12 ms·

Follow the Crypto

114 points by neilk 2y ago

neilk 2y ago
Molly White’s latest project, tracking political contributions of the cryptocurrency industry. White’s data shows these PACs dwarf even much larger industries in this political cycle.
- verdverm 2y ago
  I had a back and forth with Molly on Bluesky about this and the source of the data https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.bsky.social/post/3kvjythgh3y2v https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.bsky.social/post/3kvjythgh... There is a lot of nuance to the data and the context, so "dwarf" is probably not the best term, especially in a more general PAC context https://www.fec.gov/data/committees/pac-party/?cycle=2024 https://www.fec.gov/data/committees/pac-party/?cycle=2024
  - neilk 2y ago
    “Dwarf” was my word, not hers. Even so, if you click through she has another page that lists hybrid PACs. I have no idea if even that is the full picture; US politics are complicated. The project is open source so perhaps you can submit a PR to make it better.
    - molly0x57 2y ago
      (Molly here.) I added the “All PACs” page largely thanks to that Bluesky conversation with verdverm (thank you!) The “all PACs” page is the full picture. It’s showing the same data that verdverm linked over at the FEC, which places Fairshake at #9 out of any kind of committee. Arguably ActBlue and WinRed shouldn’t really be listed there, since they are fundraising platforms that serve as an intermediary.
      - verdverm 2y ago
        It was an informative discussion and a nice instance of constructive discourse of a political topic on social media. I learned some things too!
        virtuous_sloth 2y ago
        I've found that it requires self-discipline on both parties making an effort to break the pattern-matching/automatic-thinking to emotional pipeline that is so easy to fall into. Kudos to both of you for having that.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > White’s data shows these PACs dwarf even much larger industries in this political cycle. How does it show that? It suggests there was 200 million raised for the 2024 election, but that doesn't seem to be in comparison to anything. The US government borrowing alone is multiple trillions per year; people would be expected to spend way more than a few hundred million to influence it. Presidential campaigns alone can run into a billion dollars.
  - qqqult 2y ago
    Here's a breakdown by industry for 2024: Finance largest at $50mm, healthcare at $30mm, agriculture at $20mm. I'm not familiar enough with the details to claim that the numbers in OP take the #1 spot but they're definitely in the top 3 and that's very significant as we've seen with the recent change of tone from parties
    - roenxi 2y ago
      Where are you getting these numbers from? I was looking at https://www.opensecrets.org/industries https://www.opensecrets.org/industries because this site inspired me, it suggest finance/insurance/real estate spent $1,249,076,508 so far in the 2024 election cycle which seems a lot more plausible than $50 million. The risk-reward here suggests industries should be pumping billions into elections. The payoffs for regulatory capture are huge and the crypto people are novices compared to anyone else in finance.
      - qqqult 2y ago
        forgot to include the link, I was looking at PAC donations by industry on the same website: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/industry-breakdown/2024 https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs... I agree with you on the risk/reward of buying influence through donations
        roenxi 2y ago
        OpenSecrets doesn't make it as easy as it could to analyse all this, but I suspect what that is really telling us is that most of the money doesn't enter the race through PACs. Super PACs [0] seem to be different [1] and bring in about 2x as much money. So I don't think the industry PACs are giving a clear an impression of where money is coming from. My guess is the crypto community isn't outstanding in terms of spend as much as being naive about how to get the money to politicians in a way that gets them the regulation they want. And the players in this game might put some effort into subtlety. [0] https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs [1] The Make America Great Again Super PAC is ~80 million but the largest on the PAC list is American Crystal Sugar at ~$2 million.
- mike_d 2y ago
  The fact that it is a Molly White project means take it with a basketball sized grain of salt. She has deeply held beliefs and keeps cherry picking until the data supports them. I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying, I think they are just doing it via a single PAC rather than spinning up dozens of targeted PACs for each race.
  - sph 2y ago
    Yes, this and her previous projects have started to look more of a crusade to me, than a critique of "cryptocurrency", whatever that is, bundling them all together rather than analysing the merits and faults of each. Mind you, given the deep bias HN has against cryptocurrencies of any shape or form, I feel here she has her ideal audience here and we're the ones swimming against the current.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
      Where is the "crusade"? This just shows political donations. Is the FEC engaging in a "crusade" by publishing details on PACs? There are constantly HN commenters on a crusade to extol and defend the alleged virtues of various "crypto" projects. We could accuse these folks of having a "bias against government-backed currency". Perhaps HN has a bias _for_ true stories of fraud, corruption and crime rather than a bias _against_ all crypto projects.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - yieldcrv 2y ago
        Perhaps. HN also has stories of random software libraries and deep discussions of those. Whenever a mismanaged business in other sectors is discussed its only about that business, not the entire sector that business operates in. Whenever a devastating hack occurs directly on an end user, its a discussion of the browser and tools that can be improved to thwart it. Crypto sector has many libraries that power it too with extremely active discussions in other tech forums, and thats totally missing from HN in favor of discussion of random mismanaged businesses and phishing attacks as representative of the entire concept of crypto. When that’s further from reality, as the tooling has improved a lot and is constantly evolving. There are many best practices that are actively discussed and worked on, elsewhere. While the crowd on HN peculiarly acts completely segregated from that with a blissful ignorance filled with glee over frauds in the crypto sector, an extremely strange and impossibly different standard then how everything else is discussed.
monero-xmr 2y ago
