Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Sunday Evening Open Thread: Bitconners for TFG

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Bitconners for TFG

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133Comments

  5. 5.

    Suzanne

    Democrats should definitely go with “Republicans are the party of bitcoin and we’re the party of money you can buy things with.”

    I would amend that to “Republicans are the party of methmouth and bitcoin” and attempt to split the coalition.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    I’m just puzzled that Trump never tried to release his own self-branded cryptocoin. It’s exactly the sort of con that he loves to pull in his marks. I know that Melania Trump dabbled in selling NFTs at one point, but I don’t think Trump himself ever availed himself of that particular set of fools.

  7. 7.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: All businesses aspire to becoming monopolies or oligarchies so that they can name their price and not be price takers which was what perfect competition ensures.

    Econ 101.

    So if they can get governments to help them they will do  that.

  9. 9.

    Leto

    I always told my people, when they tried to hype up Bitcoin, that as soon as they could go to the snack bar and buy something with it (candy bar or soda), I’d believe in their fantasy money. Until then, shut the f up and pass over the real money. Weird morans.

  10. 10.

    sab

    Yes on disparaging bitcoin. We have spent many years ( possibly 1000) figuring out responsible money management by governments. I am not going to be quiet as some techbros announce they have reinvented a new wheel when they never understood how the last ones actually worked.

  12. 12.

    Leto

    @dmsilev: is this like in the Oceans movies, where they start rattling off all these “cons”, but it’s basically just words jumbled together?

    “A leaky Welshman corgi pudding?”

     

    ”Combined with a tootsie Rodgers lemonade.”

     

    Cool.

  13. 13.

    Nukular Biskits

    @dmsilev:

    I’m just puzzled that Trump never tried to release his own self-branded cryptocoin. It’s exactly the sort of con that he loves to pull in his marks. I know that Melania Trump dabbled in selling NFTs at one point, but I don’t think Trump himself ever availed himself of that particular set of fools.

    Given the gullibility of the rubes who support him and his willingness to fleece them for every dime they have, I have to agree with you here:  It is odd he hasn’t introduced “TrumpCoin”.

    Maybe I should do that.  I’d make bank.

  15. 15.

    SW

    Crypto and goldbugs.  Ever notice the goldbug commercials where they tell you that paper money is practically worthless and then try to get you to trade your paper money for their gold?

  18. 18.

    Falling Diphthong

    @dmsilev: He did NFTs. They were trading cards of him doing awesome things.

    There was a Trump bill, but it was a scammer unrelated to the Trump campaign. Just appreciated what Trump’s fans would spend money for.

  19. 19.

    Leto

    @Chet Murthy: I remember that. They basically tanked immediately but hey, the fat bastard already made his money so what does he care? It’s like the $2 bills he was recently hawking. Just on to the next grift.

  31. 31.

    MattF

    Kevin Drum asks what is the need for a strategic bitcoin reserve? It’s to protect our American money launderers from those evil Chinese! Our patriotic pickpockets and con artists need the best crime Federal money can buy.

  33. 33.

    sixthdoctor

    I recommend Number Go Up by Zeke Faux as an overview of crypto; I knew going into the book that crypto was a scam and I was off by a couple of orders of magnitude, plus there’s a nasty human trafficking element of workers forced into mass-market text/email crypto scams.

  34. 34.

    cmorenc

    Bitcoin also has the problem that it’s dependent on ever-escalating amounts of computing power validating ever-more difficult prime-factor cryptography problems, and ever-diminishing tolerance of local communities to tolerate the annoyance of the gigantic cooling fans needed to maintain the server farms.

  36. 36.

    dmsilev

    @Scout211: Huh.

    TrumpCoin (TRUMP) describes itself as a cryptocurrency supporting the Trump administration and its conservative followers and Patriots. Its crowdfunding blockchain provides funding and recognition for Patriots utilizing PatriotNodes and PoS mining.

    Sounds legit.

    Down 50% in value in the last years as well, so clearly an excellent investment. And at 0.9 cents per Trump, I think it’s quite fairly valued.

  42. 42.

    TheOtherHank

    From what I’ve read, no matter how much computing power you throw at bitcoin, there is an upper limit to the number of transactions per second it can do. And that upper limit is very small. It is literally impossible for bitcoin to be a type of money rather than digital beanie babies.

