• CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    This is the Rug Pull Administration, after all. Might as well kick it off with really, really big and obvious grift.

  • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    This is not a rugpull but a readjustment. The purpose of this coin and Melania’s coin is to get around laws preventing foreign sources from donating to or bribing Trump.

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    9 hours ago

    This is a clear and obvious pump-and-dump. Anyone that falls for this deserves to be fleeced.

  • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    “Let me tell you, folks, this, what we’re seeing right now, it’s HUGE, okay? I mean, some people are saying—and I don’t know, but they’re saying—it could be the biggest rugpull in the history of rugpulls. Tremendous potential. Absolutely tremendous. Nobody’s ever seen a rugpull like this before, believe me.”

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Jimmy Carter sold his fucking peanut farm, and now this is the point we’re at.

    • Breve@pawb.social
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        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.

      • phx@lemmy.ca
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        2 hours ago

        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

      • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        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.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          36 minutes ago

          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.

      • CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world
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        5 hours ago

        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.

        • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          Short term capital gains already are taxed as income. I doubt anyone is holding these rug pull coins for more than a year.

    • lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.today
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      11 hours ago

      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.

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        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.

      • futatorius@lemm.ee
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        9 hours ago

        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.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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          7 hours ago

          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.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      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.

      • LePoisson@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        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.

      • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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        14 hours ago

        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.)

          • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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            6 hours ago

            I don’t know if this one is more money laundering or bribery or both, but it’s clearly something in that ballpark, yeah.

        • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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          9 hours ago

          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.

            • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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              48 minutes ago

              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.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            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.

    • BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      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.

      • karobeccary@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        Ugh… just don’t if you can’t fuckin answer the question like a normal fucking person. What a smug insufferable prick.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      57 minutes ago

      …And that’s not the Onion? Looks like she is laughing so hard at the idiot peasants getting rug-pulled already in that pic.

      And also: “you can buy Melania”? Um, phrasing?

      • ours@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        The sci-fi books/series “The Expanse” features a rogue lab where all the scientists got the part of their brain responsible for empathy intentionally destroyed.

        I sometimes think about that and wonder what it would be to be like that. How easy it would be to make a ton of money. And how sad it must be for these people to live only for themselves.

      • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net
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        18 hours ago

        A friend and I were discussing this. It seems like these days it’s more rewarding, objectively, to be a shitbag than to actually be a good human. We’re constantly being played for suckers despite having morals. Everyone else is cheating in this tragedy of the moral commons.

        • rational_lib@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          There’s a selection bias, we usually hear about the most successful shitbags. Most ordinary shitbags live pretty terrible lives. Just look at the life of the typical red state resident. Usually working their ass off in a blue collar for some plutocrat who abuses them, subjected to country music all day long. Almost makes me feel bad for them.

          • futatorius@lemm.ee
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            9 hours ago

            Most ordinary shitbags live pretty terrible lives

            Same goes for most ordinary non-shitbags.

            • FMT99@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              The point is, just because one shitbag gets away with it, that shouldn’t motivate you to also become a shitbag.

        • ShepherdPie
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          17 hours ago

          At some point there will be a correction and history will not look kindly on these people.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        20 hours ago

        It actually seems like it feels pretty great. The downside is you’re probably some degree of sociopath or other disorder. But I’m neither qualified nor experienced to diagnose.

    • Chozo@fedia.io
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      21 hours ago

      Isn’t calling it a meme supposed to be the quiet part? I thought we called them “meme” coins because everybody was in agreement that the coin wasn’t meant to be taken seriously?

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        21 hours ago

        Nah, you call it a meme so everyone doesn’t look at it too closely.
        It’s like the typos in scam emails and texts.
        The people that would actively investigate such a thing dismiss it immediately.
        The stupid people buy right into it.

    • Bob Robertson IX@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      skeet (the generally accepted term for a Bluesky post)

      Can we just agree that they are all just “posts”? No more “tweets”, “Toots”, “xeets”, etc… it’s just a post.

    • audaxdreik@pawb.social
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      19 hours ago

      History from someone who moved to the platform early on:

      A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk’s meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don’t mean sensitive as in “snowflake”, I mean sensitive as in “aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe” - when someone shits in the pool you don’t wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.

