Secret Deals, Foreign Investments: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now it's all celebrity endorsement, hype and lies.
And having the US prez jump on that bandwagon and ride it while in office is just mind-boggling.
Seems like what's happening is unsurprising. A nation of spectators, not citizens.
I'd suspect there will be a lot of room for "non-official acts" charges related to Trump's pump-and-dump crypto schemes after he leaves office.
And fewer politicians are going to have incentive to stick with him then.
https://www.theverge.com/news/646426/a-1-million-per-head-di...
Is the Sovereign Bitcoin Fund bailout scam still on the table or is Bitcoin doing well enough so that it isn't needed any longer?
Now we're in a situation that's so much worse than I ever imagined -- Trump coins are vehicles for naked bribery and corruption with a sprinkle of encryption on top. I was worried about black markets, Trump has literally been using his office to grant access to top holders of his scam coin.
This is a big lesson for everyone about why some degree of regulation is necessary.
But after spending ~2y in the space, I realized another thing -- the people in this space right now are in it purely for speculation and monetary gains. There's a lot of talk about decade long horizons, but any app that achieves pmf in the short to medium term has to cater to the speculators or die.
We chose not to go down the path of launching a coin or doing speculative stuff, even though the demand for it was intense. We hit some PMF around creators, but didn't have the conviction that it would scale without speculation. A year down the line, I believe that was the right pov to have.
what ever gave you that thought? There are countries that do this right out in the open. The rest of the countries do it in various shades of gray to not be right out in the open, but still visible for those that can see in higher bit depths of gray than black and white
I really feel like your comment was much more noisy than mine ever was.
Err, I mean "good at ensuring the absolute privacy and confidentiality of financial clients."
John Adams told us the Constitution is intended for a moral (or virtuous) people.
The point is the law isn't self enforcing. People have to insist upon Constitutional order, not because of (blind) faith in it, but because the alternative is tyranny. Not anarchy.
Does this country deserve Constitutional order? The People abandoned it by electing someone virulently and openly opposed to it.
The regulation you seek is utterly meaningless in an autocracy. Or even in a unitary executive theory of Constitutional order.
But in the specific case of Trump, among the most untrustworthy liars America has produced, what does Constitutional duty mean to him? What does it mean that he took the oath of office? He said the words but no serious person believes he took an oath.
People still have no idea what we've done. And what is yet to come.
The POTUS is a psycho. And the replacements aren't good people either.
100 days down, 1369 to go. It's going to get much worse.
There's an old saying that goes something like there is crime, there is organized crime and there is government.
I really wonder how you come up to that conclusion especially that there is more than a degree of regulation. If regulation will not apply for the top anyway, then it's better to remove all regulation.
https://www.reuters.com/world/kushner-has-discussed-us-saudi...
These corrupt assholes don't even try to hide it.
Thats all Truth Social was. By buying the public stock you could in a way funnel money to Trump that did conflict with campaign finance laws/limits.
People arent buying Truth Social stock because they think its actually worth 5 billion dollars.
Well, if you see it as the private presidential corruption fund, it might well be worth well over 5 billion tbf.
Its called kleptocurrency for good reason.
Those who support it on philosophical grounds will destruction on everyone else for the sake of their own gain, and should be viewed with all possible hostility as they constitute an intentional community of public enemies in the plainest possible sense.
Neither will bans and prohibitions, unless you are willing to go full north korea with cameras everywhere and computers locked down. And you'll probably fail with that.
You're beating your fists against an ocean.
Touch some grass.
Is it a good idea? Mayne not. But obviously one can crush Bitcoin if one wants.
"Is it a good idea?"
No, not "obviously one crush" and nor are there no consequences if one were to try.
https://archive.md/qlbDM#selection-49.0-49.64
("Georg Ritter von Flondor, and what his unhappy life can teach us")
I have heard this one before.
Say what you will about "the swamp" (not a big fan myself), but as a metaphor it kinda works since a swamp may be noxious and filled with unsavory swamp creatures... but it's still an ecosystem where competition and co-evolution amongst these swamp species in response to external environmental changes would still be expected.
OR they aren’t ignorant, and are fully aware of things, and instead are scum.
"If you're doing something legally or morally wrong, create opponents to accuse of the same things before what you're doing comes out."
Trump will close off as much opposition as he can in the next two years. Then spend a year convincing people that term limits aren't required by the constitution. By then we'll have had so many scandals and constitutional crisis events that just get ignored that it will happen.
Am I being overdramatic? Because this feels different. It feels openly hostile.
The solution liberals recoil against for some reason, is disassociation. We should have threatened our Trumper friends and family with permanent disassociation before the 2024 election.
Most would still persist, unpersuaded. They're likely lost for our lifetime. But perhaps enough would have taken the social cue of ridicule and ostracizing as serious enough to not vote for a psychopath. The farther back, the more effective it would have been.