A voluntary monetary system that you can use to avoid crushing money printing and inflation? What monsters
- henning 2y ago
  Copy-and-paste meme shitcoins are not a "monetary system". Thanks!
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - kemotep 2y ago
      At least in the US inflation seems to be cooling down and only experienced a 3% yoy inflation rate last month. Monero in the same time frame technically only experienced just over 1% inflation but from June to July this year is experiencing 12% inflation and then had nearly 19% deflation a few months back. Just crazy volatility compared to USD. Would be pretty hard for the average person to make ends meet in that kind of environment. And wars are definitely fought using or even over crypto these days.
      - beaglesss 2y ago
        Which is why feds need to allow crypto derivatives securities to be sold in tradfi to hedge this volatility. They claim crypto is an unstable asset but then make it harder to stabilize your crypto wealth, it is maddening.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        > Monero in the same time frame technically only experienced just over 1% inflation but from June to July this year is experiencing 12% inflation and then had nearly 19% deflation a few months back That doesn't sound right; annual inflation in the Monero blockchain is order of magnitude 200k new coins / 18,000k coins total ~= 1% annual and dropping. it isn't really feasible to get 12% inflation over a month with fundamentals like that. So while it is volatile, the changes in price aren't being caused by inflation. It is just supply-demand fluctuations in a relatively niche asset. Inflation is the trend in value change caused by longer term changes in supply.
nailer 2y ago
Any breakdown for what incumbent banks, payments platforms and remittance organizations have spent to maintain existing dominance of these industries? Every time you purchased something with a card, you give the card provider 2% of the price. There's a lot of interest in maintaining that.
- FabHK 2y ago
  Only in some jurisdictions. Wikipedia: > In the United States, the fee averages approximately 2% of transaction value.[2] In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, while there is no cap for corporate cards.
robbyiq999 2y ago
Crypto!? No thanks. I like my currency constantly inflating and printed on paper IOUs thank you very much.
Jamustico 2y ago
[flagged]
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  Crypto has no legal business model and no road to one. AI does.
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    Depends on your worldview doesn’t it? For me, having a transaction system that isn’t controlled by either my own government or corporate America is useful. If it’s not useful to you then you don’t have to use it.
    - can16358p 2y ago
      This! It's unbelievable how underrated this whole view is especially in a place like HN where I'd expect more liberal people. Even this property of crypto alone is a single reason to support it, let alone all the other tech that can be built on top of it.
      - kitkat_new 2y ago
        anarchism doesn't maximize peoples freedom
        eterps 2y ago
        Anarchism rejects hierarchies and centralized power in favor of maximizing individual liberty.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        kitkat_new 2y ago
        it doesn't really maximize individual liberty, ultimately almost anyone would end up with less liberty in practice, except for people choosing to centralize power i.e. rejecting anarchism
Quindecillion 2y ago
This is the first time I've come into a crypto thread on HN and the pro-crypto people seem to outnumber the anti-crypto people. Is there a vibe shift happening on HN?
- acdha 2y ago
  People who hold cryptocurrency have a significant financial incentive to talk it up: their investment is valued solely on social perception. Everyone else is generally tired of hearing about it in the second decade of not delivering the marketing promises.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Never determine there’s a “vibe shift” based on one HN story. It’s equally likely that some folks got riled up on social media and decided to comment on this story.
curtisblaine 2y ago
Not american, so I don't really get it. As far as I understand, everyone spends to influence the US elections, in one direction or the other. Why is this special?
- kitkat_new 2y ago
  1. I don't 2. who claimed its special?
- rexpop 2y ago
  > in one direction or the other These data exhibit a clear rightward bias.
  - curtisblaine 2y ago
    Which is plausible and expected, since crypto is all about a smaller state which doesn't control money. On the contrary, most of the other players in the big tech sector exhibit a clear leftward bias. Why is crypto special? Because it's right wing? Or because it's crypto?
    - rexpop 2y ago
      right-wing doesn't mean "smaller state," but rather a state more conservative of extant victors. That may mean "smaller" if, for example, the EPA threatens capital accumulation, or larger if, for example, policing maintains an exploitable labor pool. > most of the other players in the big tech sector Yeah, such as union-busting Amazon or Google. /s
curtisblaine 2y ago
Everytime I see this kind of discussion I remember that there are companies not breaking the law whose only way of surviving is bitcoin, because the big two payment circuits (visa and mastercard) have decided in concert, to not process their payments. Gab and Parler come to mind.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  Those are certainly two ... examples.
  - curtisblaine 2y ago
    "Free speech is for the speech you hate, not for the speech you like"
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Free speech as in speech protected by the 1st amendment? That's very specifically meant to curtail the government's powers, not the powers of merchants who decline to do business with others. You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
      - curtisblaine 2y ago
        They didn't, back in the days. I remember diatinctly the only way to send money to Gab / Parler was Bitcoin. Maybe now they do, but that's not very important.
      - syntaxfree 2y ago
        Who said anything about amendments?
        2y ago
robbyiq999 2y ago
The government is a well intended representative of the people. The government has a solution to money and currency already. The government makes choices on monetary policy with the best interest of the citizenry in mind. Crypto is not good. The government is good.
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > The government is a well intended representative of the people....The government is good. Nazi Germany from 1933-1945? Fascist Italy until 1944? Venezuela today? USSR until 1991? North Korea today? Did you not learn any history ever?

