President-elect Donald Trump has now found yet another way to convince his followers to throw their money his way — this time with a questionable cryptocurrency venture.Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a "meme coin" dubbed $TRUMP, which is bei...
It actually seems like it feels pretty great. The downside is you’re probably some degree of sociopath or other disorder. But I’m neither qualified nor experienced to diagnose.
A friend and I were discussing this. It seems like these days it's more rewarding, objectively, to be a shitbag than to actually be a good human. We're constantly being played for suckers despite having morals. Everyone else is cheating in this tragedy of the moral commons.
The sci-fi books/series "The Expanse" features a rogue lab where all the scientists got the part of their brain responsible for empathy intentionally destroyed.
I sometimes think about that and wonder what it would be to be like that. How easy it would be to make a ton of money. And how sad it must be for these people to live only for themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty much. You can make 1001 cards with your signature and a number on them, sell 1 of them for $1000 to your best friend, then say you're a millionaire now because you have 1000 cards left each worth $1000.
This was a blatant way to allow people to donate to Trump while skirting existing campaign finance laws. Get his buddies to buy his meme coin for exorbitant prices, and now he gets to keep the money because he “sold” something and it’s not a bribe.
Great! Now we need to fix the tax code so you have to declare that as income, and it's taxed progressively. That would pretty quickly put the kibosh on these scams.
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.
People acting like cryptocurrency isn't just a security backed by thin air really drives me up the wall.
Crypto is a mirage and when it crashes people will all be wondering, "damn how were we this naive.". But humans are great at playing make believe so who knows. But acting like the USD and Bitcoin are the same is lunacy.
Like you said one is money, the other you hold onto and want to turn into 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.)
"Let me tell you, folks, this, what we're seeing right now, it's HUGE, okay? I mean, some people are saying—and I don’t know, but they’re saying—it could be the biggest rugpull in the history of rugpulls. Tremendous potential. Absolutely tremendous. Nobody’s ever seen a rugpull like this before, believe me."
This is not a rugpull but a readjustment. The purpose of this coin and Melania's coin is to get around laws preventing foreign sources from donating to or bribing Trump.
Well yes and no. It's a way for foreign countries to launder their bribes. They "buy" the coins knowing he will get the money. The quasi-rug-pull part is him extracting the laundered money. Everyone, except his shit-head followers, understands this.
The first I heard of Trump's memecoin was a headline declaring it was worth $25 Billion. I'm a pretty online person, so I tend to hear about these things pretty quickly. The article said it was worth $9 billion in 12 hours.
$9 billion is an unimaginable amount of money for any number of people to decide to "invest" in under 12 hours. The only way I can explain that happening is if many, very wealthy people, had been notified about the coin going up for sale ahead of time and wanted to curry favor with Trump.
I guess that makes sense. So if they only sell 1 coin out of 1 million and they sell it for $100 then they can walk around saying the lot of coins as a whole are worth $100 million? (obviously a simplified example)
I'm not even sure which exchange(s) it is on? I wonder if it's almost entirely about laundering money and almost none of the peasant redhats put money into it.