Instead, we keep thinking they can be persuaded with reason, despite all evidence they've abandoned rationality.
We can't legislate the outcome you want. What you want comes from virtue. And America is out of virtue. People voted for a rapist, a felon, and vile insurrectionist.
America may not deserve Constitutional order, and therefore we are losing it.
The lack of regulations in crypto make these scams legals without any fear of any repercussion
Bitcoin solves (or attempts to solve) for exchange in absence of trust and regulation. But this is a stupid thing to solve for, because without trust and regulation you can’t even have a functioning society.
(Unless you count speculation/gambling).
There are a few areas where I find crypto interesting or useful:
- The existing banking and payments industry is too Christian / Mormon. It extra-judicially regulates anything it views as "vices". This industry is supposed to be dumb payment rails with hooks for FinCEN to stop crime. It's not supposed to be your pastor. If anything, business integration with regular payment rails would help them be better regulated.
- "Stablecoins" or whatever the hell they're called seem like a wickedly efficient way to move money between businesses and countries without paying large fees or having to wait for clearance. Ideally they can even cut Visa and the fintech monopolies out of the equation. This is more of a B2B rather than consumer / individual application, and it seems genuinely useful. It also seems compatible with the existing FinCEN / FINRA / AML regulations. If you look at it long enough, it doesn't even feel like crypto. Just a new type of efficiency.
The latter may make the former a non-issue, especially if the existing fintech industry receives more competition from upstarts that don't have to pay the legacy gateways and their frictionful fees.
This seems to be 'regulatory arbitrage' rather than anything concrete to do with the tech though. i.e. there's nothing inherent in a stablecoin that can't be done more simply, it's just currently a way to skirt bureaucracy and fees, which are already diminishing in many places.
In Australia for example, we are almost cashless now and most bank transfers are instant and cheap - no blockchain required.
Digital currency is a good idea - unclear what value the blockchain part actually provides?
Yeah, these seem like a really good (potentially the only one) use case for crypto. Note that these are really just replicating dollar (and potentially euro) dominance for a new age, and whoever ends up winning here will probably be the new Visa/Mastercard (with all of the problems that entails).
Barely. If $1m of crypto moves from one private wallet to another how do you know who's doing it or what the purpose is? Could be something legit, could be paying for drugs/terrorism - no definite way of knowing.
I might have the wrong assumptions?
A way to make it less traceable is to transfer it to an iffy crypto exchange, change it and then withdraw it somewhere else. Some of those are not very good at keeping records and the like. Like I use mexc who can change usdc and when I wanted to do my tax return they said they couldn't retrieve transactions over 18 months ago - they delete the data they say. And mexc isn't the worst.
the technology is showing transactions on a public ledger literally (unlike tradfi), nobody is hiding anything (until we go to Monero and similar, but that's different). What's however happening, and we come back to the first point, is the lack of "rules" so that in effect financial "crime" is legal.
There's a public ledger I can visit to see who's bribing Trump this week?
Apparently before Bitcoin was Liberty Reserve, which was a centralized database.
Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).
But history has showed (with NSDAP and others) that it is not.
You see, you lost a good chunk of voters there.
Many are just voting for their candidate to hurt other people whom they don't like.
Bullshit. America is the richest country on earth. Your unemployment is remarkably low. Your disposable income is relatively high. And all the issues you complain about, like housing, are worse outside the US than in the US.
Moreover, a lot of the MAGA people are NOT working class struggling families. There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
Also from polling the ones who did not vote were also leaning towards Trump. So participation was not the issue.
That’s not even true within my lifetime, let alone historically. People freaked the fuck out because Reagan was going to be all of 70 when he took office in 1982. That’s nothing compared to the fossils that they’re propping up in front of a microphone these days. 70 year olds in Congress these days are nicknamed “The Kid”.
That's only true for an incredibly expansive definition of geriatric: Teddy Roosevelt was 42, Kennedy 43, Obama and Grant 46, etc. By a commom conventional standard of "geriatric” in general use (65+), only Buchanan, Harrison, Reagan, Trump, and Biden qualify at the start of their first term, and only 16 total would at the end of their last term.
> So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman
Harris was closer to (but still older than) both the mean and median age at start of term for a President than Trump was (even if you compared her in 2024 to Trump when elected in 2016). Gender and age, sure, but the whole geriatric thing as a long-term bias evident across the whole list of Presidents is unjustified (there's probably a decent argument that the current electorate has a geriatric bias, but its not a long-term historical one.)
They love him because he's as degenerate as they are, and makes it cool to be white. Or so I'm told.
Not that I believe any of that, just going by what Trump supporters tell me.
Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).
Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)
Who was president in 2020? Who did the first round of stimulus?
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
Yeah, that's fair.
