11mo ago

Big Crypto Is Spending More on US Elections Than Any Other Industry

www.businessinsider.com

Big Crypto is now 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.

politics @lemmy.world

fpslem @lemmy.world

11mo ago

Big Crypto Is Spending More on US Elections Than Any Other Industry

www.businessinsider.com /crypto-bitcoin-election-spending-kamala-harris-donald-trump-2024-8

111 comments

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 ~~boss~~ coin
  Same as the old ~~boss~~ coin 🎶
- How is crypto backed by old currency?
  
  Without old currency it is completely worthless.
  
  They aren't paying these politicians off in Bitcoin.
  
  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
- Electricity vs Blood, which is more expensive?
  
  Do you think there isn't a blood cost for electricity?
  
  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.'
- 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.
  
  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.
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.
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
- Weird that the anti crime criminal is promoting crime coin
  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.
- Yeah because you definitely can't do any of that with cash.
  
  I do all my digital theft in cash
You mean money launderers, criminals, and foreign governments are openly spending more than any other industry?
- "Wasn't" implies it was and has changed. It was, and still is a scam.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  So then what do you think it does solve? "Blockchain not money" is a phrase popular with scams too.
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.
  
  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’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
Media Bias Fact Check | bot support

111 comments