Crypto Is Still for Criming

Democrats shouldn’t give this scam cover, but probably will

Yesterday “the president” announced a trade “deal” with “Britain.” IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING, I’M TRYING TO EMULATE TRUMP’S STYLE, WITH RANDOM QUOTATION MARKS AND BLOCK CAPITALS, PLUS EXCLAMATION POINTS AT WEIRD PLACES!

Anyway, as I predicted yesterday, it was indeed a “deal” as opposed to an actual deal. There was very little substantive content. The 10 percent overall tariff on imports from Britain remained, although extra tariffs on British steel and cars were removed. Hey, children only need two dolls and five pencils, but the wealthy need their Rolls Royces, Jaguars and Bentleys. Britain, for its part, made vague promises to increase access for some U.S. agricultural products, and may be buying some Boeing jets.

Claims of a major deal were, in short, fake news. This was all about creating the illusion that Trump’s tariffs are accomplishing something.

Meanwhile, however, something potentially important happened in Congress. A bill that would have helped expand the use of stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that, unlike Bitcoin and other early entrants, are supposed to have a fixed value in dollars — stalled in the Senate. To advance, the GENIUS Act (gag) needed 60 votes on a procedural measure. With every Democrat and 3 Republicans voting no, it only got 48 votes.

What happened? Republicans tried to ram through a bill that literally had no text. That was too much even for crypto-friendly Democrats.

The setback for Republicans also reflected the stench of Trumpist corruption that increasingly hangs over all things crypto. The $Trump and $Melania memecoins have been used for what amounts to brazen bribery. So has USD1, the stablecoin recently introduced by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto firm. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this is. Thanks to crypto, the president of the United States is now effectively for sale, and the buyers appear to include not just wealthy foreigners but foreign governments.

We’re talking billions of dollars in direct payments to the president and his relatives. If we were still a serious country, Trump’s crypto corruption would lead to his immediate impeachment and removal from office.

Crypto has also been used to scam naïve Trump loyalists. An investigative report by the Washington Post found that while a handful of large investors made a lot of money from $Trump, tens of thousands of small investors, lured in by the Trump name, bought the coin near its peak and have seen most of their money vanish.

It’s understandable, then, that Democrats have been reluctant to go along with the Republican bum’s rush on crypto, worried that a vote in favor might be seen both as giving Trump a win and as tacit approval for Trump’s profiteering.

However, most observers seem to believe that the bill will nonetheless advance next week after some cosmetic changes that will offer pro-crypto Democrats a fig leaf, a chance to claim that they had taken a stand against corruption.

So it’s important to say that whatever the final language on the bill says, it will still be enabling corruption. Why? Because the entire crypto enterprise is corrupt. Money-laundering and scams that exploit naïve investors aren’t unfortunate behavior that taints a potentially useful enterprise. For crypto, they are the whole game, more or less the only reason cryptocurrencies exist.

That may sound like an extreme statement, but you should bear in mind that Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was created in 2008. That makes cryptocurrency ancient by tech standards — not much younger than the iPhone, much older than Apple Pay. Ever since crypto’s invention, enthusiasts have promised that blockchain tokens will find widespread legal use cases, displacing conventional means of payment, any day now. But it keeps not happening.

At this point, 17 years after crypto arrived on the scene, there are still no — I repeat, no — significant legal use cases. This is despite many efforts to make crypto a real medium of exchange. Most notably, El Salvador’s government made a big push to turn Bitcoin into the country’s effective currency, making taxes payable in Bitcoin, subsidizing people’s digital wallets and pushing businesses to accept Bitcoin for purchases. The attempt was a complete bust, and El Salvador, which dreamed of becoming a hive of crypto-investment and crypto-tourism, has gone into the rent-a-Gulag business instead.

But if crypto has no legitimate uses, why are crypto assets worth more than $3 trillion? Well, the marketing of crypto has been brilliant, with many small investors in particular still being sucked in by the combination of technobabble and libertarian derp. Promotion of crypto by legitimate enterprises, which profit from crypto sales, has been relentless. Venmo is a digital payment system that actually works and is in widespread use — even the fruit and vegetable stand around the corner from me takes it. But every time I use Venmo it tries to sell me crypto:

And while crypto has failed to find legitimate uses, it has flourished as a vehicle for illegitimate uses: extortion, money-laundering and, as we’ve seen, bribes to politicians.

Finally, crypto has in effect bought itself huge political influence. This influence-buying is, alas, bipartisan. As far as I know, none of the pro-crypto Democrats who will probably put the GENIUS Act over the top next week is personally on the take the way Trump is. But they wouldn’t be sympathetic to a fundamentally fraudulent industry if it weren’t for the large campaign contributions that come from defending the Big Scam.

So this is a plea to those Democrats: Please rethink your position. Crypto isn’t a legitimate industry. Any vote that further empowers that industry is a vote for more and bigger corruption, even if you personally aren’t corrupt. Just say no to the scam.

MUSICAL CODA

In other news: