Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case:
1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".
2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.
I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.
It's pretty bad, but smart people do stupid things all the time. Hopefully he learns from this mistake. And as pointed out, it does not automatically make all his prior decisions bad - we can actually analyse them each on their individual merit.
That may explain it but it does NOT excuse it or the consequences.
Smart people are also supposed to consider the consequences of their actions a bit more deeply than dumb people, and leaders are supposed to surround themselves with even smarter and more broadly experienced advisers to alert them to potential stupid actions and so moderate their actions to avoid harming others (as well as harming their own reputation or standing).
>>Hopefully he learns from this mistake. ...
Right: so just let smart people with a lot of power make whatever mistakes come along that damage others but face zero consequences for them beyond "we hope they learn".
That is an excuse for keeping incompetent autocrats or oligarchs in power, not a plan for a sustainable and growing complex society.
Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.
> Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.
It will probably be dismissed.
The judiciary in Argentina is largely at the beck and call of Milei's political godfather, former president Mauricio Macri, who uses them to put pressure on his political enemies (largely kirchnerismo), and also makes them quietly drop most lawsuits against him or his allies.
Now, to be clear, it's Macri (not Milei) who has the courts in his pocket, and lately they have a strained relationship, because Macri wants better positions in government for his cadres, while Milei is instead poaching them for his own party. So it's very likely this whole mess will be just a way for Macri to remind Milei who's who, and get a few favors, after which the whole thing will go away.
I'd love to be wrong about this, and for Milei to face the music, but I don't think I'm wrong.
>while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden
Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.
You mean a very active Twitter user who is all about cutting government inefficiency didn't know repercussions of his tweet? It was up for 5 hours. By then damage was done. People with large loses have sued and are getting their money back directly from the scammers. How crazy is this
> that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden
Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
With (a previous to this event) 56% approval rating,
> Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
At least half those guys also approve of him. Thanks to his government's policies of reducing inflation and removing middlemen out of social assistance, those people can afford to sustain themselves, and poverty has gone back down to around 37% according to several private economists/universities.
I keep seeing these numbers being thrown around about inflation improving and poverty decreasing in argentina, but then i also read articles about the increasing poverty rates and diminishing of social welfare for the poorest segments of society. I don't live there so I can't say first hand, but this latest move by milei surely made my opinion on him settle on the "not a good guy for the people"
Milei is not good for the people, and the inflation numbers are highly misleading because the cost in dollars is very high in Argentina right now. Plenty of people losing their jobs, factories closing (some with decades of existence in Argentina), plenty of people begging on the streets.
A lot of people who support him do so out of antiperonist feelings (which has a very strong tradition in Argentina), even as he makes their lives harder or they have to close their businesses due to Milei-induced crises.
I mean, there's such a thing as extending the benefit of the doubt too far, tbh. Presuming he wasn't in on it, if he's promoting stuff like this he's likely barely capable of managing his own finances, let alone a country's.
Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.
It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).
I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.
Sure, but Argentina wasn't doing ING what an MMT theorist would advocate for (which is balancing government spending with available productive capacity). This is evident because they had an out of control inflation rate.
Argentina's economy has been a shit show for a while. And of course outright killing the economy and everybody's standard of living in the process means you're doing something, but it's not what I'd consider helping the economy.
Of course, the first order effect of less spending is not usually good, particulary for those receiving the money.
However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
> it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking.
The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade.
When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).
The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.
That depends to a great extent on how the money is actually spent. The USA spent huge amounts of money to get out of the Great Depression, much, much more than it was spending before, and it ended up in a much better economic position, despite a gigantic war soon after.
So, do you know how that magic money should be spent ? And, if you know, do you know how to elect the right people that will spend it on the right things ? There's a high probability it will be spent on friends' big businesses / fraud and abuse
I thought the reason the US ended up with a good economy was because of the war, not despite of it[1]. The war massively ramped up the US's industrial output, and unlike many of the other allied powers there was no need to rebuild once the war ended.
A war doesn't directly improve the economy. It's spending on industry that was justified by the war (plus national fervor) that helped with this. But building ships and planes and tanks is not fundamentally useful for civilian industry. If the same level of investment had been directed to civilian industries instead of military, the economy would probably have been even higher.
I do agree that the relative value of the US economy shot up directly due to the destruction the war brought to European, Chinese, Japanese, and USSR industry and populations - so if you were discussing things in this sense, I can agree.
I really doubt the technology would've advanced as fast without such an adversarial setting. Economic warfare is child's play vs total war.
All that knowledge and redirected output ended up being extremely profitable once it could be used for civilians instead of the military when the war ended.
Not everyone believes the earth isn't flat either unfortunately.
There's no need to adhere to a particular economic theory (I'm not particularly familiar with MMT) to realize that, at societies scale, money isn't some kind of scarce commodity.
I interpret "government should stop spending money they don't have" metaphorically as standing in for "don't spend so much money (especially in economically unproductive ways) that it devalues money and misallocates resources so much that it slows down economic growth".
I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.
It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence.
It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend.
So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.
> I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.
There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong
> It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much eadier to overspend than to underspend.
You accidentally came up with the best possible illustration for the topic, and it's a really good illustration that actually goes against your argument:
- If you eat too much, you'll get fat and unhealthy.
- If you eat too little, you'll die from starvation.
And you're right, it's exactly the same for government spending: if the government spends too much, it's not good, but if it's spends too little the economy's dead.
There's no such thing as an economic institute without an obvious agenda, and generally no way that we know to compute the optimal spending. And even if there was some way to decide how much to spend, there would still be the insurmountable problem of deciding what to spend this money on.
It's pretty obvious that some uses of money are more useful than others - if the state spent large amounts of money on buying snow and storing it in the sun, that's not going to have the same kind of effect as spending the exact same amount of money on building new roads. But beyond obviously silly examples, no one can really agree on even the basics of the effects of government spending in other areas.
For example, a question like "if the government pays very large pensions and social aids, does that increase the economy as much as spending the same amount of money on subsidizing private business?" is extremely divisive in economic circles - with opposing schools of economics claiming opposite results as the "obvious scientific answer".
That's too much of a balanced take though than touted by lots of populists.
Germany put it recently into their constitution that new debt is strictly limited, literally called the "debt brake". That overlooks all the nuances you just explained and in the worst case can cripple the German economy. German politics is full of folks demanding the "black zero", meaning essentially no (new) state debt. It's the literal sense, not the metaphorical sense that you are describing. And people buy it, since that's how their household economy works too. They even have a metaphor for that ("schwäbische hausfrau").
It's terrible. The debt brake is just as bad for their economy as the "rent lid" that's very popular among the German left which is crippling their housing sector.
