Big Crypto Is Spending More on US Elections Than Any Other Industry
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.
The new currency that's backed by the old currency and uses a shit ton more electricity. What a time to be alive.
🎶 Meet the new
bosscoinSame as the old
bosscoin 🎶How is crypto backed by old currency?
Without old currency it is completely worthless.
Without old currency denomination. But as soon as you can start clearing debts with crypto, its effectively a third-party printable currency that the federal government has endorsed.
Is "clearing debts with crypto" ≈" buying stuff with crypto"?
It's "paying loans and fees with crypto". Specifically, "paying government loans and fees", which makes the state an insatiable consumer of a third-party currency and gives it real implicit value.
They aren't paying these politicians off in Bitcoin.
Apparently you can pay off JD Vance with it
No that is BitchCouch ™
The entire crypto industry is basically propped up by the existence of Tether, which is (notionally) backed by the US dollar.
Without Tether you lose any remaining institutional investment. Big companies want to be able to trade in crypto but they don't want to hold crypto, because it's volatile, and convertong fiat to crypto takes too long for effective trading. Tether is the middle man.
So yes, since Tether basically facilitates all meaningful crypto trading, and Tether is supposedly just tokenized USD, their statement about crypto being backed by the old money is perfectly cromulent.
they keep it in the reserves
jk
Reserves = USDT, which is definitely backed by real USD.
That's the neat part, it isn't. USDT is a sword of Damocles hanging over the crypto industry.
Electricity vs Blood, which is more expensive?
Do you think there isn't a blood cost for electricity?
glances at the climate change death toll
Which includes mining all the rare materials used in manufacturing the GPUs and ASICs (that we're actually running out of) .
I was referencing the FIAT system. I'm sure you'll agree there's much more blood cost (in terms of lives ruined and indirect life lost), although it's harder to directly relate.
dang bro, its a good thing crypto solves any of the problems with fiat currency and doesn't introduce a bunch of new ones like reliance on data centers, power and water requirements, long transaction times and it becomes useless when you lose network connection.
I do agree but imo the power consumption is a flaw of Bitcoin and should have been addressed upfront. There has to be a better way.
Etherium and proof of stake instead of proof of work
They're not intelligent enough to realize their arguments are outdated.
Why choose? Use electricity and destroy living creatures: https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/
It's not just nerds with a spare laptop mining anymore. This money wants returns in 'not being regulated.'
Say what you want about cryptocurrency, but to address the energy problem, The reason for this is the exact same reason the fediverse also uses a shit ton more energy than the centralized alternatives like reddit and extwitter.
Decentralization usually comes at a cost of performance or energy.
It's not good that so much energy is used to sustain it, but the only reason it is needed is so that it can stay fully decentralized.
Some blockchains use proof of stake for this reason, which greatly reduces the energy needed to less than .01% of what proof of work requires, but instead more money = more voting power.
There’s a huge difference.
Fediverse uses almost no energy compared to Reddit and Twitter. This is because few people are using fediverse alternatives.
Bitcoin uses more energy than entire countries, despite few people using it.
And also the fediverse serves a purpose. Crypto is just a shortsighted pyramid scheme fueled by greed.
Crypto is bound to attract scammers like flies are attracted to shit.
Crypto is not all about short-term gains and it does have utility. It's just not an answer to everything, and we should stop treating it like a speculative asset.
If it were to stop acting like a speculative asset more people might take it seriously.
If it were to stop acting like a speculative asset, nobody would be using it.
It is all just perpetrated by tech bros who try to get rich from it. Their crypto portfolio is directly connected to the amount of people they can convince to buy in.
Exactly, and if somehow it became impossible to instantly convert crypto to USD, crypto would be worthless. Crypto doesn’t have enough actual utility on its own besides gray/black market purposes.
I literally only buy crypto for utility.
Are you allowed to tell us what you do with that crypto?
Yes.
Pay for VPN and other services, transfer money to other people that I can't reach with fiat, and keep a stash.
You have to compare by energy per user or per interaction. Lemmy would cost a ton more and consume a lot more energy than reddit if they were the same size. I don't think Lemmy instances would even be able to handle federating with other large instances at that size and the fesiverse would get split. It would start needing sharding and replication, and some kind of consensus algorithm to choose where to get most data, and you'd have the same problem cryptocurrency has.
No, you don't. The same way I don't have to justify using nextcloud vs gdrive because nextcloud uses a lot more energy per user since it's self hosted.
Bitcoin uses an absurd amount of energy for its popularity and use. Period.
No, that’s not going to happen. The reason why cryptocurrencies must rely on a consensus algorithm is because the order of transactions matter. One transaction can make another transaction impossible depending on which one comes first.
Fediverse doesn’t have this strict condition. No post and comment can make another impossible. It’s also not the entire world if a post is lost.
The consensus would come in at the replica sharding. One replica can invalidate another replica.