      I don’t particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it’s still gross. I keep advocating for “bleats” which kind of works as “Bluesky tweet” and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it’s a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should’ve just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I’ll probably resort to just calling them posts, there’s no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it’ll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains … if it lives that long.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    21 hours ago

    Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a “meme coin” dubbed $TRUMP, which is being billed as the “only official Trump meme.” According to Axios, $TRUMP has already accumulated a valuation of roughly $32 billion. And because the Trump Organization is keeping 80% of the coins, this means the president-elect and his businesses are roughly $25 billion richer as a result.

    80%. Hmm.

    https://www.axios.com/2025/01/19/trump-meme-coin-what-to-know

    Reserving 80% of the new supply for the team is an awful lot. It’s usually more like 10% to 30%.

    It’d be interesting to see who is buying.

    I mean, yeah, one possibility is that it’s supporters getting fleeced here, which is what the article is proposing.

    But I suppose, without having a lot of familiarity with the structure here, that it could also be a route to launder funds. Supposing I wanted to bribe the President to do something. If I buy this, I’m increasing the value of the asset, and most of that asset is held by Trump – that’s functionally transferring wealth to Trump’s pockets.

    If I buy, say, shares in a publicly-traded company, then the SEC can see what’s going on. But I don’t think that they have direct visibility into who is purchasing coins on a coin exchange.

    EDIT: Hmm. Okay, so I’m not really in the loop on this – not something that I’ve been super-interested in – but it does sound like (a) they assert that they do have that ability and (b) exchanges have not been doing so.

    https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102

    SEC Charges Coinbase for Operating as an Unregistered Securities Exchange, Broker, and Clearing Agency Coinbase also charged for the unregistered offer and sale of securities in connection with its staking-as-a-service program.

    As alleged in the SEC’s complaint, Coinbase’s failure to register has deprived investors of significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      This is blatantly a bribery scheme, with untraceability as a feature. Everyone knew it was coming, and there’s nothing to be done about it because the recipient now controls the Justice Dept, which is the only organization that’s likely to have the resources to trace the payments.

    • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Yep, it doesn’t feel like a pump n dump, but very public bribery.

      Hard to tell for sure, but it’s got a strange flavour to it.

      Time will tell.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        15 hours ago

        Eventually it’ll dump. I can’t imagine this coin having much utility post-Trump presidency, whenever and however that ends.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        19 hours ago

        I mean, I just don’t have the expertise to say on the legal/regulatory side. Someone who has a background in securities and has been following the cryptocurrency situation would probably be in a better position.

        I suppose that there will be people who do have such a background looking at it. The fact that it’s the President – who is in charge of the Executive Branch – and that most media that might be reporting on it has a partisan position makes this a lot more complicated.

        Still, wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve run into high-level graft in the Executive Branch. Dealt with it then.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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    22 hours ago

    Look at the bright side: only a die-hard magard would fall for this grift. So when Trump pulls the rug, the magards will finally realize they’ve been took.

    In other words, Trump is innoculating his own followers with the cure for Trumpism.

    • Gamoc@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Oh yeah because this is totally the first time ever that he’s fucked them over.

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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      21 hours ago

      So when Trump pulls the rug, the magards will finally realize they’ve been took.

      Bless your heart.

      No, no it will be the democrats’ fault somehow. Or brown people. Or both. Probably both.

    • IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
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      21 hours ago

      the magards will finally realize they’ve been took

      No they won’t. They will line up for the next one. The only reason they will ever stop is because they have nothing left. And then when they have nothing they will blame immigrants, woke, Soros, or whoever for their lot in life.

      There are people who exist in this world who can not comprehend that the actions they take lead in part to the consequences that follow. The only thing that can be done is to watch from the side them losing everything and then getting out of the way as best one can in their fit of rage.

      Sort of like a person with a gambling addiction putting the last $10k of their life savings into a slot machine. We know what’s going to happen, there is nothing that can stop it from happening.

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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      21 hours ago

      This was a money laundering scheme. Foreign governments and companies (foreign and domestic) who want favor with trump are the ones who bought in.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      15 hours ago

      Trump has been running the same scams for decades. There’s probably tons of bag holders for his NFT scam that are loading up on TRUMP and MELANIA. He’s got a whole mailing list of gullible marks and he keeps butchering that pig until there’s nothing left.

    • PSoul•Lemmy@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      He’ll just gish gallop his way out of it. Whatever smoke screen he comes up with will make his followers lose focus on all the money they have lost. Example:

      Oh wow, look at this immigrant caravan from Panama. Let’s invade and stop them.

      • ShepherdPie
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        17 hours ago

        Or he’ll just claim he wasn’t a part of it and “some very bad people” are the ones responsible for their losses.