The worst thing about Germany is how the conservatives have brainwashed their citizens into believing that Hitler came to power “because of high inflation” because they wanted people to forget that Hitler came because of their policies (especially Brüning's deflationary policies). And in the end, with the debt break they just constitutionalized the economic policy that put the Nazi to power, and now unsurprisingly the AfD is booming.
> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.
Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.
There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
Real cost in USD going up because they're releasing the artificial peg that most people can't access anyway?
No one says it's going to be all sunshine and roses, but fixing inflation and housing/rental prices seems like a pretty solid start, as well as moving towards eliminating a currency peg.
Where are you getting that they’re releasing the peg? No market instrument has priced that in and every time it gets raised the Minister of Economy moves the bar for when that will happen. They need a capital injection from the IMF that they will never get because Caputo asked for $45 billion loan for the IMF for the same purpose two presidencies ago and it changed nothing.
"Argentina's monthly inflation rate dropped to 2.2% in January, its lowest since mid-2020 after libertarian President Javier Milei took office just over a year ago ushering in austerity measures that have helped stabilize the embattled economy."
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-r...
Dropped to 2.2% after a 120% inflation in the past years?
Compared to before Milei, costs are completely high and people who could live with their (now considered low) income are barely surviving.
You can say he's fixing it, but at the same time pretty much driving almost the whole population into poverty. And then the next president will have to deal with it and probably undo whatever Milei did. It's unsustainable.
According to private economists/universities, poverty is around 37%, which is even lower than we he started to rule, we will have to wait for official statistics in March I believe.
I’m sorry but opinion polls I this country are worth the paper they’re written on. Menem’s political program wrecked the Argentinian economy the same way this program is doing and the man got reelected with some of the highest increases in poverty during that period.
The important thing is that outsiders are falsely believing that the problem with this country is high inflation instead of low economic productivity. The country has dealt with high inflation for a century and during that time has the highest standard of living of Latin America and a solid middle class.
What Milei is doing is literally regressing in the public infrastructure needed to develop industry while keeping structural costs artificially high. Mark my words: very little will have been accomplished inflation wise but industrial activity will drop permanently as factories that cannot handle high costs leave.
Argentina has an economy that is strongly indexed on USD due to hyperinflation of the Peso and parallel exchanges everywhere ("cambio negro").
What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.
This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.
I know very little about Milei other than a few articles I have read but as someone who has been visiting Argentina on and off for the last 3 years, it does seem to me he has at least stabilized the currency much more than previous admins? I remember the bluerate for dollars being double the previous almost every time I returned and has now stabilized at around 1200 per dollar. I leave no comment on the rest of his policies but that rate of inflation seemed extremely unsustainable so this is no small feat. https://bluedollar.net/
I will admit to being uninformed so if something else is going on here I would like to understand.
The price of the dollar doesn't mean too much, the real cost in USD of living is through the roof and the official inflation index is not reflecting that, what's worse, if your salary is in USD or was tied to USD now you earn even less because they are pegging it so it doesn't go up.
Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.
In 2015 Brazilians could do a lot in Argentina for as low as R$30.
Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).
Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.
Instead, nowadays it's Argentinians that come to Brazil to make a killing at the low prices here.
Your local currency having a crazy valuation after your country just fixed hyperinflation isn't anything new. It's kinda of an obligatory stage. It can get fixed quickly enough if you remove the foreign exchange restrictions.
As always, how the government reacts now to solve all the disparity that high inflation created is what will tell it's a good government or not. The disparities being there right now isn't... But odds are that now his government will terminate before he can do any real work there.
Well, that's true, but I think it's based on the economic plan by Caputo.
Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.
>> how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.
> If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
> it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue
It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
It's been a very messy experiment - he is limited politically in what he can actually do. As as result it's going to be hard to draw firm conclusions about Austrian economics.
> the current increased poverty levels in Argentina
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
I went through an Austrian School binge during the financial crisis. The Austrian school had some very prescient and relevant observations on price signalling and why orthodox communism would inevitably fail because of it. Basically when you mess with prices, things get out of whack because they're a very basic and powerful signal of all the inputs into any product or service.
But the school is also a spectrum. If you watch interviews with Hayek, he's quite pragmatic in some ways; he concedes that some social programs can be desirable, particularly around heathcare, but pushes that such programs should be as market oriented as possible. He's also fine with taxes on negative externalities, like pollution.
Von Mises, who many consider the father of the movement, was extremely rigid and uncompromising in his classical economics view and how government should be minimal (though being jewish and watching the nazis operate greatly influence this viewpoint). Add to the fact that much of the modern torch has been carried by American advocates who were heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard (who was a student of Mises and can best be described as anarcho-capitalist through and through) and the whole movement has took a nosedive off the crazy tree.
IMO the movement is now mostly made up of people who at best can no longer see the forest for the trees and at worst are bigoted or terrible people who can't stand that "the government" won't let them do terrible things. I've literally seen videos of Rothbard disciples advocate for debtors bondage/slavery, child labour, and even worse things.
> 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.
> Obviously it's just a memecoin, but that's what Milei's tweet said, he never mentioned "meme" in his tweet unlike Trump.
Who gives a shit? Let's stop pretending that utilising the word 'meme' in any sort of associative context is some airtight legal defense against this being a lowest common denominator scam. These are both absolutely illegal and disgusting acts that aim to rob people of their money, using the word meme does not absolve Trump from anything.
One of the co-creators of Libra coin reveals that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
Nobody really should. This is just to make the scam more obvious to Milei's shrinking supporters.
Milei and his closest circle are now stuck in a loop, trying to argue simultaneously that "$LIBRA and cryptocurrencies are just a gamble, a casino for very technical people", "this only affected a minority of crypto gamblers", and that "he wanted to spread the word about a project that could be good for Argentina".
Anyone with a gram of brain matter can tell these assertions are incompatible.
And yes, one of the co-creators of $LIBRA candidly said the way these things work, only insiders make money, and the rest loses. He claims he's upset by "insider trading" being considered a naughty thing, when it's "the way these things work".
Before anyone asks: I've watched all the interviews, with Milei, his economy minister Caputo, and this Davis guy. Not hearsay, they are literally saying all these things now.
It'll be hard to argue Milei is such a savvy guy now (he often makes a show of calling his opponents "econochantas" -- slang for "econo-fraudsters"). And now he's proven himself to be either a bumbling fool, a scammer, or both. A losing proposition for anyone trying to defend his actions.
Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.
>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?
Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.
Really? A politician shouldn't be criticized or applauded within the context of the long-running political system that preceded him and just maybe, you know, possibly might have had something to do with his being elected, the choices he makes, and their social effects?
Don't be ridiculous. Decades of abysmal government in Argentina is damn important in any conversation about its current administration.
