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Notes -
Donald Trump launched a shitcoin!. Trump Memes - $TRUMP - on Solana. It has a market cap of $5B, comparable to actual company $DJT, and a fully diluted value of $29B. For those who are unfamiliar, a 'shitcoin' or 'memecoin' is a term for a tradeable token that lives on a blockchain, like Ethereum or Solana, that doesn't make a claim to have value or future profits, and whose price relies on a large number of retail traders who think it'll go even higher, or that it's funny. Trump Memes joins coins like Shiba Inu, Fartcoin, Pepe, and Dogwifhat, and is now #4 for market cap. They function to redistribute huge amounts of wealth from gullible crypto enthusiasts to the token developers, smart traders, and people who happen to see it first. And, of course, 80% of all Trump tokens that exist were allocated to the coin's developers, locked up for some time period.
FT: The president-elect of the US is promoting a shitcoin?
Is this good for crypto? It doesn't hurt to have a friendly President - Trump and his team were embracing crypto, planning crypto-friendly executive orders, designating it as a 'national priority', and even seriously considering a 'strategic bitcoin reserve'. It might be bad, in the long run, though - it's the perfect setup for the next Dem administration to crack down on crypto. Or even a bipartisan crackdown, especially once Trump is too old to be politically relevant, or just dead from old age, and the grip of his personality over the Republican party is gone.
And, what a thing to do a few days before your inauguration. As much has people do irrationally hate Trump, I kind of buy the liberal claim that, because we all know Trump is corrupt and depraved, and the way in which he is so is incredibly funny, people don't hold him to the same standards they'd hold their political enemies, or anyone else. Joe Biden's done a lot of bad things, but if he blatantly scammed his supporters for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the response from his allies would be a lot stronger!
I don't like the impersonal process-oriented bureaucracy, the expert elite, the oligarchy behind democracy, whatever you call it. They are hypocritical, corrupt, dysfunctional, whatever else. But they're not infinitely that. Society still more or less works. If the alternative (whether that's just more MAGA candidates winning elections, or a moldbuggian new regime) is concentrating power in strong individuals, and this is the kind of individual that smart right-wingers - empirically - chose to concentrate power in, is that really better?
Politicians are corrupt. In the same way it’s not concerning behavior in a dog to fear the vacuum cleaner but it would be in a person, this kind of stuff just comes with the territory.
Trump is less tasteful, that’s it.
It’s fair to call out that the media and the left have poisoned the well of useful conversation and nuance with their hysterics. But at the same time, I’m fucking tired of this fully generalizable hand wave.
This is not even a response, it relies on a series of logical leap that are entirely lazy deflections.
first it requires jumping from the truism that political corruption is inevitable on the whole, to the unfounded conclusion thus any given circumstance its therefore inevitable.
It’s no different than identity politics that jumps from a tenable claim that racism exists, to the ridiculous conclusion that any given scenario must have racism hiding in it, thus justifying any reaction.
It also requires treating all corruption as binary, then voila with a side of what aboutism,
Suddenly any concern about blatent corruption becomes dismissed as aesthetics, nativity, or even argued as actually virtuous since it above the board and therefore some kind of subversive transparency.
At the end of the day this schtick is played out. It’s just the opposite side of the coin as TDS, and just as brain rotted and empty rhetoric
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