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'Dumping like crazy': Trump accused of 'rugpull' scheme now valued at $32 billion
(www.rawstory.com)
Please correct me: is this nothing but entirely fake money?
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Yes and no.
It's a collection of numbers with properties related to how they're found that make them difficult to counterfeit, and the way they're recorded makes it difficult to steal. This, as well as a handful of other properties, give digital currencies behavior not entirely unlike the things that make cash useful.
Unlike money, it's not backed by a government. This means that it's much more volatile in terms of value. Say what you will about the state of the US, it's unlikely that the dollar will significantly change value over the next year. It's essentially guaranteed that the price of every cryptocurrency will be wildly different a year from today.
Put them together and you've got a wonderful vehicle for laundering money or bribery, which is what this all is.
The other key aspect of money that it's missing is being generally useful outside of speculation. I can reliably use my dollars to pay for goods and services, and most significantly to pay taxes and satisfy debts in the eyes of the law. Cryptocurrency is inevitably either instantly converted to money once someone gets it, or it's held onto under the assumption it'll be worth more later.
Money has value because it gets you "stuff". Cryptocurrency has value because it gets you money.
It's fake money, but it's a very complicated and realistic fake money.
Cryptocurrency is inevitably either instantly converted to money once someone gets it, or it's held onto under the assumption it'll be worth more later.
Money has value because it gets you "stuff". Cryptocurrency has value because it gets you money.
With one notable exception...when it is actually used as a medium of exchange, to buy drugs on the internet. (Which the vast majority of crypto is not used for, especially shitcoins like Trump's scam.)
Drugs and money laundering, and I am very sure the latter is going on with this, by design.
I don't know if this one is more money laundering or bribery or both, but it's clearly something in that ballpark, yeah.
Crypto can be used at regular merchants as well. It's very handy for avoiding interchange fees, and annoying bank rules. For instance, my own bank will not allow me to make any purchases with a vendor outside of the US, even if I call them and try to pre-authorize it; their excuse is that there's too much fraud. That means that if i want to buy, for instance, military surplus apparel and equipment from Czechia that I have to find a company that uses a US payment processor, or find someone that's importing the surplus that I want, rather than going directly to the source. If I want a surplus Czech OM-90 gas mask, it's about $400 new through a US distributor, and about $50 or less (...plus shipping) if I buy one directly from Czechia. Even allowing for the relatively small mining fees with crypto, and the costs of shipping, buying direct with crypto ends up being much cheaper than using a US distributor, or trying to find a bank that doesn't either prevent foreign transactions or charge usurious fees for them.
It can be, but it's not typical. I've actually used the barter system more often than I've even heard of people actually using crypto for routine business transactions. And I live in an area where barter is not a standard arrangement.
It's not just the cost of the transaction, which can vary depending on demand (lack of predicability is another issue), it's also how long the transactions can take. For any retail establishment, taking an hour to process a transaction is entirely unfit for purpose. A minute is too long.
In your use case, you're using Bitcoin more like a payment processor than as a currency. Something like PayPal would work just as well if your bank played ball, and would work faster and have more predictable costs.
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There's nothing special here, just pretend you showed up with 100 signed photos of yourself and said you were selling half of them to the highest bidder and keeping the other half. Now your collection of autographed photos is ostensibly worth 50 times as much as you are selling them for.
Same thing here, only stupider.
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Isn't calling it a meme supposed to be the quiet part? I thought we called them "meme" coins because everybody was in agreement that the coin wasn't meant to be taken seriously?
Nah, you call it a meme so everyone doesn't look at it too closely.
It's like the typos in scam emails and texts.
The people that would actively investigate such a thing dismiss it immediately.
The stupid people buy right into it.
Smellania?
Smellania and Strump, shitting in a stree.
I think Elon has already bought himself a bit of Melania....
I can't not see Smelania now.
Smelania? That's not very nice.
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The disclaimer Novak referred to in his skeet (the generally accepted term for a Bluesky post) …
who has accepted this term? i want names
I think most people use skeet as a joke
History from someone who moved to the platform early on:
A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk's meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don't mean sensitive as in "snowflake", I mean sensitive as in "aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe" - when someone shits in the pool you don't wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.
I don't particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it's still gross. I keep advocating for "bleats" which kind of works as "Bluesky tweet" and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it's a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should've just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I'll probably resort to just calling them posts, there's no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it'll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains ... if it lives that long.