A lot of words for, let’s remind ourselves, is a head of state endorsing a crypto scam. I’d be far more sympathetic if this was a discussion of something complex like Argentina’s economy. It’s not.
> 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.
Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.
> but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people
Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).
Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.
> usually notable people accept money to promote things
Some businessmen and entrepreneurs (or shady kinds of guys calling themselves so, anyway) are already denouncing Milei (or his close representatives, like his sister Karina, nicknamed "the boss") demanded money in exchange for favors / photo ops / etc. These are guys who have photos with him, not random strangers.
I think there's little doubt Milei is dirty, for all his talk denouncing the "political caste".
>I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds
I don't think this is the approach if you want people to side against Milei.
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Inflation is still far higher than it was 15 years ago without contractive policies that are destroying the industrial fabric of the country, and the local understanding of economist that actually know a thing or two is that there is inflationary inertia that will not be solved by the current policies.
> the economy is growing
By no means is the economy growing; industrial capacity is down. The nominal price of goods is going up and the cost of living is going up which appears in some metrics as more money moving in the economy, alebeit for drastically lower production as the real price in US dollars has doubled across every product line. The indexes that show progress use outdated purchasing baskets.
> percentage of poor people is down
Poverty went drastically up at the beginning of his mandate and still has not recovered baseline values. Most poverty indicators continue to undercount the impact of the cost of food, medical insurance and services, which hit poor homes disproportionately. This can be observed by the fact that medicine and food consumption are the categories whose consumption has been hit the hardest.
> salaries are up
Registered salaries using indices that have no accomodated for the changes in inflationary inertia are not very useful. [Consumption, however, is the lowest it's been in 20 years with no sign of recovery](https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/15/el-consumo-masiv...).
> For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.
When he started, the poverty index was around 40%, not 25%. Then it peaked to almost 55%, but now they claim it has descended to around 40% again (It's probably down, but I'd wait a few months for confirmation.).
Also, from 2007 to 2015 the numbers were heavily cooked, so take that period with a grain of salt.
And in ~1990 we had an hyperinflation, that may skew the average in weird ways.
> But two months ago, their rent mushroomed from 90,000 Argentinian pesos to 150,000 — a leap from roughly $88 to $148. It was beyond their ability to afford.
We had a heavy rent control, so most apartments were out of the market and it was difficult to find one.
For some time it was ilegal to raise the rent and the inflation was 100% yoy. So a contract for two years used to say something like you have to pay an average of AR$75K, but only AR$50K during the first year and AR$100 during the second year. So no "rise", only a weird paying scheme.
Also, to renew it, you must pay the new market rate, but the inflation was 200% yoy instead of the predicted 100% yoy. So the new prize was AR$150K and AR$300K (with an average of AR$225K).
(IIRC there were some changes to allow increments that follow the inflation index, but only every 6 months. With an inflation rate of 250% yoy, that means that every 6 months your rent double overnight.)
So IMO it's not outdated, but the numbers are cherry picked and are difficult to understand if you never lived with a 200% yearly inflation.
I have no desire if to influence if people side with or against Milei. If you want to follow him, by all means go for it.
I am however, still going to mock obviously bat shit insane ideas, and telepathically speaking with your cloned dogs for policy advice is absolutely bat shit insane
He apparently did clone his dogs but can you point to the source material (in this case Milei) about speaking with them telepathically?
This just sounds super made up.
I've listen to his interview with Lex F. and his WEF speech and he sounded like a principled free market advocate. Not a single thing he said was crazy so I wonder where did you get this factoid.
Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
He's said so in speeches I've listened to. He claims his dog Conan (deceased) gives him advice from the Beyond. You can also google the myriad of interviews with him that mention this (and note: not all of them are critical, some found this touch of craziness endearing!).
He also claims his dogs (all clones of his revered Conan) are his "children", because they are the only "people" -- along with his sister -- "who will not betray him". Note that very few people have seen these dogs alive (very few recent photos or videos), and there's concern they may also be providing him comfort from "the Great Beyond". He gets enraged if people question him about this.
The guy is mentally unstable.
> Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
Sadly, in this case the truth is stranger than fiction.
> His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Do you live in Argentina? Because none of this is actually true.
Look at the other side of the coin, too: his policies are authoritarian, he's dismantling science and industry, he's becoming like a religious leader automatically aligned with the US in whatever random things Trump says (e.g. attempting to leave the WHO just because Trump claimed he would do so).
Lots of poor people begging on the streets for a country where "the percentage of poor people is down". Also, this percentage is compared to the previous administration, which wasn't very good and also went through the COVID pandemic.
He's also been sacking close associates left and right, not exactly a sign of a competent government that inspires confidence.
> salaries are up and so on
This is false, but also, the cost of living is going up. Oh, "inflation" won't show you this, but the actual cost in dollars will.
Milei's hardcore followers are now in an impossible situation:
- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.
Or,
- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.
Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?
Or 3: he was ill advised from someone in his close circle, and their head will roll, but I don't see any minister that would take the fall, maybe a kid under the economy minister, either truly responsible or willing scapegoat
Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
>Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam.
You lack the gift of nuance, your axiom is crypto=bad, so you are not seeing any difference between what the coin was technically and how it was sold, and that very difference is the basis of fraud.
A "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" would be a completely legitimate enterprise, it implies that whatever money is deposit will go towards that purpose.
I heard the trump thing and it's hearsay for now. They are two different cases, Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.
No, I lack patience for obvious bullshit, and to even attempt to defend such an obvious grift is genuinely pathetic.
> Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.
Let me paraphrase: "Trump said it was a scam up-front, so therefore he's absolved of any responsibility for it being a scam. Trump announced his scam three days before his SECOND inauguration, therefore there is no conflict of interest or abuse of power."
> he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.
> In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year.
We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.
> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"
Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.
I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.
We don’t really look at publishing metrics here to define what makes a good university; that is mostly determined here by the difficulty and completeness of the programs.
The University of Buenos Aires and a few other national public universities are considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA. Lesser national universities rank second along with specific degrees from some private unis. Then you have several tiers of private universities.
The UB looks good externally because it’s the school for rich kids who don’t have the chops for public uni, as such it invests its money in nice facilities and exchange programs, while its research shines by its absence and it’s really not harder than high school even for STEM degrees, due to its ridiculously low bar.
This is highly opinionated obviously because there are no hard metrics but I can more or less confirm this, the University of Belgrano is generally seen as fairly mediocre, even for private university standards.
The University of Buenos Aires is excellent. Is ranked, by the same rank you dismissed in another message, as the 71th place, the number 1 in whole Latin America. You cannot dismiss every University below 71th place as "ridiculously low bar". This is like saying "UBA is shit, because MIT is better".
I know your type: you throw bold assertions left and right, without a single source to back up. When somebody ask for sources you reply "trust me bro". You back up your assertions with "I never met anyone from Belgrano" (I never met anyone from MIT or Harvard, yet I thing they are good Universities) or "there are no famous people from Belgrano"... well, turns out that Milei is very famous and from Belgrano, so your argument falls apart.
But the whole point (Miley is bad because his University is bad) is invalid. You can study at MIT and be mediocre. You can study at a mediocre University and be top notch. Heck, you can even almost fail at high school and be excellent at your work. Dan Luu, University of Wisconsin after nearly failing high school come to mind, or John Carmack (two semesters at University of Misouri before dropping out, after a sentence of one year in a juvenil home). Guess they are bad at their job, according to your standards. Talk about elitism...
You ask from us a full "believe me because I say so, ignore whatever data you might find that contradicts me, I won't explain why nor point you to alternative sources. Just everything that doesn't agree with me is tainted, manipulated, or wrong. And if you don't have a degree in one of the best 100th Universities in the world and I can't find your research, you are unworthy". Nah, I'm not debating in those terms.
PS. Just noticed this:
> [...]considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA[...]
Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!
We don't care about in Latin America about first-world instutional ranking metrics that play by the game of publish-or-perish and I don't care about convincing anyone; just ask around in Argentina or ask any academic researcher from the country what the most prestigious institutions are and you'll get a unanimous opinion.
> Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!
And yet, he just did the most impressive turn on a economy on the run towards a hyperinflation ever seen.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Milei: this memecoin event is bad, but so is his political friendship with open self declared fascists, him being a libertarian. He is a populist. But about macroeconomics he is doing, at least, good. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that minimum is simply a hater that doesn't want an honest debate. You can even argue that he did good at macro but bad at micro, and there is a debate. But to call the man "sheer utter moron" in macroeconomics is just wrong.
You are just argueing with the fallacy ad personam: instead of explaining us what policies were moronic, you say "the guy is a moron" and pretend that is enough to have a debate? And then you resort to the fallacy of association: Milei went to this University. I say this University is bad. Then Milei is also bad. Even 20 years after leaving the University and working in innumerable places (among them senior economist at HSBC), or authoring many academic papers. Turns out that https://www.topuniversities.com places the University of Belgrano at 465 best in the world: not impressive, but still of the 132 listed Universities of Latin America Belgrano is ranked the 18th.
If it is third rate and blacklisted, what about the next 114 Universities in the rank?
I don't see his feats as impressive when he was responsible for putting more than half of the population in poverty when he started.
You can look at these numbers and say it's an improvement, but half of the population is still considered poor and the rate at which it's decreasing is not fast enough to consider Milei as a "genius".
And every economist worth their salt tells you that the number is based on an outdated basket of goods that underweights what has increased in price the most: household services and health care.
Health insurance prices have tripled and household services more than doubled. Basic foodstuffs are now more expensive than they are in developed countries; a pack of pasta is cheaper Costco than a local supermarket.
> And yet, he just did the most impressive turn on a economy on the run towards a hyperinflation ever seen.
This is said by no one except Milei. No serious economist has claimed that we were going towards a hyperinflation. I have lived through hyperinflationary periods and that was not it.
It is _trivial_ to disable inflation if you’re willing to wreck an economy.
I’m sorry I have no intention to reply to this because you’re just making stuff up. Milei has not published a single academic paper and has been credibly accused by many of plagiarism. His h-index is 0. His doctorate is from a degree mill. University metrics are easy to game and about as useful as the Top 50 restaurants in the world. While you’re at it tell me where all those famous academics in UB are, because in years of perusing computer science academia in Argentina I literally never ran into one.
He's not a great researcher, because he was not a researcher! He was more of a consultant, and published from time to time until around 2016, when he switched to another type of job.
I mean, honestly, I think Milei has a bit more plausible deniability here; he _could_ merely be extremely gullible/incompetent. Trump deliberately fleeced his supporters; it's very hard to read his shitcoin any other way.
"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.
The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.
Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.
I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?
How are comments like this ("Tell me X without telling me X") helpful? This is such a low-effort reply; at least briefly explain why you disagree with OP.
Why am I being judged by a low effort reply when even OP didn't care to tell us in detail why "Milei helping the economy is far from the truth". Such stupidity should only be answered with another low effort statement. It doesn't care where you are in the political spectrum, objectively Milei is annihilating inflation, we have primary superavit, lowered state expenses among other fantastic things he did for our country and we are doing great, a lot more is needed but we have 3 more years ahead. Saying he's not helping the economy can only be justified by not living here and having no fucking idea how we are doing. I live here, so I can tell you we are doing FAR better than a year ago.
In reality, Milei is wrecking our country. Very high cost of living, poor people begging on the streets, inflation kept low at the cost of depressing the economy and wrecking our industry, factories closing down, etc. It's not hard to keep inflation low if you're willing to destroy the country.
And, you know, being involved in crypto-scams. But that's just the cherry on top. Maybe his dead dog Conan told him to do it, or so his medium told him. (Yes, he does speak to his dead dog via a medium, not making this up).
The Solana trenches are effectively a giant crime-riddled casino. Everyone who plays understands this -- you can make money but you're essentially gambling. I'm not saying this is OK, but it's the current state of things.
When this $Libra token launched, everything else dumped as capital flowed into it, and then effectively got siphoned off by insiders. So even people that didn't chase "Argentina's coin" got screwed. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are some winners in this game, mostly insiders and cabals, but a whole bunch of losers.
I would say something's gotta give, but the stark reality is that America's casinos are always jampacked with dream chasers.
I was at an (academic!) conference about Crypto recently with a friend. I am an outsider to the whole topic and wanted to "expand my horizon" and see if maybe my expectations of if it being mostly a scam were wrong.
In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.
If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
I don't buy into any of the people that claim they were scammed, they knew the rules and they tried to make money out of nothing. Other than perhaps trading unregulated securities, I don't see the actual fraud.
To be clear it is distinct from pretending to be a security for an actual productive company, that is actual fraud, but usually the coins are very transparent about having no underlying value.
> If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.
These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.
(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)
It’s true that the gaming industry has leaned heavily into monetization, especially with loot boxes and microtransactions. Many games now create systems where players feel pressured to spend money to keep up, and younger players can easily get caught up in it. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, and even FIFA have built entire economies around this model. While some argue that it’s just part of modern gaming, it does raise ethical concerns, especially when minors are involved. It’s always a good idea to set spending limits or monitor transactions to avoid unintended charges. Platforms like https://melbet.tg/en also highlight how digital spending is everywhere, not just in gaming. Whether it's online games or other digital services, understanding how these systems work is key to making informed decisions. Games should be fun, but they shouldn’t encourage spending beyond what’s reasonable.
Cigarettes also exist and people smoke and get cancer from smoking all the time.