    “I’d like to by a pizza, please. Here are some bitcoins”

    “I’m sorry but it will be several hours before we can process your transaction. Do you have any actual money?”

  44. 44.

    Josie

    @zhena gogolia: ​ Click on the middle choice at the top to see the names you have pied, then remove the one you want to unpie.​
     Sorry. Slow typist.

  46. 46.

    WereBear

    Money is anything we mutually agree it is.

    The Seven Nations did trade particular seashells. Polished them and put a lot of elaborate beadwork into them, so they had an inherent value, as well as all the work that was invested in it.

    But crypto is a scam.

  53. 53.

    Chet Murthy

    @TheOtherHank:

    no matter how much computing power you throw at bitcoin, there is an upper limit to the number of transactions per second it can do. And that upper limit is very small.

    “transaction processing” is what I did for a living for 20yr.  Your statement is 100% accurate.  All of it.  And what’s more, that upper limit is small -by design-.  It’s very fair to say that the people who designed this shit didn’t have a good goddamn clue what they were doing, in terms of transaction-processing, and for sure that all the promises made in the original Bitcoin paper by Nakamoto were absolute bullshit.  Absolute bullshit.

    The Feds authorized Bitcoin and Ethereum derivatives.  They’ve authorized crypto brokers who are authorized to convert dollars to-and-from crypto.  What they should have done, was mandated that those derivatives, and the custodial databases for all the brokers, ALL BE RUN ON BLOCKCHAINS.  Make these bastards actually eat their own dog food.  The entire ecosystem would have collapsed under the strain of a thousandth the workloads that these brokers process today.

  54. 54.

    bbleh

    Just as a topic for conversation, what OTHER tunes will Trump dance to at Thiel’s direction?

    Thiel may be a sociopath, but he’s not dumb, and he knows perfectly well how to keep somebody as dumb as Trump on the hook.  And I ain’t heard recently that the Trump campaign is rolling in dough, nor the ones that are basically rube-scams that mostly or entirely fund his legal costs.

    Dance, monkey, dance!

  57. 57.

    sab

    @zhena gogolia: I overpie. Sometimes I can’t remember why, and when I unpie them they remind me. Others I do remember and only seasonally pie them. Others I never remember why, but that is rare.

    I love schrodingers cat but I pie her everytime Elizabeth Warren runs for office.

  59. 59.

    Chet Murthy

    @Chet Murthy: A little more on what I mean.  When you want to buy bitcoin at Coinbase, you transfer your money to a Coinbase account; then you execute the trade to buy the BTC.  But that BTC is still owned by Coinbase.  You can export your BTC to your own “wallet”, but most people don’t.  They buy, sell, etc, at Coinbase, and it never leaves their Coinbase account.  And none of that activity is “on the Blockchain”.  We know this because the brokers are able to give you price quotes in (milli-)seconds (and there are traders who trade based on those quotes).  it’s all done using traditional databases, just like the Fed uses.

    If they instead had to do it all using blockchains, they’d never be able too process their transactions, and the entire house of cards would collapse.

  60. 60.

    zhena gogolia

    @sab: I would never pie s/c, but I know what you mean about changing your mind. “overpie” is a good verb.

  63. 63.

    Baud

    I never use the pie filter. Which is too bad because I think it’s well implemented.

  64. 64.

    Burnspbesq

    Every conversation I’ve ever been in about crypto kinda ground to a halt when I asked, “supported by the full faith and credit of whom, exactly?”

  66. 66.

    Attempted Chemistry

    Crypto is just a speedrun through the history of monetary regulation.

    It’s the result of people’s brains breaking because fiat money is arbitrary, but not meaningless.

    It’s like the antivax movement because regulation has been so successful for so long that people have forgotten what the bad old days were like.

  67. 67.

    Martin

    @WereBear: I’ve talked to a lot of crypto guys (they’re always guys – which is a huge red flag) and they always talk about how artificial supply of a digital asset is no different from fiat currency issued by the central bank. And yeah, okay, but that only holds if there’s only one crypto. You lose the constraint on supply if anyone can create a new crypto. If there’s an infinite number of cryptocurrencies, wouldn’t the value go to zero across all of them?

    And if you can convert crypto to physical goods without intermediate dollars, then okay. But if you can’t, and you always have to disintermediate to dollars, then you’re right back to being constrained by the value of dollars. Your crypto can’t be worth more dollars than dollars were shoved in. You can individually come out ahead if someone else takes a loss, but there’s no possibility for the creation of wealth, only the transference of it from poor to rich.

    Yeah, don’t trust any of these people.

  68. 68.

    M31

    @sab: lol “seasonal pie” is a great term

    like ‘strawberry rhubarb pie season’

    and ‘oh no someone is relitigating the 2016 Dem primary pie season’

    NOT ME IT’S A JOKE

  69. 69.

    schrodingers_cat

    @sab: I actually collected signatures for her to get on the Massachusetts ballot for the senate, this time.
    I just didn’t see her as presidential material. YMMV

    I have never pied you.

    I pie people who call me nasty names and make personal attacks and write screeds at me even when I haven’t interacted with them for months sometimes years.  Some “valued commenters” are in the list.

  70. 70.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Nukular Biskits:

    You’ll never convince me that cryptocurrency isn’t a scam.

    That and the electricity demands it requires.  Shut that crap down tomorrow and the planet’s better off on a variety of levels.

  74. 74.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    I’ve only ever pied Mr. Christianity-hater and a certain frequent Miami associated commentor who often makes violent statements. People say lots of things I don’t agree with, but only those two have really pushed things too far too often for me.

  76. 76.

    bbleh

    @zhena gogolia: “You know folks, America has the greatest medicine.  The greatest, really.  The best doctors, the greatest medicine.  And sometimes bad things happen, and kids die, and you know what?  We bring them back to life!  We bring them back to life! Their hearts, their kidneys … even if we can’t talk to them, they’re still living!  They’re still living!  Our great doctors and hospitals do this all the time.  Our great doctors.  And now we’re gonna do this even more, and bring even more life to our great country.  We will have a Strategic Youngblood Reserve, FILLED with the blood of young people who have tragically — tragically! — passed away, who can LIVE AGAIN where they’re vitally needed.  Our nation’s leaders, our businessmen, these heroic young people — heroes!  — can live again through our nation’s business leaders!  It’s a miracle folks, a miracle.  A miracle! And we’re gonna have this, a strategic reserve.  It’s a miracle for our business leaders, and our young heroes!”

    (I seriously wonder whether an AI writes his stuff.)

  77. 77.

    gene108

    @Burnspbesq:

    Every conversation I’ve ever been in about crypto kinda ground to a halt when I asked, “supported by the full faith and credit of whom, exactly?”

    Thought the whole point of cryptocurrency was that it would self regulate and not need any government backing or regulation?

    The value would be set be the limits of blockchain and some other stuff no one bothers with anymore.

  78. 78.

    TBone

    @TBone:

    The price of MAGA (TRUMP) is $5.65 today with a 24-hour trading volume of $6,711,174. This represents a -4.18% price decline in the last 24 hours and a -24.73% price decline in the past 7 days. With a circulating supply of 46 Million TRUMP, MAGA is valued at a market cap of $259,824,487.

  82. 82.

    Sister Golden Bear

    Yeah everyone hates when the weather forecast is wrong, but Republicans have a weird obsession with destroying our nation’s most dependable resources for tracking weather. Because according to the Project 2025 document, NOAA is a “main driver of the climate change alarm industry” and therefore must be destroyed.

    “The plan also states that forecasts provided by private companies such as AccuWeather are more accurate than those provided by the National Weather Service, and so it recommends that the NWS “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” or enter partnerships to sell its data.” Because someone needs to be making money off that sweet, sweet public resources.

    For the record, AccuWeather, which opposes this, uses NWS as one of their main data sources.

    LA Times, non-paywalled.

  83. 83.

    gene108

    @bbleh:

    I can no longer tell what’s real versus parody, when it comes to Donny Dollhands.

    Also, a part of a person can live on through organ donation, in a way.

  84. 84.

    Jeffro

    @Nukular Biskits: it’s a scam, a money-laundering aid, a scam, a way to vastly increase electrical demand (aka, keep burning carbon) for no reason, one heck of a scam, AND yet another way for hostile foreign powers to destabilize Western governments

    Much much more than a floor wax AND dessert topping, that’s for sure 😡

  85. 85.

    David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch

    Harris raised $200 million in first week of White House …
    AP News

    4 hours ago — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has raised $200 million since she emerged as the likely Democratic presidential nominee last week.

    Harris campaign added 170000 volunteers
    Voice of America

    2 hours ago — The Harris campaign raised a whopping $200 million in its first week and signed up over 170000 volunteers, it announced.

    Roll tide 🌊

  86. 86.

    Martin

    @Starfish: Americans are so compliant. In a rational world the residents would have torn down the fence and burned that place to the ground.

  88. 88.

    Eyeroller

    @Chet Murthy: For bitcoin at least, there is also a finite number of them (21 million) and it becomes asymptotically harder to acquire new ones as we approach the limit.  That makes it inherently deflationary.  Supposedly we won’t run out till around 2140, however.  For some reason the cryptobros think this is a good idea, since they seem to fear inflation irrationally.

  90. 90.

    Eyeroller

    @Martin: As stated in earlier comments, they don’t actually do the full blockchain for transactions.  I am not sure “inflationary” is the right term if one does it the “right” way, but “impractical” certainly applies.

  91. 91.

    Eyeroller

    @Starfish:  The common factor is GPUs, whose current architectures are extremely energy-intensive.  They run very hot and need a lot of cooling, in addition to drawing a lot of power just to function.  (Drawing a lot of power pretty much automatically results in a lot of heat generation, but it means it’s a double whammy.)

  92. 92.

    Chet Murthy

    @Martin: The transaction cost (in energy) is determined by two things (sorry it’s complicated):

    1. how far along we are in issuing bitcoins; as we get farther along, you get fewer Bitcoin for solving each sudoku
    2. how many other people are trying to solve the same sudoku at the same time; the more people, the higher the total energy everybody will spend on solving it, and only one person gets the payoff coin from solving it

    This means that as BTC gets more popular, it becomes more energy-intensive.  Which is insane b/c it’s starting off as crazily energy-intensive.

  93. 93.

    Starfish

    It is fascinating that the Harris campaign does want to hear about tech, and it may be time that we start getting some tech regulation in place.

    https://toot.bldrweb.org/@andrewbrandt/112860059065004929

    It talks about how corporations were trying to shut down the voting village at DefCon, and Senator Harris went to bat on voting rights for them.

    This mentions that they are going to put on a cyber-reception for Harris at DefCon.

  94. 94.

    Eyeroller

    @Chet Murthy: Oh, if he meant the cost of mining each bitcoin, that is mostly externalized.  The farms are mostly built where energy is artificially cheap.

  97. 97.

    Martin

    @Eyeroller: Bitcoin and Etherium are almost entirely ASICs dedicated to mining now. They’re faster and cheaper than GPUs. It’s the spew of other coins that aren’t big enough to justify ASIC development that are exclusively GPUs.

    But same problem in terms of heat/energy.

  98. 98.

    Martin

    @Eyeroller: I’m not sure externalized is the right word there. You have multiple people mining and only one gets paid in coin. The ones who don’t get paid do need to pay for the power usage – they’re taking a loss on that coin, and presumably they would stop doing that if the coin they do periodically generate didn’t cover their aggregate cost. So on a per-coin basis, yeah, you could say that it’s externalized, but across all Bitcoin those costs are accounted for in the system.

    The pollution is externalized – they aren’t paying for that – the rest of us are.

  100. 100.

    Eyeroller

    @Martin: The miners are paying in coin of the realm for the energy they consume.  When we talk about bitcoin being deflationary, that is a statement about its intrinsic properties, if we had no other means of exchange.

  101. 101.

    Maxim

    @Starfish: And water intensive, too. Completely bass-ackwards environmentally.

    We’ve been watching some Olympics this weekend, and apart from Olympics-themed ads, what we’ve seen the most of is a ton of ads from various companies pushing their AI “assistants.”

  104. 104.

    Gvg

    It’s a terrible idea to tie the money supply to an unchanging cap. An economy shrinks and grows. Mostly grows because the population grows if nothing else. Setting a cap means eventually unsolvable inflation and then depression and no growth that is unrelated to actual events in the economy.

