there anyway to validate/audit this?
if there is, doesn't it mean crypto is not 'crypted'?
But I absolutely guarantee that the final coins that are decided upon change from what's currently there.
The crypto bros are under some delusional that they’re a legitimate currency, and they should be immune from the SEC.
… and then they betray that thought every chance they get.
Fiat is printable, bitcoin is not and have limited amount, same as gold.
Do you belive in debt that current fiat money represent?
Having a limited amount is a bug, not a feature. Being able to create and destroy money is a feature and a not a bug.
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
Monetary flexibility to deal with economic shocks is a handy thing to have.
Actually one aspect of currency is storing a value, which it is not anymore with printing.
Another way of creating value is through innovation, which often needs easy(er) access to capital to research, develop, and produce it:
> But Inflation is not inevitable. There are numerous countervailing forces that have been at work for much of the past 50 years. The three big Deflation drivers: 1) Technology, which creates massive economies of scale, especially in digital products (e.g., Software); 2) Robotics/Automation, which efficiently create more physical goods at lower prices; and 3) Globalization and Labor Arbitrage, which sends work to lower cost regions, making goods and services less expensive.
* https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/
A fixed money supply often leads to economic stagnation due to a lack of access to capital:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
The stagnation was sometimes only stopped through lucky discovery of gold deposits:
> Monetarists believe that the 1873 depression was caused by shortages of gold that undermined the gold standard, and that the 1848 California Gold Rush, 1886 Witwatersrand Gold Rush in South Africa and the 1896–99 Klondike Gold Rush helped alleviate such crises.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
Do you want economic growth and innovation to be dependent on the amount of shiny rocks we happen to find lying about?
Definitely not. I prefer decentralisation. People have right to exchange without interference of third party that shape value centrally.
Bitcoin is still choosing which University to attend, and on his first date.
Bitcoin is a brand not a fixed tech. Remember when it forked?
Don't believe that Trump couldn't order Bitcoin to mint for the US. How? He is a master power broker and Bitcoin is centralized and run by humans. It is not an independent entity like, for example a coronavirus or an idea that cannot be tamed.
The big bitcoin buyers are then USA and Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). The miners incentivised to operate in the US. The US government can now say to the coder: well, (clicks fingers), take this $10m and do what we say or don't and we will make you illegal and under arrest.
This would be well within Trump's MO and comfort zone.
Bitcoin is not as democratic as you suggest. Mining pools have power. Decisions get made. People are involved. It is like saying the US is not controlled by definition because there is Congress. But those people make decisions and can be heavily influenced by those with money.
A publicly auditable, decentralized monetary system is necessary in this day and age. Money is just too important to be entrusted to any specific political party. There needs to be a reliable mechanism to limit spending. Scarcity is one of the most important characteristics of money to ensure a level playing field for everyone; our current monetary system completely neglects this essential property and has no mechanism to limit government spending. We have an extremely centralized system which is unaccountable to the billions of citizens who are increasingly forced to participate in it as it is becoming increasingly unappealing, asymmetric and inefficient.
I think if the government launched a new cryptocurrency, distributed it evenly to every citizen, made it legal tender then started buying it up with fiat USD (intentionally causing hyperinflation of the fiat USD). That would solve a lot of problems. Every country should also do the same and they can agree on maintaining forex rates so that the hyperinflation is even and not too noticeable. Only people who refuse to move to the fairer system would lose; which is fine. Wealthy people who understand the benefits of a scarce money system will be able to maintain much of their wealth by transitioning early and buying up tokens from people who do not understand the benefits... Or they can just hold onto their assets (if they're confident that their assets are productive in real-terms and not just nominally in fiat terms).
This is not just financial benefit for a voting bloc.
It may or may not be illegal and whatever lawyers and judges tell us about that it still stinks just as strongly.
Third option is that it's absolutely illegal but you won't get a conviction so it passes.
Maintain the outrage no matter who and especially if you feel they're on your "team" in the partisan BS.
> Rather, the person familiar with Fairshake said, the goal of the attack campaign was to terrify other politicians—“to warn anyone running for office that, if you are anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.”
> “It’s a simple message,” the person familiar with Fairshake said. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart.”