Does this mean cigarettes are a good thing? Why do they exist in society if they so clearly harm people?
There's a big industry around smoking that has managed to perpetuate itself in society despite the fact that it causes harm. This doesn't mean there's a good reason reason for it to exist; the reality of the situation is that you can entrench yourself in society and become very difficult to remove if you have enough power to do so. It might be that in 100 or 200 years the cigarette industry is finally gone.
Pretty much the same applies to Casinos. Yes, people play at them, and a lot of people that go to Casinos have a gambling addiction. For some, perhaps most, casinos provide a degree of entertainment that is not really a problem but ultimately Casinos are set up as a business that relies on people losing more money than they win. There's things like lotteries which seek to channel gambling addiction into social good.
And even in this scenario; Casinos are highly regulated. Which crypto ponzis are not. The existence of crypto gambling is simply a failure of regulation which is slow to adapt to new technologies. Yeah, crypto bros are in luck that there's an administration that goes as far as to encourage people to fall for these scams. It doesn't mean it's something that's going to last.
I concede that just because something is consensual doesn't mean that it is ethical or legal.
However there is and should be a legal difference between selling tobacco to unknowing customers, like in unlabeled soda or ice creams, against selling to cigarette buyers who are informed.
Similarly security laws are in place to protect legitimate investments, the courts do not want to be involved in inproductive speculative trades. You need to have some nuance between speculative casino games and genuine trading.
You can't treat both cases the same, if you do you do it at the expense of genuine commerce.
In this case, it crossed over to the criminal kind because it passed as an investment security, and was sold as such. So I do backtract in what I said in my original comment, I do see how THIS is a crime, but not other stuff like say, other typical pump.fun coins. Mostly because I learned a bit more about the case.
Neither do many of the people who say such a thing here. Instead they regurgitate classic HN talking points around crypto without really considering their logic.
Simple example: calling something like bitcoin a "ponzi scheme" when it's literally run by nobody in particular and has no specific fraudulent promotion being done by its administrators (since there are none) for the sake of personal gain through redirected funds.
I do think that there' nuances to crypto. But even bitcoin has some ponzi like properties:
1- high reward to early adopters
2- needed to be shared to have value
Although I will make the important distinction that the asset doesn't lose value once it can no longer be shared, which is typical of pyramid schemes. Quite the contrary, it reached critical mass and gained first mover monopoly
_Bitcoin_ isn't a Ponzi scheme, though it does tend to behave a little like one. Many of these memecoins are, essentially, intentional Ponzi schemes, tho.
Is there such a thing as truly "unregulated" here? What I mean is - pyramid schemes are illegal irrespective of the mechanism, so there's always _some_ basic regulation for these things.
I feel pyramid schemes are just a special kind of pump-and-dump scheme, and I don't understand how these aren't being punished effectively and swiftly by the existing laws and enforcement agencies...
Unregulated means that it isn't presented to the regulating authorities, not only is it not submitted for approval to the SEC or the Argentina equivalent (CNV), but it wasn't even submitted for chartering as an LLC (SRL) or Corp (SA) in any Argentina Jurisdiction.
> the company informed him about the Libra blockchain project and its aims to finance private ventures in the country.
I can’t believe people are still falling for these claims. Every single time someone launches a coin with claims that purchasing it will help fund some special cause, there is no basis to the claim.
If you want to fund or finance a cause, give your money to that cause. If you buy a meme coin, you’re only giving your money to insiders who held the coins before the pump.
But of course the motivator wasn't actually to "finance private ventures", it was to rent seek and to speculate about making profit by being first to be in on the thing.
The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my character."
Let's see it another way: there's absolutely no way that in the 2-3 hours the post was up a person not familiar with the gamblecoin ecosystem could purchase $LIBRA, let alone pour thousands of dollars in. The people who lost money are all professional memecoin gamblers, and the ones who pocketed in are obviously connected to the project leaders. Cyptobros want to have unlimited freedom to trade whatever they want without regulation, which is fine for me, but then they shouldn't whine when/if they are rug-pulled.
For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project. This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click. Meanwhile, states operate their own lotteries and casinos (e.g. "Lotería de la Provincia") where the poor and hopeful go to pay a tax on their ignorance.
Of course, the president and his advisors are responsible for not investigating enough and blindly trusting these so-called "businessmen". We'll see what the Law has to say about that, but I remind you that Argentina is a place where a vice-president tried to steal a company (look up Ciccone Calcográfica).
Last, the 4.4B number looks huge, but that is just "market cap", i.e. valuation extrapolated to the total supply of tokens, and not the actual amount of money that went into the coin.
> For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project.
Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.
Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
In fact, people who criticize Milei or deviate from what he considers the norm, however mildly, get thrown out of government (see: Ramiro Marra). He has a troll farm run by influencers who will ostracize anyone who criticizes Milei. It's very likely Fran Fijap was told by them to delete his post "or else"...
The point is the window to buy was 2-3 hours: you had to be ready to trade, and watching either charts or being on a discord or actively checking X and with cash in an account.
People lost money but I doubt there was much collateral damage
Though I agree that the damage will be limited I don't think it would be very concentrated on people paying attention. Considering notifications get pushed and heavy use of large group chats is common in south America does not take much for it to be promoted to laypeople by the more active followers of Javier. Older people particularly at risk given the excessive trust they give to people In position of power, knowledge of technology and readily available savings in USD on non savings accounts or investments.
> Older people particularly at risk given the excessive trust they give to people In position of power, knowledge of technology and readily available savings in USD on non savings accounts or investments.
Older people have seen one hyperinflation, a few high inflation periods, sudden jumps in prices, perhaps two or three bank runs followed by confiscation of the deposits exchanged for long term bonds, and I may be missing a few "interesting" events. They don't trust anybody anymore.
No, it's not OK, but I also don't think a president has any responsibility towards gamblers in the US or China. Also, "I invested because the president of a random country told me so" is a pretty bad excuse for losing money.
This reminded me of WorldCoin and it was sad to see it's still trading 0.01 above its all time low. I had expected it to go much much down further.
My introduction to it was at a local mall here. A person just approached and me and I politely said "I don't want it" assuming it was the credit cards or donations and he chuckled and said "sir, it's not credit cards" but I kept moving and then he pointed me to that creepy looking shiny globe/round thing. The moment I saw "Sam Altman" mentioned on a print-out kept there, I couldn't run faster out of there. I later read about it and found out this time around the creepy bugger was out scanning everyone's iris.
I think there are many types of scams after all. Good scam, bad scam, legit scam, illegitimate scam et cetera.
Wild story. This is more perverse than rugpulls (i.e., $libra).