The data are known to show that the primary effect was in reducing the risk of hospitalization, severe disease, and mortality. Why, then should the lack of effect on transmission be the end-point that determines the appropriateness of mass immunization?
And I say this as someone who thinks Biden was a pretty good President.
Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.
Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.
This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".
Fertile ground for a fascist conman.
There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
It’s not solely Trump’s identity that makes that distinction; it’s the haphazard, uninformed, and ruinous adventures in poor decision-making in economics and otherwise that characterize the difference. Biden was ineffective and a poor choice, but utterly benign in comparison to his mendacious, unskilled successor.
It's a complex web of alienations.
You could spend an entire college semester discussing how and why. Immigration is the current scapegoat for the effects of a hollowed out middle class, though.
hahaha
rattling off a bunch of people who haven't been criminally charged in response to a party whose leader quite literally HAS been charged with fraud is the point.
how many indictments were passed down during the Obama admin vs Trump admin vs Bush admin and so on. Republican admins are notorious for being criminals.
A elite that fights social welfare as socialism, while at the same time removing the middle class and handing the lower classes infinite competition. Nobody cares about who the elite pretends to care for, nobody cares about corruption, they want to see that house burn down, like theirs was torched. The sounds of humanism the enemy makes, are irrelevant, as the sound of compassion made while doing nothing.
Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government contracts.
Like, yes, please, investigate all of them.
Republicans sort-of tried with Hunter, but kept balking at public hearings because they knew a bunch of the stuff they were claiming when they went on Fox was made-up, so it better served their propaganda purposes to avoid pursuing it. If there was actually anything to it, I hope and assume they would have gone ahead.
Which brings up the credibility problem with these claims from Republicans: "There's fraud in government! We found tons of it!" cool, that's a crime, where are the indictments? Oh, there aren't any, because you're full of shit. "Massive election fraud!" cool, that's a serious crime, you're in power now, a bunch of your AGs launched high-profile investigations, where are the indictments? You snagged a half-dozen cases, all mundane shit like someone with two houses voting in both states in two different elections because they forgot about it or didn't realize it was illegal? Where is the massive, organized fraud? Oh, you were just lying. Again. (They've been fucking that particular chicken for nearly two damn decades and somehow still have nothing to show for it, the democracy-undermining pricks). Months and months and all those hours of interviews for the Benghazi "investigations", and what? Nothing again. It's tedious. Shit or get off the pot, go after crime but stop lying about it.
Hunter Biden blatantly and corruptly sold his father’s influence. There’s even evidence that Joe got his “10% for the big guy” on these dealings. It’s a massive disgusting scandal.
For the record I can’t stand when either side pulls this crap. The whole narrative that my side’s politicians are less corrupt than yours needs to end. They’re dividing us into tribes and playing us for fools while the political class robs us blind.
Hunter Biden, as far as the country has been made aware, never requested an TS-SCI clearance, as Jared Kushner did. Jared Kushner was given one via overrule from the 45th administration when the FBI and CIA said there's no way in hell he should be given access to any state secrets due to his background.
For the record, fuck Hunter Biden for anything he might have done. But don't equate selling access to demanding the highest levels of access to our nation's most closely held secrets.
> Jared Kushner is just as much a “private citizen” as Hunter Biden is.
Feel free to start the ball rolling
He was convicted of several crimes…
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco-weiss/pr/robert-hunter-...
It's ridiculous how the US has gone downhill since.
Now, as the trump + melania coin acting as a grift, instead of "alternative funding mechanism". I mean, you could already 'donate' directly to the president, and even get a tax writeoff for it. Atleast this way you'll have to pay capital gains. You could already pay $1m to get a audience with the president, how is this any different? Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.
the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.
It's not that i entirely believe all of this, but i would like to provide some counter weight to all the comments that are all just parroting "Grift".
If any of this is (arguably) normal we should tear down the systems that support these norms. They are bad norms. The solution is never, “Welp, people are corrupt, what can you do?” You start making changes in the legal system. Because if you don’t you’re giving the country away as though there were no other course of action.
What? Campaign donations are not tax exempt.
> Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.
Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)
> the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.
Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.
>Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)
Taking a microdose of ket under medical supervision, and taking a hit of weed which is legal in alot of states is not the same "Smoking crack every 15 minutes" as hunter said he did.
>Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.
You aren't giving any money to the president here. It's a way for the president to provide utility to the coin. The coin has a vesting schedule, locking the coins so they can't be sold by the insiders.
Only if they're tax exempt NGOs. Which affiliated NGO do you propose?
> Taking a microdose of ket under medical supervision, and taking a hit of weed which is legal in alot of states is not the same "Smoking crack every 15 minutes" as hunter said he did.
(I'm… pretty doubtful Musk is actually microdosing.)
The Feds consider both crack cocaine and marijuana as a Schedule I drug; per the DEA, "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse". https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
> You aren't giving any money to the president here.
Per the article: "A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash."