It's been a while since we've checked in on the Trump meme coin scam, but today the New York Times checked in for us:
As of the middle of this week, more than 810,000 wallets had lost money on [$Trump].... The total losses are almost certainly much larger: The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces that started offering the coin only after its price had already surged.
....Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners, although most of that has not yet been cashed out, the Chainalysis data shows.
Here's the price of $Trump over the past three weeks:
The coin opened at 9:01 pm on January 17th and skyrocketed from 18 cents to $32 before Trump even announced it. After Trump did announce it, it surged further to $75, making a ton of money for a few early flippers who mysteriously knew about it so early.¹
But not for anyone else. Within four hours of opening, $Trump was already above $18, and anyone who bought it after that is now underwater.
Except, as the Times notes, for Trump and his buddies. They don't really need to care all that much about the price of the coin. Sure, a long-term bonanza would be nice, but they'll presumably continue making $100 million in fees every month as long as there's plenty of churn among the chumps. Or maybe less. But who cares? It's a lot and it's risk free. Just sit back and let the Oval Office make you rich.
¹Who? No one knows because the blockchain is private and encrypted. Which just confirms the old saw that the only actual use case for crypto is criminal transactions.
$Bribecoin appears to be working as planned.
Dammit! I was coming here to try to get people to call it what it really is, which is $bribecoin. Good job!
Con Don's back at it with a vengeance. Maybe the last hurrah before they are run out of the country with those carrying pitch forks and chain saws. Suckers always get sucked in. Wonder how Melanoma's bit coins are doing???
Look for a specially crafted tax exemption in the next budget
Too had the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has fallen to a hostile takeover by the Criminal in Chief. Worse, the majorities in Congress are happy as a clam about it all. And Leonard Leo is telling the federal courts it's all good, and howza bout a nice vacation? My treat!
It's not a scam if the customers are in on it, is it?
Which customers exactly? Those special few who got in while it was worth pennies? Or the rubes who bought it for $18+ ? It's a scam all right. But I don't have an ounce worth of sympathy for them.
The customers who just want to funnel untraceable money to Trump and don't care whether the "coin" is worth anything or not.
Off Topic -- Can't even watch the Super Bowl without fucking Trump involved.
I'm so old I can remember the Convict's first year in office when Budweiser aired an ad that subtly criticized his "hate the immigrant" schtick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZaQQvfIfPQ
Since when is the 'Super Bowl' presidential interview a thing?
Since the president and his team of thugs started attacking and filing lawsuits at media outlets. Those cost money.
He did characterize Musk as the "smartest 15 year old boy.."
Since when is the 'Super Bowl' presidential interview a thing?
Since 2004.
The only real winner is me.
He makes money = he's a crook.
He loses money = he's an idiot.
Either way, I'm right. 😎
So...perfect
https://youtu.be/syhOt6KS5X0
We've got three primary groups with competing theories (a) that this world is broken; (b) how to effect change; and (c) the outcome from that change.
- Heritage/Federalist folks seem to believe that the world is sclerotic with immoral heathens. In this new world order, Christian Conservatives will lead the nation under the new moral order -- or perhaps as the pseudo-intellectual neo-Catholic Vance sees it, ordo amoris. They plan to effect change via Project 2025. To these folks, the ends justify the means; God said so, in the Old Testament, didn't he?
- The tech bro folks seem to think the old world is broken with bureaucracy and illiberal rules. They want governments to die so that they can implement the tech way of doing things -- move fast, break things and fix things equally fast, and by rapid iteration find the right solutions -- to move humanity forward beyond itself. Musk is carrying out the plan to break everything, and fast.
- Steve Bannon's flavor of populism, aka Bannonism. He (perhaps ironically) hates the rich. He also detests the religious (as opposed to the moral). He sees both as the source of all the ills of this world and wants to destroy the world's order in hopes of rebuilding it with a nebulous populist-not-communist-or-socialist but probably newish world order (but definitely not that old Latin novus ordo mundi thing). He is using the convicted felon Trump to further his own ends, in part because he recognizes the skills of a lot lizard salesman, and in part because the lot lizard salesman is an idiot and easy to manipulate. He's failing. He can't compete against Musk nor can he stave off the Christian right.
And then there's the convicted felon Trump. He's stupid. He doesn't give two shits about the future except that he wants the world to either adore him or fear him and to earn more money.
But the guy is excellent at one thing: Selling turd to people as rare truffles. And so, the three endorsed and supported him, hoping to use him to achieve their similar goals to destroy the current world order and American Democracy.
Anyway, the turd is TrumpCoin (tech bros), is the Trump Bible (Federalist/Heritage), is Big Oil Energy Solutions (Bannonism).