I'd blame the bank staff just as much as the CEO. No controls, signing off on wire transfers above material thresholds...I assume that Board and bank officers will get reamed for gross negligence and willful misconduct. Those can pierce liability caps and insurance.
I seem to be in the minority here, and I would definitely be framed as a supporter for saying this, but I'm a nuanced person.
He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although definitely someone near him definitely was, not necessarily a dev, but definitely someone with a "bag", holding it and speculating that it would go up, essentially utilizing their position for personal gain, which I think is a very classic form of corruption.
It's not the minister of economy, it's not his modus operandi (Funds and offshore accounts), this has the markings of someone young. Whatever he got out of it, either by buying early and holding, or by founding it himself, he for sure lost of all of his political capital.
I'll take a look at the specific contract, and addresses, I'm assuming it's a basic pump.fun thing, but there may be more to it.
I dont know which scenario is worse for a president, an experienced economist like him not understanding what he was endorsing or being part of the scam.
He is not an experienced economist. He holds a Master's from a third-rate private university and a doctorate from a degree mill. This myth needs to die.
> He worked for various years as senior economist in a bank
Ah, it looks like you were in a coma between about 2006 and 2012. I have bad news. Sometimes (whisper it!) banks _employ incompetent people_. I would be reluctant to take "oh, well, he once worked for _HSBC_" as that much of an endorsement.
Not to say that everyone who worked for HSBC was incompetent. But, er, clearly they were not all hypercompetent either, given what happened.
He is experienced. I didn't say he did or didn't do a good job there. My answer is a response to "he has no experience as an economist". It's not a response to what you are argumenting.
This would imply he got nothing out of it or even lost money and I highly doubt it because if he lost money he have have instantly sent out the police and justice department until he was made whole. The truth is this is plain corruption but instead of making millions he probably made a few $ 100ks over the span of a few hours.
That level of idiocy for sure begs impeachment. But he's not an idiot if he arose to the presidency, he's got a lot of savvy about how things work and who does what. Definitely worth inspecting inside and out.
You don't need to be a genius to become president as a populist - you just need to get rid of any kind of morals (if you still had some at the outset).
Yes, but you do need some kind of intelligence to last a year as a non peronist in Argentina and getting the economy to turn around and prevent a hyperinflation.
Either way, this event is bad, he is either negligent or criminal, and the opposition has been looking for a motive to impeach him since he took power, I can't believe he gave it to them.
Crypto finally found a great use case then -- It's clearly scam artists and people exploiting their popularity to screw over regular people. There has been an implosion of those recently.
In the future we could use it to measure real popularity by the value of their coin. side note: I've been thinking there should be a HN store where we can buy ingame cosmetics from all these points we've gathered.
Christ, why is it just ok for politicians to outright create and promote Ponzi and Pump 'n Dump schemes?
It doesn't seem that long ago that this would have been a scandal but now with the moron in the Oval Office creating his own meme coins without even trying to hide his business interests, and now the president of Argentina is doing the same shit?
Is this really the world that we want? I mean, I guess the answer is "yes", but I don't have to like it.
Insane timeline. Jimmy Carter had to sell his unprofitable peanut farm to avoid the appearance of conflict of interests, but the current president did a shitcoin pump and dump and his supporters eat it up and ask him for more.
Not quite. Carter put his farm into a blind trust during his administration; when he left office, he sold the farm because it was deeply unprofitable (and had been mismanaged by his chosen trustee).
That one is such a clear, obvious case of corruption. I wish more people were screaming it from the rooftops. I've told a number of people about it IRL and it's shocking how few know. But I guess that's part of the "flood the zone" tactic of the fascists.
For those who haven't been following along, here's the highlights.
Adams did some corrupt shit, like really obviously corrupt. Foreign sources made gift offers. Advisors said "no, the mayor definitely doesn't want those gifts because that would be highly inappropriate and illegal." The mayor's office said "actually, we would love those gifts please continue!" All of this is well documented; yes, they took notes on a criminal conspiracy. Naturally, this resulted in criminal charges. Adams screams political persecution because that's what corrupt politicians do when they're caught.
Trump takes office, and this creates an opportunity for further corruption. Adams and Trump make a deal. Adams will facilitate anything Trump wants to do in NYC vis a vis immigration (which may include tactics of questionable legality), Trump's DOJ will drop the charges.
DOJ lawyers who were in the meetings discussing this arrangement were told not to take notes. Hm. Then DOJ leadership directs the lawyers assigned to the case to file a dismissal. They burn through 7 DOJ lawyers who resign rather than sign a dismissal.
The dismissal was eventually signed by Emil Bove, who had been recently appointed to the #2 position in the DOJ by Trump. Bove's previous role was as one of Trump's criminal defense lawyers.
Because he didn't. As he explains, it seems like all he did was do a retweet of what he thought might be a good thing (like he does a lot), not create the coin and not profited from it. According to his own words:
> "A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever. I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)."
Either the headlines know something we don't know to say he "backtracks on a memecoin" and "Argentinian President Milei launched a memecoin, $LIBRA" or they are not true. Given the context, it seems to be the latter, so I wonder why they'd be lying?
Even if everything you said here is true, he's the president of the country. It is not unreasonable for the president of a nation to do the research of what they're endorsing before they endorse it, instead of backtracking immediately after backlash.
Who decided that? Would you hold that same standard if a politician you didn’t like did it?
I don’t like most politicians, but if Bernie Sanders (someone I do like) blanket retweeted a crypto scam, I would say that that’s bullshit. Unless he was the biggest moron on the planet, he would have to know that a retweet will be read as an endorsement by a large number of people.
A public figure, particularly a high-profile elected figure, particularly a figure who is in charge of how laws are enforced, should be held to a high standard.
But as other people have pointed out, it actually wasn’t just a retweet.
I thought a military had a responsibility to run tribunals and then execute a head of state that uses their power for a promotion, greatly reducing the chance of getting this far into a fraudulent one. Bringing a promotions run to an end, leaving the impeached with whatever profits were already made is obviously not good enough for sorting out the problem.
The finances of Argentina are probably unfixable, but the sad thing is that the United States is now collapsing to Latin American standards of governance. I expect there to be Brazil-style duelling sets of corruption cases after every future election.
It happened in the 20s, before 2008, and it's happening again. Trump doing this is an extra level of depraved, and I suspect the coming crash will follow suit.
It makes me wonder if I should pull my savings out of index funds and just keep cash in a savings account in the short term.
Normally I'd buy treasury bills, but honestly considering that Elon has been fucking around with the treasury's code with no oversight, and considering that Trump's big strategy for eliminating national debt has been to "declare bankruptcy" (whatever that would even means in regards to an entire country that is the world's reserve currency?), I'm hesitant to even do that.
I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
> and just keep cash in a savings account in the short term.