Wouldn't that just need to happen within the infrastructure of an instance?
Decentralization isn't the reason, and conflating it with fediverse services is disingenuous.
The reason many cryptos use a lot of power is because of proof of work.
Proof of stake and proof of work have the same effective result for voting power. In order to effectively mine, you need a large capital investment and in order to stay competitive in mining you need to continue spending capital, the same is true for proof of stake as the larger overall stake the lower the payouts, so it requires more capital investment.
Can’t tell if this is shill, but I dislike cryptocurrencies and anyone who defends them. Not that you did, per se, but it’s close.
I think that 99% of Cryptocurrencies are unnecessary and shouldn't exist.
But I also think that if I want to buy a private VPN, any payment method except monero completely invalidates the VPN because now your credit card is linked to the VPN instead.
And I think that transferring money to family members abroad with some ethereum l2 curency is a 100 times cheaper and faster than any other method. I had to pay student loans in another country, but my bank blocked the credit card transactions because they were foreign. The only other way was cryptocurrency with a tiny fee, or a bank transaction with 10% plus 50$ fees. Guess which one I picked.
You can buy a gift card in cash which works just like a debit card and not have to worry about cryptocurrency.
For gifts maybe, but not for paying student loans. But gift card locations can be tracked to the store and be used to narrow down your location.
Also, aren't gift cards the biggest modern vehicle for scams?
I thought this was about VPNs?
Which bank accepts crypto to pay back student loans anyway?
they didn't say a bank specifically,
Gift cards that act like credit/debit cards are harder to get than they used to be. I think all of the mainstream ones require identification or linking to a previous bank account per regulation now
To your point about money transfers, this is only true because crypto exchanges are dodging regulations. The cost and time involved in international transfers is primarily red tape, because no one likes wire fraud, money laundering, or people funding terrorism.
If crypto ever "succeeds" as it hopes to, it will become more and more regulated, and the value you see in it will increasingly diminish.
I wonder whether a travel notification could have solved your issue with paying a foreign merchant.
Ok?
Oh and by the way, crypto users... the coins they'll be promoting won't be yours. They won't be pushing for clear SEC categorization or lower taxes. They'll be helping insiders, and you're on the outside.
Coinbase made their first attempt to consolidate power with the New York Agreement. This is their next attempt, now with regulatory capture.
Republicans are offering you financial freedom that you already have without their permission.
Crypto billionaires are billionaires “on paper.” By that, I mean, they can’t get their money OUT of crypto unless millions of people buy INTO crypto. So, of course, they are trying to mainstream it.
They need suckers to hold their bags
It's just another form of Ponzi Scheme.
Crypto is the currency of the confidence game. The value isn't in the crypto, it's in the people trading actual money who've bought into it.
Network Effect and Winner Take All Market
You mean money launderers, criminals, and foreign governments are openly spending more than any other industry?
Weird that the anti crime criminal is promoting crime coin, or not weird at all. Republican party has for years campaigned on fires they started (see debt, immigration, economy, etc)
I guess supporting something whose only legitimate uses are digital theft, money laundering, and buying human trafficking victims are their way of ensuring cartels won't ever stop existing
Yeah because you definitely can't do any of that with cash.
I do all my digital theft in cash
How about the other things you listed?
Crypto is a painfully both-sides affair, what with the enormous volumes of investor cash flooding the election system. This went back to JP Morgan's backing of Etherium during the Obama administration, with crypto-bros infesting multiple Fed banks and throwing their own batch of state and federal office holders at the wall. Then Scam Bankrupt Greed's FTX went big and straight up bought out Senators Cynthia Lummis and Catherine Gillibrand to write crypto-friendly regulatory reforms. His bank imploded before that legislation could worm its way through Congress.
But now they're back and with even more obscene piles of cash. Mistaking the Crypto-bros as uniquely Republican is going to bit liberals in the ass biggly. You're going to start finding crypto investments in your pension funds, your 401ks, and your college trusts very soon, if the Newsome Imperium and the Bloomberg banksters are allowed to ram their novelty tech innovation bills through Congress uninhibited.
Newsom is largely centrist, its less that crypto is party aligned and more that its corruption aligned - the republicans are just more corrupt on average.
He's absolutely buried within the Silicon Valley lobbying community and has repeatedly wielded his gubernatorial power to quash pro-labor and pro-regulatory legislation on those grounds.
California Democrats are a stone's throw away from any Midwestern Republican when it comes to "business friendly" state policies. The only thing either group cares about is economic growth.
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.
A VPN has uses outside of criminal activities.
Crypto gets perpetuated through them.
Most crypto is not associated with criminal activity.
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
It sure is.
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
No, just that almost all use cases were scams.
Still waiting on that one non-scam game changing use case.
Oh yeah, Paris Marx covered this on his Tech Won't Save Us Podcast with Writer and Crypto Skeptic Molly White.
Not that it needs bearing repeating, but Fuck All Crypto Bros.