114 points by neilk 2y ago

Molly White’s latest project, tracking political contributions of the cryptocurrency industry. White’s data shows these PACs dwarf even much larger industries in this political cycle.

verdverm 2y ago
I had a back and forth with Molly on Bluesky about this and the source of the data https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.bsky.social/post/3kvjythgh3y2v https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.bsky.social/post/3kvjythgh... There is a lot of nuance to the data and the context, so "dwarf" is probably not the best term, especially in a more general PAC context https://www.fec.gov/data/committees/pac-party/?cycle=2024 https://www.fec.gov/data/committees/pac-party/?cycle=2024
- neilk 2y ago
  “Dwarf” was my word, not hers. Even so, if you click through she has another page that lists hybrid PACs. I have no idea if even that is the full picture; US politics are complicated. The project is open source so perhaps you can submit a PR to make it better.
  - molly0x57 2y ago
    (Molly here.) I added the “All PACs” page largely thanks to that Bluesky conversation with verdverm (thank you!) The “all PACs” page is the full picture. It’s showing the same data that verdverm linked over at the FEC, which places Fairshake at #9 out of any kind of committee. Arguably ActBlue and WinRed shouldn’t really be listed there, since they are fundraising platforms that serve as an intermediary.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      It was an informative discussion and a nice instance of constructive discourse of a political topic on social media. I learned some things too!
      - virtuous_sloth 2y ago
        I've found that it requires self-discipline on both parties making an effort to break the pattern-matching/automatic-thinking to emotional pipeline that is so easy to fall into. Kudos to both of you for having that.
roenxi 2y ago
> White’s data shows these PACs dwarf even much larger industries in this political cycle. How does it show that? It suggests there was 200 million raised for the 2024 election, but that doesn't seem to be in comparison to anything. The US government borrowing alone is multiple trillions per year; people would be expected to spend way more than a few hundred million to influence it. Presidential campaigns alone can run into a billion dollars.
- qqqult 2y ago
  Here's a breakdown by industry for 2024: Finance largest at $50mm, healthcare at $30mm, agriculture at $20mm. I'm not familiar enough with the details to claim that the numbers in OP take the #1 spot but they're definitely in the top 3 and that's very significant as we've seen with the recent change of tone from parties
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Where are you getting these numbers from? I was looking at https://www.opensecrets.org/industries https://www.opensecrets.org/industries because this site inspired me, it suggest finance/insurance/real estate spent $1,249,076,508 so far in the 2024 election cycle which seems a lot more plausible than $50 million. The risk-reward here suggests industries should be pumping billions into elections. The payoffs for regulatory capture are huge and the crypto people are novices compared to anyone else in finance.
    - qqqult 2y ago
      forgot to include the link, I was looking at PAC donations by industry on the same website: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/industry-breakdown/2024 https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs... I agree with you on the risk/reward of buying influence through donations
      - roenxi 2y ago
        OpenSecrets doesn't make it as easy as it could to analyse all this, but I suspect what that is really telling us is that most of the money doesn't enter the race through PACs. Super PACs [0] seem to be different [1] and bring in about 2x as much money. So I don't think the industry PACs are giving a clear an impression of where money is coming from. My guess is the crypto community isn't outstanding in terms of spend as much as being naive about how to get the money to politicians in a way that gets them the regulation they want. And the players in this game might put some effort into subtlety. [0] https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs [1] The Make America Great Again Super PAC is ~80 million but the largest on the PAC list is American Crystal Sugar at ~$2 million.
mike_d 2y ago