Ah, but remember the tariffs stuff; you could be looking at _pretty dramatic inflation_ depending on how that works out (personally I suspect he will be ultimately unable to do that much for long; there is likely a level of market disruption at which he will be Liz Trussed, but who knows). All is risk.
> I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
No such thing; the EU doesn't really have debt-raising powers. This confuses people, but the EU/EC is _not_ a conventional government, and has only a tiny budget (170bn this year). You can buy European sovereign debt, but it's on a per-country level. Bear in mind that by doing this you'd also be taking on currency risk. Personally I wouldn't touch sovereign debt denominated in another currency; YMMV.
I think she's possibly the _clearest_ example of this in recent years; there've been others (realistically, "screwed up, or is perceived to have screwed up, the economy" is one of the more common reasons for national leaders to get their marching orders), but the sequence of "deranged budget proposal, catastrophic market crash, no more Liz" was just perfect. She didn't even, in the end, really _do_ anything; even the suggestion that she might do the things that she wanted to do was enough to cause a crisis.
(With Trump, the dynamic is a bit different, at least for now; he claims to want to do all sorts of absolutely bonkers things, and the markets are generally going "well, yeah, but you're not really going to, are you?")
Beware the confusing naming! The big index is MSCI All World. Not to be confused with MSCI World, which is pretty much just the US, Europe and Japan.
(You may be _slightly_ late. After years of not doing anything much, European markets are up about 10% YTD, Chinese even more, vs S&P500 4%. There's always a bubble, somewhere...)
Whatever you do, do not buy bonds right now. As they sell off and rates rise, the value of your bonds on the secondary market will get trashed. You'll also have an opportunity to buy bonds with massive yields if the market crashes due to a debt crisis. I mean imagine getting paid 20% per year, tax advantaged, for the next 30 years.
Honestly, the rule with indexes is buy and hold. Although I'm confident we have a crash incoming, unless you need the money soon, you should just hold your index funds and add everything you can to it at the bottom. You'll also have to pay taxes on the realized gains if you go to cash. I do believe that Trump's entire presidency is going to be a massive crash, temporary rebound, and then downtrend through 2028. We will probably not return to highs until the 2030s.
I wasn't planning on buying long-term bonds regardless; historically I have bought short-term treasury bills, usually 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the coupon rate, so I'm not too worried about the value on the secondary market. I'm much more concerned with the fed defaulting on paying me back.
I more or less came to the same conclusion that you listed; I don't really want to create a big taxable event, so I think right now I'm going to keep the stock I have, and in the shorter term keep future income in a savings account for awhile and suss out if there's going to be a crash or not.
Obviously you can't really "time" the market but it's a pretty low-risk experiment on my end.
Listening to it now and it's so eye opening, these guys literally do NOT care about the project, all they care about is making money and using any advantages to get one up on the loser holding the bag.
-"Every one of these memecoins serves to make insiders money, what am i supposed to do NOT launch the project?"
-"This famous person lost $5 million so we made him whole and refunded to avoid any issues"
-"These coins are just a casino"
It's so funny that these guys are way more lucid and honest than most of the "investors"
Edit:
Oh man so this guy spends 40 minutes moaning how sniping and scams are rife in the Solana ecosystem but he himself sniped $MELANIA and claims "To not have made any money" which means nothing to me because I'm sure your bank account grew.
Also looked him up and he has 0 experience in development, LA Based, and was an "entrepreneur" for 7 years before becoming the CEO of a Bitcoin consulting company. This guy is the stereotypical rug pull con artist.
How come Milei, a master economist, go on to promote something he later said he didn't understand? This is the quality of leaders coming into power all over the world. Bunch of incompetent people (in the most charitable read of the situation) or bunch of grifters (in the least charitable read).
Some reports indicate he gets paid to say things about products or companies, which has more credibility because he’s, you know, the president. And that’s what happened with this meme coin thing.
He was never a master a master economist. This is a purposeful memetic disinformation campaign promoted by the owners of first-world mass media.
He holds a degree from a third-rate private university. Private university is where you go to school in Argentina for when you don't have the chops for public university and need to go to a degree mill.
His doctorate is from another bullshit institution made up by a rotting old landowning oligarch who holds prehistoric beliefs in just about everything.
In all honesty, I've read a bunch of positive articles about Millei, and watched the Friedman interview with him. He has multiple economics degrees and really seems to understand economics in a way that Trump does not, IMHO. And, so this is horribly embarassing that he does not understand the basics of cryptocurrencies and tokens and the scoundrels. Understanding economics is not the only point when you are running a country. You need to create a stable environment for citizens.
You don't seem to be considering the possibility that he knew perfectly well what he was doing, and that this was intentional. Rug pulls are popular among celebrities.
You are right, I assumed he was principled and dedicated to the good of the country above all else. Should I reconsider that? Like I said, I read positive things about him and thought was a sincere person. If you have something else I should read, I would be very interested to know what to add to my list.
I've been following Argentina's struggles for a while given my time in Brazil and the parallels to hyperinflation so I was willing to consider his unorthodox approach, but perhaps it blinded me?
There are some good takes in both directions throughout this thread. Based on talks I had with friends and family living there:
Reasons for liking him: he's bringing inflation down, he has been keeping his promises towards retirees, and he's been reigning in some egregious examples of corruption that previous administrations ignored because it gave them political power.
Reasons for not liking him: he's strangling Universities, rent prices are out of control and not properly reflected in the inflation index, and after being first row during Trump's inauguration he decided to withdraw Argentina from the WHO.
A friend of mine who doesn't like him described his policies as "Ron Swanson from Parks & Rec". I think there's a lot to it.
The article explains that this is the first time since 2020 that prices stopped increasing, which doesn't mean they are at a level where people can afford them - the article itself attributes the lower purchase power of the average family as one of the main drivers for why they stopped raising. The article also explains that maintenance (expensas) are 22% of the final rent price and those increased 170% from last year. "We stopped raising prices because we priced everyone out" is definitely what I'd call "out of control".
Anecdotally I also know three families who had to move back to their parent's house because they were priced out of the rental market. I won't say that all of this is Milei's fault (although I do have thoughts about his handling of the Rents law), but nonetheless the current situation is far from good.
I also had a good impression from hearing him speak. He's clearly highly educated and intelligent. But he's also a supporter of Carlos Menem, a famously corrupt politician in the long history of corruption in Argentina.
Whether or not Milei truly wishes to help his country, or if he's using his power for personal gain, is difficult to say. As an outsider, I don't have an informed opinion. But I'm inclined to believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The reality is that the vast majority of people who seek political power are egomaniacs and sociopaths. Very few actually want to help their country.