Crypto absolutely does have utility, but it's not currency of the future.
People going against all crypto lack nuance, and people promoting crypto as solution to all problems are either naive or deceptive.
As long as I have not seen blockchain do anything even remotely useful that couldn't already be done better before without it, I will keep calling it useless.
The only common private immutable money?
So then what do you think it does solve? "Blockchain not money" is a phrase popular with scams too.
Blockchain has more utility than crypto, but keeping focused on the latter, crypto may allow for anonymous (pseudonymous) transactions* that are also immutable, which can preserve your privacy and also allow you to financially support whoever government doesn't want you to support - be it protesters, or your relatives in sanctioned jurisdictions, or, say, Ukrainian army if you are Russian**, or whatever.
It also gives you Internet money you're in full control of - no one can freeze or seize your assets***.
*This does not apply if you use open ledger cryptocurrency and bought it from a traceable source, especially an exchange that requires KYC
**I am Russian, and I do not transfer money to Ukraine. Rest assured, dear FSB agent. But many people do, and they should be protected
***Assuming you use a trusted non-custodial wallet and adhere to basic DeFi hygiene if you use it. Also, sometimes, like when you do crime, inability to freeze your assets is bad. But I did happen to be in a situation when all my bank accounts were wrongfully arrested, and it took me 3 weeks to make my appeal approved by the court to restore access to my own money. Makes sense for me now to keep some money in cash and crypto.
This is embarrassing. Currency should never be an industry in the first place.
That's part of what they're lobbying for - to have it treated as a currency and not a commodity.
They should treat it as a currency first then. The first major problem with crypto I saw was people were treating it as a commodity instead of using it to buy things.
They were buying things with it. Mostly drugs and other illegal things, but still.
That is/was its number one use as a currency, but more crypto was moved around as commodity trading or being held with the intention of commodity trading then ever use to buy things with.
But it really doesn't work as a currency.
Real currencies represent debt, not value. You work a week and you're owed something for that work. You get currency that represents what you're owed. You're not meant to hold on to currency, it represents an incomplete transaction. When you spend the money you get the value of what you're owed.
Crypto currency depends on it having value. People holding onto it in the hopes of it increasing value. If people stop holding onto crypo-currency the value would crash and it would be useless.
It's not really feasible to take out a loan denominated in crypto currency. Sure it might be technically possible to make this happen but you'd be a fool to borrow crypto currency as if it increased in value (which it has to do to avoid crashing) you'd end up owing more value than you originally borrowed even before any kind of interest might be charged. There's a reason why central banks want slow by steady inflation: people can be confident that if they take out a loan they won't wind up owing more in value terms than they originally borrowed.
Crypto "currencies" simply aren't currencies because the nature of it being required that they have an increasing value to avoid crashing means they can't perform the basic functions of finance.
People buy crypto currency in the hopes that it will increase in value. Inevitably everyone who might possibly be interested in buying into crypto currency will have already bought into it. There's a finite number of people in the world. When that happens it will no longer be increasing in value and then what do the people that bought into it as an investment do? They sell. And the value crashes. This means is fails at the other requirement of a currency, a stable value.
It's a pyramid scheme and everyone knows it. The crypto guys are just trying to get in the last few pumps before they dump it entirely.
By your definition stocks are also a pyramid scheme and everyone knows it. The more people that buy it, the price goes up! Sell? The price crashes! What a revelation!
You may know more about this than I do, but this seems incorrect. The crypto industry relies on trading commodities. If they wanted a digital currency, would they not lobby for a central bank digital currency?
They want the cryptocurrencies that already exist to be treated as currencies instead of as commodities.
They’re lobbying so they can make more money from cryptocurrency. It’s not going to benefit the common folk in any way (unless you believe in trickle down economics).
Jesus fuck, Citizens United needs to be reversed almost as much as Roe v Wade.
Imo citizens united paved the way for the reversal. Billionaires like must are clear they need meet for the machine and the only meat that spends money is human
Funny that some cryptobros still think bitcoin is the currency of the people. That shit is controlled by the rich as well, including the banks that they claimed would be left out of the "crypto revolution".
Yeah.. and they get to use other people's money while doing it. Crypto is great.
What, you don't like unregulated banks who don't actually provide any useful services?
Hey now... money laundering is a useful service to people in certain professions.
Obligatory shoutout to Molly White.
She does a fantastic job in reporting about this, from launching a website to track the crypto industry spending on politics to catching Coinbase red-handed and reporting them.
incredible that this thing that in my childhood didn't even exist yet and in my teen years was a fairly revolutionary and subversive idea has turned into an actual industry trying to influence elections
A yes, what a truly democratic country
::: spoiler Business Insider - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Business Insider:
::: spoiler Search topics on Ground.News https://www.businessinsider.com/crypto-bitcoin-election-spending-kamala-harris-donald-trump-2024-8 ::: Media Bias Fact Check | bot support