The fact that it is a Molly White project means take it with a basketball sized grain of salt. She has deeply held beliefs and keeps cherry picking until the data supports them. I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying, I think they are just doing it via a single PAC rather than spinning up dozens of targeted PACs for each race.
- sph 2y ago
  Yes, this and her previous projects have started to look more of a crusade to me, than a critique of "cryptocurrency", whatever that is, bundling them all together rather than analysing the merits and faults of each. Mind you, given the deep bias HN has against cryptocurrencies of any shape or form, I feel here she has her ideal audience here and we're the ones swimming against the current.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
    Where is the "crusade"? This just shows political donations. Is the FEC engaging in a "crusade" by publishing details on PACs? There are constantly HN commenters on a crusade to extol and defend the alleged virtues of various "crypto" projects. We could accuse these folks of having a "bias against government-backed currency". Perhaps HN has a bias _for_ true stories of fraud, corruption and crime rather than a bias _against_ all crypto projects.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      Perhaps. HN also has stories of random software libraries and deep discussions of those. Whenever a mismanaged business in other sectors is discussed its only about that business, not the entire sector that business operates in. Whenever a devastating hack occurs directly on an end user, its a discussion of the browser and tools that can be improved to thwart it. Crypto sector has many libraries that power it too with extremely active discussions in other tech forums, and thats totally missing from HN in favor of discussion of random mismanaged businesses and phishing attacks as representative of the entire concept of crypto. When that’s further from reality, as the tooling has improved a lot and is constantly evolving. There are many best practices that are actively discussed and worked on, elsewhere. While the crowd on HN peculiarly acts completely segregated from that with a blissful ignorance filled with glee over frauds in the crypto sector, an extremely strange and impossibly different standard then how everything else is discussed.

monero-xmr 2y ago

A voluntary monetary system that you can use to avoid crushing money printing and inflation? What monsters

henning 2y ago
Copy-and-paste meme shitcoins are not a "monetary system". Thanks!
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kemotep 2y ago
    At least in the US inflation seems to be cooling down and only experienced a 3% yoy inflation rate last month. Monero in the same time frame technically only experienced just over 1% inflation but from June to July this year is experiencing 12% inflation and then had nearly 19% deflation a few months back. Just crazy volatility compared to USD. Would be pretty hard for the average person to make ends meet in that kind of environment. And wars are definitely fought using or even over crypto these days.
    - beaglesss 2y ago
      Which is why feds need to allow crypto derivatives securities to be sold in tradfi to hedge this volatility. They claim crypto is an unstable asset but then make it harder to stabilize your crypto wealth, it is maddening.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      > Monero in the same time frame technically only experienced just over 1% inflation but from June to July this year is experiencing 12% inflation and then had nearly 19% deflation a few months back That doesn't sound right; annual inflation in the Monero blockchain is order of magnitude 200k new coins / 18,000k coins total ~= 1% annual and dropping. it isn't really feasible to get 12% inflation over a month with fundamentals like that. So while it is volatile, the changes in price aren't being caused by inflation. It is just supply-demand fluctuations in a relatively niche asset. Inflation is the trend in value change caused by longer term changes in supply.

nailer 2y ago

Any breakdown for what incumbent banks, payments platforms and remittance organizations have spent to maintain existing dominance of these industries? Every time you purchased something with a card, you give the card provider 2% of the price. There's a lot of interest in maintaining that.

