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.
Usually, if there’s a scam, someone’s making money off it. This is them. They want to keep making money.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
