2w ago

'Dumping like crazy': Trump accused of 'rugpull' scheme now valued at $32 billion

www.rawstory.com 'Dumping like crazy': Trump accused of 'rugpull' scheme now valued at $32 billion

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...

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Please correct me: is this nothing but entirely fake money?
- 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.
  That's how cryptocurrency market caps work.
  
  I read your comment, thought it's impossible that you're right, and took a beat to verify. You're entirely correct. Crypto truly is this stupid.
  
  The same method is used to determine market cap of publically traded companies. Whatever the most recent trade price was * total number of shares = what the company is supposedly worth.
  
  Non-rigged markets tend to also require a minimum trade volume, restrict insider trading, and keep a close watch to prevent pump-and-dump and similar scams.
  Clean, open markets are regulated. That's why the scammers to go the crypto markets: they're opaque, rigged, and free of those inconvenient fraud-prevention rules
  
  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.
  
  Short term capital gains already are taxed as income. I doubt anyone is holding these rug pull coins for more than a year.
  
  It's like those terrible celebrity endorsed/named perfumes and other product.
  Being sold like stocks
  But with no physical product even a shitty one
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.)
  
  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.
  
  assuming you can find a merchant that takes it.
  
  True enough.
  
  It also in those cases feels more like a medium of exchange rather than a currency. I don't know anyone who says the price is "x bitcoin", rather they say its priced at "x dollars/euros/etc." and so will be x bitcoin.
  
  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.
  
  Yeah and you're a fool if you use Bitcoin for that purpose
  
  That would be what XMR is for
  
  I truly have no idea what that means... Unrelated, but I recently got into a tragic boat accident.
- All money is "entirely fake". The only difference is how big the value fluctuations are and to what degree you can exchange it for other currency. Crypto has a big problem with the former and minor problems with the latter, but generally speaking it's not much less real than, say, the US dollar.
  
  When the value of your money is only measured by how much of a different currency you can exchange it for, and not it's actual purchasing power (which is 0 for 99.9% of all cryptocurrencies) then it's essentially fake money. Literally no different than the monopoly money Luigi was carrying around with him.
  
  You can't pay taxes in crypto.
  
  I can't pay my taxes in rupees, but that's a legitimate currency.
  
  I'm pretty sure people in the EU can't pay their taxes in USD either, but it doesn't mean the US dollar is fake. Or it does mean that it's fake and all other currencies are also fake.
  
  The Democrats should issue a statement that they will ban this shit as soon as they're back in office. See what that does to the market cap.
  But they won't because they are fucking spineless and have no fight in them.
  
  the Covfefe in Chief will never allow another Democratic presidency
  
  You mean the billionaires who own Trump will never allow another Demicratic president nor Congressional majority. Rule of law and democracy, even the pale shadow of democracy we had, in the US is dead.
  
  It's only dead when we surrender or are killed. Quit whining and start organizing and training.
  
  Never's not a very long time for someone who's 78 and in his condition.
- Fake money spends.
- Ugh ..just don't if you can't understand what a ledger is ...
  
  Ugh.. just don't if you can't fuckin answer the question like a normal fucking person. What a smug insufferable prick.
  
  Way to explain and not just be an ass. Also, he's not wrong. It's a meme coin

127 comments