FabHK 2y ago
Only in some jurisdictions. Wikipedia: > In the United States, the fee averages approximately 2% of transaction value.[2] In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, while there is no cap for corporate cards.

robbyiq999 2y ago

Crypto!? No thanks. I like my currency constantly inflating and printed on paper IOUs thank you very much.

Jamustico 2y ago

[flagged]

lern_too_spel 2y ago
Crypto has no legal business model and no road to one. AI does.
- zarzavat 2y ago
  Depends on your worldview doesn’t it? For me, having a transaction system that isn’t controlled by either my own government or corporate America is useful. If it’s not useful to you then you don’t have to use it.
  - can16358p 2y ago
    This! It's unbelievable how underrated this whole view is especially in a place like HN where I'd expect more liberal people. Even this property of crypto alone is a single reason to support it, let alone all the other tech that can be built on top of it.
    - kitkat_new 2y ago
      anarchism doesn't maximize peoples freedom
      - eterps 2y ago
        Anarchism rejects hierarchies and centralized power in favor of maximizing individual liberty.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        kitkat_new 2y ago
        it doesn't really maximize individual liberty, ultimately almost anyone would end up with less liberty in practice, except for people choosing to centralize power i.e. rejecting anarchism

Quindecillion 2y ago

This is the first time I've come into a crypto thread on HN and the pro-crypto people seem to outnumber the anti-crypto people. Is there a vibe shift happening on HN?

acdha 2y ago
People who hold cryptocurrency have a significant financial incentive to talk it up: their investment is valued solely on social perception. Everyone else is generally tired of hearing about it in the second decade of not delivering the marketing promises.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
Never determine there’s a “vibe shift” based on one HN story. It’s equally likely that some folks got riled up on social media and decided to comment on this story.

curtisblaine 2y ago

Not american, so I don't really get it. As far as I understand, everyone spends to influence the US elections, in one direction or the other. Why is this special?

kitkat_new 2y ago
1. I don't 2. who claimed its special?
rexpop 2y ago
> in one direction or the other These data exhibit a clear rightward bias.
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  Which is plausible and expected, since crypto is all about a smaller state which doesn't control money. On the contrary, most of the other players in the big tech sector exhibit a clear leftward bias. Why is crypto special? Because it's right wing? Or because it's crypto?
  - rexpop 2y ago
    right-wing doesn't mean "smaller state," but rather a state more conservative of extant victors. That may mean "smaller" if, for example, the EPA threatens capital accumulation, or larger if, for example, policing maintains an exploitable labor pool. > most of the other players in the big tech sector Yeah, such as union-busting Amazon or Google. /s

curtisblaine 2y ago

Everytime I see this kind of discussion I remember that there are companies not breaking the law whose only way of surviving is bitcoin, because the big two payment circuits (visa and mastercard) have decided in concert, to not process their payments. Gab and Parler come to mind.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
Those are certainly two ... examples.
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  "Free speech is for the speech you hate, not for the speech you like"
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Free speech as in speech protected by the 1st amendment? That's very specifically meant to curtail the government's powers, not the powers of merchants who decline to do business with others. You could make a pretty strong argument that overly stringent regulations that result in sex workers, etc., being unable to process payments are a violation of that, but I'm not aware of why Visa/Mastercard don't support Gab & Parler. If it's that, you have a point. Otherwise, not really.
    - curtisblaine 2y ago
      They didn't, back in the days. I remember diatinctly the only way to send money to Gab / Parler was Bitcoin. Maybe now they do, but that's not very important.
    - syntaxfree 2y ago
      Who said anything about amendments?
      - 2y ago

robbyiq999 2y ago

The government is a well intended representative of the people. The government has a solution to money and currency already. The government makes choices on monetary policy with the best interest of the citizenry in mind. Crypto is not good. The government is good.

RestlessMind 2y ago
> The government is a well intended representative of the people....The government is good. Nazi Germany from 1933-1945? Fascist Italy until 1944? Venezuela today? USSR until 1991? North Korea today? Did you not learn any history ever?