Wtflol
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Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a "meme coin" dubbed $TRUMP, which is being billed as the "only official Trump meme." According to Axios, $TRUMP has already accumulated a valuation of roughly $32 billion. And because the Trump Organization is keeping 80% of the coins, this means the president-elect and his businesses are roughly $25 billion richer as a result.
80%. Hmm.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/19/trump-meme-coin-what-to-know
Reserving 80% of the new supply for the team is an awful lot. It's usually more like 10% to 30%.
It'd be interesting to see who is buying.
I mean, yeah, one possibility is that it's supporters getting fleeced here, which is what the article is proposing.
But I suppose, without having a lot of familiarity with the structure here, that it could also be a route to launder funds. Supposing I wanted to bribe the President to do something. If I buy this, I'm increasing the value of the asset, and most of that asset is held by Trump -- that's functionally transferring wealth to Trump's pockets.
If I buy, say, shares in a publicly-traded company, then the SEC can see what's going on. But I don't think that they have direct visibility into who is purchasing coins on a coin exchange.
EDIT: Hmm. Okay, so I'm not really in the loop on this -- not something that I've been super-interested in -- but it does sound like (a) they assert that they do have that ability and (b) exchanges have not been doing so.
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102
SEC Charges Coinbase for Operating as an Unregistered Securities Exchange, Broker, and Clearing Agency Coinbase also charged for the unregistered offer and sale of securities in connection with its staking-as-a-service program.
As alleged in the SEC’s complaint, Coinbase’s failure to register has deprived investors of significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others.
It’d be interesting to see who is buying.
Lots of foreign nations. Lots.
This is blatantly a bribery scheme, with untraceability as a feature. Everyone knew it was coming, and there's nothing to be done about it because the recipient now controls the Justice Dept, which is the only organization that's likely to have the resources to trace the payments.
So how can we poison it?
It's all traceable.
Yep, it doesn’t feel like a pump n dump, but very public bribery.
Hard to tell for sure, but it’s got a strange flavour to it.
Time will tell.
Eventually it'll dump. I can't imagine this coin having much utility post-Trump presidency, whenever and however that ends.
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Look at the bright side: only a die-hard magard would fall for this grift. So when Trump pulls the rug, the magards will finally realize they've been took.
In other words, Trump is innoculating his own followers with the cure for Trumpism.
the magards will finally realize they've been took
No they won't. They will line up for the next one. The only reason they will ever stop is because they have nothing left. And then when they have nothing they will blame immigrants, woke, Soros, or whoever for their lot in life.
There are people who exist in this world who can not comprehend that the actions they take lead in part to the consequences that follow. The only thing that can be done is to watch from the side them losing everything and then getting out of the way as best one can in their fit of rage.
Sort of like a person with a gambling addiction putting the last $10k of their life savings into a slot machine. We know what's going to happen, there is nothing that can stop it from happening.
This was a money laundering scheme. Foreign governments and companies (foreign and domestic) who want favor with trump are the ones who bought in.
Trump has been running the same scams for decades. There's probably tons of bag holders for his NFT scam that are loading up on TRUMP and MELANIA. He's got a whole mailing list of gullible marks and he keeps butchering that pig until there's nothing left.
magard
It's magat
Nah. They'll double down to own the libs
He’ll just gish gallop his way out of it. Whatever smoke screen he comes up with will make his followers lose focus on all the money they have lost. Example:
Oh wow, look at this immigrant caravan from Panama. Let’s invade and stop them.
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His fans think they’re sticking it to everyone by doing this. It’s maybe the most incredible confidence man job I’ve ever seen. He’s harvesting everything they can yield and they’re sneering at us while they lose it all.
It’s not dumping if it was money laundering all along.
All you need to know about investing in Donald j trump investment vehicles:
- Ryan Cohen a known extreme trump supporter endorsed Donald J Trump within days of crashing the short interest on GameStop Stock by selling billions in shares for cash he did not need as he already had nearly 1 billion saved. He did this to be timed with when the shorts were going to start buying. He betrayed every single one of his long term investors for thieves shorting companies illegally, then turned around and endorsed Donald Drumpf on X(itter). This is Donnie's game plan, and every single one of his billionaire supporters game plan for how the next 4 yrs is going to go. Do not invest in anything even remotely related to Donald J Trump. It's more than likely a ponzi scheme, even the viable businesses are just going to pump and dump then leave you holding the bags.
Oh, I didn't realise he'd outed himself as a piece of shit