Cryptocurrency is bad - it's a vehicle for hurting people.
It's bad for the environment and the society where all us people have to live.
I agree at this point that any politician on board with crypto is siding with the baddies.
The AI Coup & Trump's CEO-Dictator Playbook w/ Gil Duran | MR Live - 2/11/25 The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Gil Duran: "Any politician taking money from crypto or speaking well of crypto is one of the bad guys."
It helps scammers and it facilitates scams. And it's being leveraged by enemies of ordinary people, both foreign and domestic, using trafficked labor.
Scam Inc 2: Opportunity of a lifetime Podcast Episode · The Intelligence from The Economist · 08/02/2025 · 36m "I said to him what do you mean I'm going to scam people then he said you need to convince people to invest into crypto." – "They had the slogans that would always chant before we start work every day and uh it was some something like cripple the US and the European economy and then I don't know if it is what he said or it's just a translator who added it but then he said this is World War 3."
I’m sure some of the people running these operations justify it in their mind as a sort of Robin Hood type situation, or indeed a war.
Scammers and Human Trafficking The perpetrators of scams are often also victims of scams that wind up as trafficked workers. Chloe Humbert Feb 23, 2024 So I thought I would just make a list of the grisly reports on this…
China knows what's going on, because they recognized that these scam centers, staffed by trafficked humans for labor, have been operating to scam money off their citizens, and they put a stop to it.
World Economic Forum - What's behind China’s cryptocurrency ban? Jan 31, 2022 The People's Bank of China argues that its ban on cryptocurrencies is to curtail financial crime and prevent economic instability. However, China's cryptocurrency ban comes amid fears that cryptocurrencies were facilitating capital flight from its markets, bypassing conventional restrictions.
Most people don't like rip-offs and scams.
The Impacts Of Cryptocurrency - Nicholas Weaver - PSW #829 Security Weekly - A CRA Resource May 16, 2024 Nicholas Weaver: "cryptocurrency you remove the crime and the fraud and there's no value proposition at all" (...) "Bitcoin has committed a crime against me personally a personal crime I've got fairly strong Silicon Valley libertarian tendencies and Bitcoin has made me believe in the jackbooted enforcement of money laundering laws – enforce all the money laundering laws at all the points."
The people who like rip-offs and scams are people who have difficulty advancing their interests any other way, because they're also doing other things that most people find abhorrent.
Bitcoin Nazis, Ethereum Grifters: A Tale of 2 Communities (Scam Economy LIVE w/ Michael E. Hayden) Matt Binder Premiered Jun 2, 2022 Michael Edison: "someone uh with uh tremendous who holds a tremendous amount of bitcoin is giving alex jones money at a time uh when he is trying to declare bankruptcy and he is trying to avoid giving money to the sandy hook parents so we have been finding that money and we are hoping that by catching these transactions we are able to help um get it to them uh but you know it's scary because jones of course um you know very intimately involved in pushing stop to steal um you know really pushed…" Matt Binder: "which is also probably a slogan that crypto people are using right now if they've invested in terror or luna stop stealing my money dokwan please" Michael Edison: " it's not just the you know the obviously the the heinous information that everybody's familiar with and defaming people who um you know who just lost their their child in a you know in a mass murder um but also you know i'm leading an insurrection against um the united states uh and doing it basically to drive up traffic to the infowars store i mean we really believe because we saw a huge increase in traffic to the infowars store i mean so much of this is just about making money and money transferring between people it's not ideological necessarily um yeah i mean it's really scary the amount of money that they're giving it…" Matt Binder: " right do we have any idea who this big benefactor is any any speculation Michael Edison: "we are we are working at it we get a lot of people like it's peter thiel and it's like you know there are a lot of um there are a lot of people outside of peter thiel who are also um have a lot of money and really want this country to turn in a hard right authoritarian direction so they can hoard more money and more power for themselves which is what all this is it's a business transaction."
From funding hinky enterprises to extortion and organized crime, cryptocurrency seems to be wrapped up in a lot of shady business.
citation needed - Issue 75 – Absolutely preposterous Trump horrifies even some of his crypto-steeped fans by launching a memecoin before his inauguration, and a flurry of activity from the new administration signals what’s in store for the crypto world in the next four years. Molly White 24 Jan 2025 The crypto entrepreneur who called himself “The Godfather” and an LA Sheriff’s deputy have both pleaded guilty to charges including criminal conspiracy against rights and tax charges. “The Godfather”, actually Adam Iza, hired members of the Sheriff’s department to serve as “his personal enforcers against his enemies”, using them to extort, intimidate, and set people up for arrest. The deputy who pleaded guilty, Eric Saavedra, also abused his access to LASD databases to obtain personal information on Iza’s enemies, and abused his authority to obtain search warrants against those people.
And there’s not even a good use. If you understand how the banking system works, and you understand how computer databases work, it just all falls apart that there’s any usefulness. A lot of people who claim things about the banking system, wind up showing that they really don’t know how banking works as it exists. And part of the problem is that in the U.S. there are some boondoggly reasons that transfers aren’t as fast as they are in Europe. But that doesn’t mean that burning up coal and gallons of water is going to be more expedient.
