The crypto industry is making its mark on this year’s elections to the tune of some $119 million.
The funding has largely come from two companies — Coinbase and Ripple — which are funneling money into super PACs like Fairshake PAC, which is dedicated to “elevating pro-crypto candidates and attacking crypto skeptics,” according to Public Citizen.
At the 2024 bitcoin conference in Nashville in February, Trump — who called bitcoin “highly volatile and based on thin air” in 2019 — said he’d lay out a plan “to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Trump has already won the backing of several crypto enthusiasts, including his running mate JD Vance, who owns at least $250,000 in bitcoin.
Wasn’t crypto a scam?
“Wasn’t” implies it was and has changed. It was, and still is a scam.
Yeah, I mean how there is people putting lots of money into elections with crypto if it is a scam, I don’t understand.
Usually, if there’s a scam, someone’s making money off it. This is them. They want to keep making money.
There is so much nuance to this argument that this conversation just glosses over. Replace “big crypto” with banks and it’s the same thing.
Casino owners put a lot of money into elections too.
Would you say casinos aren’t a scam? I’d call them a scam.
It’s not as much as those people who are buying bitcoins thinking they get rich, but the people that are making money on them that are spending on elections.
It isn’t, it’s a technology. People use that technology to scam.
Same as phone calls aren’t scans and email aren’t scans but people can use them to scam.
Crypto has a purpose, just one that doesn’t apply to many people.
We’ll find that use case any day now. The one that isn’t enabling crime, that is.
Yeah that’s pretty much the only solid purpose crypto has as of now. But the technology itself is cool.
Define enabling crime.
Is payment for private VPN enabling crime? Is sending money to and from relatives in sanctioned jurisdictions enabling crime? Is supporting opposition leaders enabling crime?
Yes. Literally yes. What the fuck do you think a sanctioned jurisdiction is?
Well then I’ll be a criminal for caring about my close ones.
If you believe that it’s a moral good to break those laws, that’s fine. But that’s not the argument you were making.
Fair enough, I digressed.
Though between our countries, no law prohibits me to send crypto to each other, so here it is not criminal activity. Operating such transactions in fiat is what falls under scrutiny.
Crypto enables freedom, and yes, criminals are kinda into freedom. Imagine cash has never existed and try to pitch that. It would never make it past the board. You are correct that crypto may not help your average American. But its use as a safer haven are important in places like El Salvador, Nigeria, and Curacao.
I’m surprised you didn’t get downvoted for this kind of post.
Ehhhh… Kinda. It’s like asking if BitTorrent or Usenet is piracy. Technically crypto isn’t a scam, but that’s mainly what it gets used for.
In reality only a small part of crypto could be the classified as scams. I know that’s the main crypto narrative on lemmy, but there is nowhere near much of scams as talked about here.
The scams and shitcoins are likely going to be the loudest because they need to cast a wide net, so it’s not too unexpected for those to be the most visible “crypto things” to your average person
No, just that almost all use cases were scams.
Still waiting on that one non-scam game changing use case.