    People got stuck on ONE type of problem where governments issued too much money instead of solving their problem, usually by not raising taxes or cutting spending or borrowing when they should. They didn’t bother to understand the whole problem, or all the ways to solve it or all the other problems that can also happen and need different solutions. Certain people just fixated on not understanding paper money.

  105. 105.

    Martin

    @Starfish: Not that surprising. She was AG of California after all.

    So, tech is one area where politics doesn’t align neatly with policy. And CA regulatory philosophy doesn’t align neatly with national regulatory philosophy.

    CA tends to look at a lot of tech companies as natural monopolies, where breaking them up doesn’t yield much since customers will just reform the monopoly elsewhere. Social media being a good example where users want as large a social graph as possible which builds a platform to monopoly status. You can’t escape that dynamic. But the feds see tech like they would an automaker or a retail chain where a breakup would produce a competitive market.

    So CAs view is to tolerate the natural monopoly, and establish the pro-consumer outcomes the government would like to see achieved, and then work with the companies on how to achieve that. This might involve capping profits, requiring the adoption of standards, building out services in markets that are seen as unprofitable and capping prices, etc.

    Harris enforced a lot of regulation in her tenure as AG, and there’s a fair bit of tension between CA and federal views on how best to do it. This might be the place you see the largest departure from Biden, not toward a Trump position but a completely different one entirely.

    I think it’s safe to say that Harris has a stronger handle on tech than Biden or Trump by a country mile. Vance has a yet different, but very ideological view. When it comes to a figure like Lina Khan, she fits old school Democratic regulatory thinking, she’s also liked by Vance because she seeks to break up the parties that Thiel and Musk dislike. My guess is Harris would dump her because while she’s tough on regulation (good), her focus on breakup is the wrong focus to Harris, not because she’s tough.

    This is going to be one of the trickier lines for her to walk, because it’s not going to make sense to a lot of Democrats.

  108. 108.

    Ken

    @bbleh: I seriously wonder whether an AI writes his stuff.

    It would have to be one with a very small token buffer, to explain why each sentence, or sometimes the start and end of a single sentence, has no relation to the stuff around it.

  109. 109.

    catclub

    @TBone: There is also the elections marketplace. Trump had been running around 65% before Biden dropped out.

    I will note that in 2016 Hillary was at around 80% probability of election almost the entire year.

  110. 110.

    artem1s

    @Martin: ​ 

    I’m not sure externalized is the right word there. You have multiple people mining and only one gets paid in coin. The ones who don’t get paid do need to pay for the power usage – they’re taking a loss on that coin, and presumably they would stop doing that if the coin they do periodically generate didn’t cover their aggregate cost. So on a per-coin basis, yeah, you could say that it’s externalized, but across all Bitcoin those costs are accounted for in the system.

    The pollution is externalized – they aren’t paying for that – the rest of us are.

    whenever I read stuff like this about crypto, I can’t help but think of this…

    “If,” [“the management consultant”] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .”
    “Fiscal policy!” whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!”
    The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.
    “Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.”
    “How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn’t grow on trees you know.”
    “If you would allow me to continue.. .”
    Ford nodded dejectedly.
    “Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
    Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
    “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.”
    Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
    “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”
    The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”

    Bless Douglas Adams he really understood the human race.

  112. 112.

    Slightly_peeved

    @Nukular Biskits:

    it is, so that’s a good position to hold.

    In addition to the issues already covered here, it is laughably, woefully insecure. The bitcoiners claim it is because it is strong against one particular attack vector – manipulation of the ledger. But that’s not how security works, whether it be information security or physical security, because the attacker goes for the weakest point. No need to alter the ledger itself if taking someone’s keys, which is really easy, gives you complete control of their part of the ledger.

    bitcoin security is a steel safe door at the entry to an open field.

  113. 113.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Gvg: I think it’s what happens when you try to create a digital currency based on the ontology and conspiracy mindset of libertarian goldbugs. It’s going to have some of the same kinds of problems as money based on the gold standard. But the people responsible actually think of some of the bugs as features.

  114. 114.

    wjca

    Trump speaking at the cryptocurrency conference, and endorsing the concept, is GREAT news.  Since everything Trump touches dies, it means there’s hope that crypto will implode, and end up on the junkheap of history.  Speed the day!

  115. 115.

    Bill Arnold

    This scatter plot from 2020 is saying that ASIC bitcoin mining hardware of the day was roughly 5 orders of magnitude more energy efficient (megahashes per joule) than general purpose CPUs.
    Efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware (26 Feb 2020)

    If the approximately 0.5 percent[1] of global electrical energy used for bitcoin computations were run on general purpose CPUs, the same computations would consume roughly 3 orders of magnitude more electricity than is currently used by humans.

    An alien observing human computational infrastructure and how it’s used would determine that most computation ever performed by humans and their computing machinery has been/is SHA256, for mining of bitcoin. With matrix multiplications (AI/neural networks) in a distant but rapidly rising second place.
    Proof of work (what bitcoin uses) was a mistake, IMO. It is basically turning fossil fuels from a grid or dedicated power plant (except in the cases where it only uses renewables) into bitcoins, and thus is turning human megadeaths into bitcoin, in the fullness of time (with moderately high probability but well less than 100 percent). Only a small share of the total, since nearly all electricity usage is not for cryptocurrencies, but every bit counts.

  116. 116.

    Geminid

    @Ramona: I think how it works is the Democratic Party is guaranteed a ballot line based in past performance, but every candidate still has to meet the individual filing requirements, incumbents included..

  120. 120.

    Ksmiami

    @Martin: I fucking hate Bitcoin. It needs to be stopped. It has no value except for criminals evading authority and as a way to steal from the terminally stupid🍥

  122. 122.

    Albatrossity

    TFG: “So what happens when they figure it out? That’s going to really be something.”

    It’s a Ponzi scheme. So of course he would show up at a gathering of other scam artists and grifters. If he didn’t, that really would be something!

  124. 124.

    Bill Arnold

    Also from the Trump “speech” to cryptocurrency people:

    Trump: We will be creating so much electricity that you'll be saying, please, please, president, we don't want any more electricity. We can't stand it. You'll be begging me. No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough. pic.twitter.com/fFLs47APYR— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2024

    (I’m old enough to remember a time when “crypto” was a reference to cryptology/cryptography.)

  125. 125.

    steve g

    My 2.292e-13 BTC worth of wisdom about bitcoin:

    Nobody monitors the value of the US Dollar in bitcoin. Everyone monitors the value of bitcoin in US Dollars. Now you know which one is real money.

  126. 126.

    206inKY

    @Starfish: At least AI contributes to economic productivity, Bitcoin is just an elaborate MLM scheme. Their first and most fervent pitch is that it really truly definitely is a currency rather than a way to launder or gamble money before converting it back into USD. Trump’s reserve is like landing the federal government as a downline Avon rep for these people.

  127. 127.

    Darkrose

    @Ksmiami: Oh yeah–I just finished it, like I said. His deep dive into pig butchering and other scams is essential reading.

    Everything I’ve read and watched supports the idea that cryptocurrencies only use cases involve things that are illegal, unethical, or just flat out cons. One of the reasons I’ve deeply unhappy with Adam Schiff is how much money and support he’s gotten from the cryptobros.

  129. 129.

    206inKY

    @Gvg: This is why nobody issues debt in Bitcoin despite their desperate insistence that it’s a currency. It would be a cross of gold 2.0 for debtors and could end up being a catalyst for a regulatory crackdown.

  130. 130.

    206inKY

    @JeffH: Here’s a test in lieu of citations: Nobody’s afraid of losing their jobs to Bitcoin. It’s obviously fake and doesn’t disrupt any actual work in any sector, even finance. Can you say the same about AI?

  133. 133.

    fancycwabs

    Two things:

    1. At the bitcoin thingy, the price of a photo op with Donald Trump went for as much as $850,000, in case anyone was wondering why he was there.
    2. Both Trump and RFK Jr. advocated for taxpayers to become the new base of the Bitcoin Pyramid

    Editing to add Additional Bonus Thing:

    3. I generally describe cryptocurrency (and its sibling, NFTs) as “stock in a company that doesn’t make anything, and isn’t regulated by the agencies that normally provide safeguards for stocks in companies that do make things.”

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