Computer Security 161 Cryptocurrency Lecture Nicholas C Weaver Feb 28, 2022 "if this is supposed to be the internet of money you should be able to have it on your internet connected computer right? wrong! you want to secure your system have a small bitcoin wallet on it when it gets stolen you know you got compromised. i'm not joking we actually detected a compromise this way in the early days back in 2014 where a student created a bitcoin wallet that we monitored. we were deploying it on some systems to see if bad guys were starting to steal bitcoin and he had a copy in his dropbox account and his dropbox account got compromised. that bitcoin got stolen and we knew about the compromise within a minute great wonderful, but at the same time you can't outsource if you keep storing your bitcoin on exchange there's no insurance there's no deposit insurance so "not your keys not your bitcoin". talk about a security landmine. There's even more so the primary tool these days that people are using is browser extensions like Metamask. these are horribly opaque to use so like a bunch of experts in non-fungible tokens were tricked by a phishing attack into having their metamask wallet sign basically a contract saying "i sell all my monkey jpegs for zero dollars" and the attacker just sat on that for a few weeks and then transferred all the monkey jpegs from OpenSea to his wallet and then resold the monkey jpegs on OpenSea and then took the money and ran oh and if you're ever on twitter mention the word metamask it's amusing the responses you get. there's this dream in the cryptocurrency space of decentralization: trust nobody. the entire system is trustworthy but every actor is not. now first of all this is one hell of a nihilistic worldview but secondly it doesn't work because this requires that there can never be a small group that can change things. okay the cryptocurrency community thinks it's a leap of faith an article of faith that such decentralization is a good idea the only thing that buys is the crime but it's a lie the code is inevitably developed by one or a few groups"
A lot of people are up for grabs and making a lot of money opposing human interest.
Kyrsten Sinema Is The Latest Addition To Crypto’s Sellout Dream Team. Who Will Be Next? Outgoing Biden officials, members of Congress, and political staffers are all up for grabs by industries looking for their own roster of influence peddlers. Henry Burke and Revolving Door Project Feb 11, 2025 With Ruben Gallego promising to run on the Democratic ticket against her last year, Sinema decided to step aside and enjoy using her campaign funds on lavish trips to Europe and California Wine country instead. Despite this, Sinema’s value was still high enough to be picked up by Coinbase’s Global Advisory Council. Crypto interest was unsurprising given the help she provided the industry while in office. Sinema is not the first high-profile elected official to join the crypto company’s team, she’ll be joining the council alongside Trump Campaign Manager Chris LaCivita and veteran crypto shills like former Congressman Tim Ryan, former Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, former Senator Pat Toomey, and former Mayor of Los Angeles and CA Governor candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa. With no salary cap in the lobbying (or, in this case, unregistered influence-peddling) game, expect the already stacked roster of cryptocurrency cheerleaders to grow even further.
Former Democratic Party Congressperson Tim Ryan is also a paid fossil fuel mouthpiece who claimed Harris lost Pennsylvania because supposedly people want more plants burning coal. It really should be clear how and why fossil fuel and cryptocurrency interests are in fact a joined project.
It's bad for the environment and the society that all us people have to live.
And cryptocurrency tycoons have showered the elections to get favour with candidates, or oust them. I myself phone banked for Sherrod Brown in Ohio who lost his race because huge amounts of cryptocurrency campaign finance to promote his loss. The cryptocurrency lobby also gives money to Democrats in order to secure their votes won’t go against the industry interests.
Can Crypto Crash Our Economy? | Molly White | TMR The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Feb 22, 2025
My letter to reps:
End cryptocurrency. The Economist magazine recently reported on a podcast that people being trafficked to work in scam centers in Asia have revealed that there's an anti-American sentiment, if not an agenda against the US and Europe, behind these cryptocurrency pig butchering scams targeting Americans. Meanwhile cryptocurrency is outlawed in China who said they're trying to stop crime and financial instability and according to the World Economic Forum they are attempting to stop capital flight from their country, which seems shrewd given that it does seem to facilitate extraction of wealth from citizens by international criminals. American journalist Gil Duran said that politicians taking money from crypto are the bad guys, and I agree. Cryptocurrency industry investors have been using money to influence politicians and elections in the US, to the detriment of a democratic republic for and by the people. Computer scientist Nicholas Weaver has said that if you remove the fraud, cryptocurrency has no value proposition at all. Worse, it’s burning coal, construction debris, and wants to burn tires, and pollute our communities, just to print cryptocurrency. There's no point in defending this crime tool. Stop crypto now.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
If people don’t speak up in opposition to crypto scams, if we remain quiet, these people will take this money because they won’t see a downside to it.
Energy production pollution for no purpose other than cryptocurrency.
An update about the PA DEP public meeting.
It's imperative to inform politicians about tech scams that target their ideological hopes with false promises.
We can’t just depend on politicians to do the right thing just because they’re Democrats, surely that’s obvious by now.
Tech Won’t Save Us - 21 07 01 (#67) Bitcoin is a Right-Wing Technology David Golumbia
Podcast / Tech Won’t Save Us / Jan 30, 2025 The Problem With Cyberlibertarianism - Paris Marx On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, we’re joined by Chris Gilliard to discuss David Golumbia’s final book, Cyberlibertarianism, and how right-wing politics shaped how we think about the Internet.
You can help prevent scams: “be the good” this year — Putnam County District Library Feb 19, 2025