Feel free to disagree.
"But the guy is excellent at one thing: Selling turd to people as rare truffles. "
"Skilled bamboozler" is shorter, and is actually a good description.
Since it's free to disagree....
Please don't refer to what Musk is trying to do to government as the "tech-bro move fast and break things" or a Silicon Valley mentality. When the goal is to destroy governance, there is no real re-building. Think SpaceX vs Twitter.
Kara Swisher has a really good interview with Ezra Klein on Musk and what drives him as well as why he's turned into giant asshole, well worth your time to watch.
https://youtu.be/2xXLycFv5Gc?si=3CDx4sMlGgUrDUd_
Erf, an hour with Ezra Klein?
Really, really worth it. Ignore Klein and his fluff makeup with the very carefully positioned lighting. Swisher is who you want pay attention to. She knows.
oooops...posted to wrong thread initially...
Klein did characterize Musk as "smartest 15 year old boy..."
Are we sure he wasn’t always a giant asshole?
I went through a startup accelerator program with his HR head from SpaceX and, no, he was not always what we see today. That's something she talks about in the interview. He became radicalized during Covid and too much bird site. He also was burned badly by something the Biden admin did.
What I did find interesting was the statement that "you don't want him outside the tent" in relation to the fact he can bring nearly unlimited money to anything. He's already creating problems within The Felon's team, but they have a real problem if his money goes elsewhere - especially if it switches sides.
He's figured out just how powerful he is because of a) the money and b) he owns a major social platform with global reach.
That, and the amt of ketamine he's been taking has probably permanently altered his brain and worsened his manic compulsiveness.
Also, I agree that podcast between Klein and Swisher was excellent.
He may have gotten worse at that time, but he was already a major asshole who felt he could do no wrong long before that.
Remember the Thailand cave rescue? At the time he felt like grabbing the spotlight by offering to lend the rescuers some type of experimental minisub. When the rescuers responded by telling him that any type of sub was not viable do to the extremely tight spaces inside the cave he exploded into a crazy hate filled tirade accusing the foreign rescuers part of the team of being pedophiles who were only in Thailand to sleep with boys.
I suspect Musk's been a broken human being all his life, but he only fully embraced his inner villain and allowed to let it out publicly when he saw the success Trump had by doing the same.
Steve Bannon's flavor of populism, aka Leninism.
FIFY
The crypto shills have gotten so desperate that they've moved to arguing, and I'm not making this up, that we should build up Bitcoin because it will function as... an escrow service.
I'm not even kidding. Forbes and Fortune, the "respectable" faces of crypto (Forbes got its brain eaten by crypto awhile back) both had pieces this week asserting that we need crypto because "nation-states that are enemies may not trust each others payment rails, but Bitcoin provides a way for them to interact in a trustless fashion!"
This, of course, is insane. The US and the USSR hated each and were more focused on excluding each other than the US and the PRC are now... and still did billions of dollars of business every year.
This is before you even get into the fact the "defi" is a ridiculous fantasy. Nation states do not like it when things like this exist outside of their control, justifiably so. The reaction to being told "this country we don't want to have close economic relationships with is circumventing that with crypto" wont' be "oh well, guess we live in a decentralized world" but "cool, those transactions are now crimes, and our national infrastructure will focus on banning them."
> This, of course, is insane. The US and the USSR hated each and were more focused on excluding each other than the US and the PRC are now... and still did billions of dollars of business every year.
There's a different reason this is insane: the US and our allies (and closest trading partners) actually should and -do- trust each other enough that our central banks work together to manage and stabilize the financial system. To pretend somehow that the US and the ECB don't trust each other, and that we need to use some third-party "currency" (with all the overheads and costs that come with it) is madness. As you say, *insane*, *barking mad*. The US/Western-managed financial system is based at the Fed, and everybody trusts us. Trusting us gives us an enormous amount of leverage on the world financial system, and for us to just GIVE THAT UP would be, again, barking mad.
And nations can totally just use a bridge somewhere and roll stuff across it - or a third party.
Crypto doesn't add anything to that scheme other than being itself, a scheme.
Trump has pretty much destroyed any trust US allies have in the US.
Sort of perfect; a product for criminals, sponsored, designed, and managed by a criminal enterprise, and finally, named after a criminal (and head of the crime family).
Aaaaaand, never forget: totally above the law himself! It's all good, man!
It's not inherently criminal to get in at the beginning and sell to "greater fools" as the price goes up.
Although if you believe that scamming people out of their money through memecoins should be criminal, then... yeah, I guess it's normatively criminal. But it's not currently legally criminal.
There are 2 use-cases for crypto:
(1) money laundering, which is criminal. That's not what happened here.
(2) memecoining, which is basically a bunch of repetitive scheming around the greater fool theory.
Crypto has lots of other uses; not requiring calling home to process a number of transactions is useful, as is a ledger that is difficult to falsely enter transactions.
Its worse problem is that it's not actually good at #1 and got its popularity from #2.
[Not trying to attack you, but rather, to extend your remarks to their full and horrific extent]
Actually, no.
#1: instead of "calling home" (which really means calling one of a number of well-known, well-maintained locations for your bank/credit-card-processor, which can be done in milliseconds -- MILLISECONDS), you have to call a number of "miners" (whose locations are found by a community-maintained list someplace, not actually regulated at all), and get them to commit a transaction to the ledger, then wait for six confirmations, which in the best case takes FIFTEEN MINUTES.
To say that "it's not actually good at #1" is to understate the case: it is -terrible- at #1, as in: if that's what you wanted, then you were robbed.
#2: [again, not blaming you for this] this is a misrepresentation: the right question to ask is not "is the ledger safe against false transactions", but rather "is the financial system based on it safe from fraud". And as we know, BTC and other cryptocurrencies are absolutely riven thru with fraud and theft on a colossal scale. Just colossal.
Believing in cryptocurrency is like believing that we don't need governmentally-regulated weights-and-measures (and standards for purity in food, drugs, chemicals, etc). So everybody can carry around a set of weights-and-measures, as well as a full chemistry laboratory that they'll break out every time the need to purchase (let's say) some cooking oil, or gasoline, or whatever. Because hey, you can't trust anybody, can't trust anything, so you gotta verify everything yourself.
It's a nonsensical and laughable (if it weren't so damn pernicious) worldview.
Oops, I was wrong about that. It isn't FIFTEEN MINUTES, but instead, SIX TIMES that. Typically you get a new block (the unit at which transactions are written to the ledger) every 10-15 MINUTES, and the rule of thumb is that for your tran to be irrevocable (haha, pretty much) you need to wait for SIX such blocks to pass after your tran was written. So that's an hour-to-an-hour-and-a-half.
That's a long reply which is absolutely incorrect.
It's baffling how many ways it's wrong.
Firstly, your assumptions are based off a specific cryptocurrency, and not applicable to the term in general.
As a Venn diagram Bitcoin is inside the circle crypto.
But cryptocurrency is not limited to Bitcoin.
You'll have to point to the -specific- places it's wrong. Be specific. B/c I don't think any of it was wrong. An example:
sure, maybe some other crypto doesn't have the six-confirmation limit. But since none of them can use Paxos, they're all limited by some sort of time-based scheme. Which means that they cannot provide realtime settlement. BTW, that's why the crypto -exchanges- use (internally) real databases, not crypto ledgers -- because they want their trans to settle in seconds.
The transactions are recorded on the blockchain, yes. But they have no identifying information about who the transactors are or where the transactions occurred, not even a TZ.
> It's not inherently criminal
Let's suppose that there's a drug-peddling ring that wants to set up in your city. They need money to bootstrap their operation: to buy weapons, drugs, pay soldiers, set up their distribution network, etc. You offer to "invest" in their enterprise so they can get started. Is that a criminal act?
Later, they need to launder the proceeds of their crimes; you run a bank, and you're happy to take their money and wash it into accounts in the Caymans that look totally legit. Was that a crime?
Crypto has only one use-case: crime. Crypto "investors", by investing, are facilitating a worldwide money-laundering network that moves the proceeds of crime from what appear to be dirty hands, to clean hands.
Every crypto investor is a willing participant in that worldwide money-laundering network.
That's baffling and wrong.
All the transactions are recorded and saved which is exactly the opposite of what a criminal wants.
It only works if the officials agree to never check that record.
Again, you provide no actual evidence for wrongness.
Just because trans are recorded, doesn't mean that criminals can't use it. I mean Jesus H. Christ, the mere fact that almost all ransomware depends on cryptocurrency should indicate that you're just wrong about that.
The transactions are recorded, indeed. That's the whole point of blockchain. It's that they're completely anonymized and untraceable is what criminals like about it.
This. They use UT so there isn't even the slightest indication where a transaction occurred much less who made it.
Wow! After how he rewarded investors of his Casinos, Airlines and Universities, who could have seen this coming?
I know! I'm just as shocked as you. 🙂
(Cue a certain scene from Casablanca ...)
$100 million in transaction fees is an awful lot. Do we know how many transactions or how the fee is calculated?
It's to grift off the speculators.
Now that Trump has announced the possibility that some US Treasuries won't be paid, the dollar may follow his memecoin into oblivion.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-says-some-treasury-notes-may-not-be-real
While I do not discount the prospect of insider trading, I also would not be surprised if bots galore were watching the exchange and went "New Coin!" with instructions to buy at least a little.
"a fool and his money are soon parted". There's no group of people more foolish that Trump supporters.
"Credulous" is the word. For example, they are treating every word coming from Musk about "waste and fraud" as truth which should not even be questioned.
Apparently Mr Drum needs reminding that President Trump cares so little about money, he donates his salary to worthy causes! Not like the money-grubbing Biden Crime Family, with their 23 shell companies.
Oh, look!! A new troll!!
Really generous of him to donate his $400 thousand salary while making $100 million on bribecoin. Not to mention what he makes from his bible, and whatever other scams he's running.
Might want to adjust your snark detector a bit there.
Sadly, we live in a time when it's all but impossible to tell snark from true idiots.
That comment could have easily been written by MF.
Yes, but Ken Lovell has a history. We know how out of character this comment would have been had it been sincere.
I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic/facetious.
Sigh. Like so much of the Trump presidency - inevitable and yet inexplicable that so many people didn't see the inevitability.
A bunch of people have lost their shirts on this, to be sure. The question is, do they care?
For a lot of them, I suspect it's an honor to have been fleeced by the Dear Leader. Like the bean pickers welling up with tears watching Bagwan Sri Rajneesh being chauffeured past their fields in one of his many Rolls Royces.
Frogwan Baksheesh!
I suspect that a good percentage don't care if they lost money. It's a cult.
I hope all of MAGA bet on KC tonight, following the convicted felon's choice to favor them. I rather enjoy how he keeps leading them down to economic ruination.
As if to prove to the world that he's a total fucking moron, he claims he's going to cut billions from defense spending even as he's demanded that NATO countries spend 5% of GDP on defense.
As I keep telling you, the man keeps stepping on his own dick.
Yes, he is that stupid. All the punditry calling him strategic or smart are either overthinking everything or trying to ass-kiss.
The word on the street from them what know is that it's WAY too short to step on.
These collectors coins should all just be illegal. Crypto coins are all either fraud or crime facilitators.
Not to worry. I'm sure the DOJ is going to be right on that.
Maybe crypto like memecoins is a way for the little guy to get in on the disassociation of money from the real economy. Except he/she still lives in the real economy and it can't possibly work.
Like Wile E. Cayote's disassociation from gravity? Bound to be short lived.
There are going to be any number of bad things that happen to people because Americans elected trump and musk president. Some things will happen to innocent people and some will happen to not so innocent people.
It’s unfortunate that we cannot prevent this and I hope nothing bad happens to me or people I care about. As for the rest… oh well. Good luck.
Politico reports that the GOP are trying to put work requirements into Medicaid and SNAP while reforming Medicare to pay for their multi-millionaire / billionaire tax cuts.
THIS is the point where Democrats have to put up every roadblock they can including blocking the debt limit. These tax cuts keep flattening the tax rates, which effectively increases the GINI and it'll keep destroying America's middle class and poor.
It's time to maximize the pain for Republicans. Talk about their attempts to transfer money form the poor to the rich.
R's have learned to play the media. D's still haven't figured it out. Until they do, they can wail all they want and it will fall on deaf ears.
"If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made then sheep!"
Trump shuts down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau upon learning
suckers,MAGA, investors lost $2 billion in Trump change,https://www.rawstory.com/trump-crypto-2671135951/
- CPI report is out. CPI, both headline and core, ticked up. 6 out of the last 7 months, headline CPI has been going up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DDGW
- The convicted felon spoke to Putin w/o a heads up or talking to Ukraine first, then promptly invited Putin to come to the US, doubling down on his war against the ICJ which has had an arrest warrant out for Putin since 2023. Will he abandon Ukraine like he did with Afghanistan? At the very least, he's demanding a quid pro quo: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/top-trump-official-kyiv-discuss-deal-minerals-energy-2025-02-12/
- Republicans confirm Gabbard with only McConnell voting against her, showing just how little the GOP honestly cares about national security. Or did they do so knowing that she'd crash and burn?
- FEMA took back $80M granted by Biden, to NYC, to cover the cost of housing of migrants, showing how much it cost for the DoJ to drop their case against Adams: https://apnews.com/article/fema-migrant-hotels-new-york-musk-immigration-a41f36b2bfdc0bb78a5859bcec8dfb72
- Patel apparently lied to the Senate when he claimed he did not know anything about the FBI purge: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/durbin-patel-fbi-staff-prior-to-confirmation/
Let's have a total national strike.
We have all these labor unions in the public and private sector, dammit. If we don't use that power to stop all the firings and the destruction of democracy, we might never get the chance.
The demand? The convicted felon Trump and Musk quit.