I don't know how productive it would be to give you random examples as I am wuite biased and find just about all of his actions to be despicable. It sounds like you may be living in something of an echo chamber of sorts. I recommend seeking out news sources that may challenge your beliefs and relying less on social media and YouTube videos. I'm not really sure how to help you to be honest though. Are you watching/reading some form of news on the regular? For me it's NPR but I try to watch some conservative news as well to see what the other side is up to, how they're reacting.
> I've been following Argentina's struggles for a while given my time in Brazil and the parallels to hyperinflation so I was willing to consider his unorthodox approach, but perhaps it blinded me?
He met with the founder of this thing several times. They lowered the age allowable for trading to 13 years and up right around the time he met with these people. The con wouldn’t have worked without him spreading it. Multiple of his closest allies immediately replied that this was not a mistake.
The man as in an irredeemable narcissistic moron. We’ve had this conversation several times with the same conclusion over and over again. I get that not everyone is into Argentinian politics but by this point it’s well-established knowledge.
> Sorry, when you are the president you don't get that leeway to make mistakes and then correct them by saying "sorry, my bad!" No way.
What does "don't get to" mean? Descriptively, this is false; normatively, this seems like a completely impossible standard to hold presidents to. You want them to literally never make any mistakes?
I think not endorsing specific crypto rugpulls as a solution to help small businesses [on the day they rugpull] in the first place isn't a particularly high normative standard to hold public officials to, especially not public officials who claim to be experts in economic revitalisation. Owning mistakes feels like "with hindsight, I probably shouldn't have pursued this tax policy", not "with hindsight I probably shouldn't have been the prime pumper in a pump and dump scam, but now I'd like to put this experience behind me"...
(cf some fashion blogger with no understanding genuinely being able to claim that promoting crypto was an easily-made mistake)
I mean, the standard for politicians, especially US ones is to never ever admit mistake. If they do, they get no leeway. However, if they double down, they get their camp defend them up to absurdum.
So maybe, the "sorry, my bad" is the superior way about mistakes.
>Sorry, when you are the president you don't get that leeway to make mistakes and then correct them by saying "sorry, my bad!" No way.
Did you really put thought into saying this or are you just voicing absurdities for the sake of it?
Either you're saying that an all too human political leader/head of state should never once make any mistakes during their administration, or you're saying that they should double down on anything they claimed and never admit wrong-doing (Trump-style, essentially)
I'm saying crypto should be held to a higher level of scrutiny by everyone, and if you are the president of a country you should not involve yourself in crypto without thinking it through a bit.
You might disqualify yourself for running for office in the future if you want to continue to argue with me on this. </joke>
The Lex Fridman interview was awful. Milei hasn't said a single interesting thing. I was expecting a lot more from (I think) the first politician following the Austrian school of economics.
Many of the people who appear to me to talk the most sense (eg: Tyler Cowen) follow the Austrian school. It being fringe does not mean they're wrong. It could be the mainstream is wrong. I'm not an economist and don't know.
In all likelihood, the reason they appear to talk the most sense to you is that both you don't understand what is wrong with them¹ and you never even read the actual theories they pose themselves against.
Anyway, the criticism about the Austrian school isn't even that it's wrong. It's that it's neither a theory nor a school of though. There isn't much "though" in it. But when you get to the views of an actual person, they will necessarily be more complete than the school, and need to be evaluated independently.
1 - "I can clearly see that objects stop moving without anybody messing with then. That Newton guy makes no sense whatsoever."
Fringe means that it attracts weirdos, demagogues etc, as things normally fringe for a reason, but even if they are not, people have so much reputational risk for publicly advertising these views, so that either suggests they are grifters, so they do not have reputation to start with or they have poor judgement.
You got conned. Anyone who watches his actual interviews first hand can see that he’s mentally unstable, holds a degree from a third-rate university, and is more concerned with his own narcissistic tendencies than actually governing.
I do have to admit more and more Friedman seems like he is more intent on building his subscriber count than actually asking tough questions. I can't say I feel like his fact checking is worth anything if it ever was. I should have known better.
> he is more intent on building his subscriber count than actually asking tough questions.
It's quite a sad indicator of the state of knowledge in the world where Fridman is considered the more "intellectual" of pop podcasters when the most popular podcasts are crap like Rogan, Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, and Call Her Daddy.
Because Fridman will literally have a guest with platform A, like Netanyahu, and agree on 95% of his controversial points with little pushback. And then immediately after have on Yuval Harari, with the opposite opinion on those controversial points... and agree with 95% again with little pushback. Fridman softballs and is almost useless except as a megaphone. You'd rather have him cut out and have Netanyahu and Harari debate on their own merits.
> Because Fridman will literally have a guest with platform A, like Netanyahu, and agree on 95% of his controversial points with little pushback. And then immediately after have on Yuval Harari, with the opposite opinion on those controversial points...
Isn't that his whole schtick? Letting people voice their different opinions? Yes his questions are soft. And yes, I'd love to see Netanyahu and Harari debate - can you make that happen?
Staying their and listening to people make false claims over and over again without challenging them on any of the lies or grandstanding is not a service to anyone. At the very least, no one should be looking at a Lex Friedman interview hoping to hear the truth of any kind.
What if I go to a dinner party and someone lies or omits crucial facts?
I guess take it for what it is -- it's a conversation recorded on YouTube ... maybe don't be fooled by the suit and the mics. Anyone can buy those, there is no certification AFAIK :-)
(I'd also say that 95% of journalism you see on TV is not much different than a conversation recorded on YouTube, i.e. they don't do fact checking themselves.)
The dinner party isn't broadcast to millions of people. With a great audience comes great responsibility. "Just let people talk" doesn't cut it. Of course, there is also lots of bad journalism in traditional media.
> maybe don't be fooled by the suit and the mics. Anyone can buy those, there is no certification AFAIK :-)
It's not useful if you don't push back on people who have agendas and who are willing to lie their teeth off to promote whatever grift they're pushing.
Fridman gets his guests to open up, which is valuable, but yes he does that by being uncritical of basically all guests ...
For example, I didn't know who Vivek R was before a month or so ago, and I watched the Fridman interview with him. I actually thought he came off very well ... He got to hit his high notes
Vivek got challenged a bit there, in a good way. I saw a lot more of the holes and inconsistencies
(Ezra Klein seems to be a reasonable centrist, more like the reporters of 20-30 years ago. After reading NYTimes since the 90's, I stopped taking at least half of NYTimes seriously maybe around 2015. They were/are literally trolling in their Op Eds for clicks, and greatly expanded that section. But there is still some stuff worth reading)
I also watched parts of Fridman's interview of Milei, and didn't form a strong impression, maybe because of the translation.
Friedman is, like many people in this age of podcasters and influencers, another fool who's not only out of his depth in most interviews, but too self-centered to do anything to change it.
His political analysis when interviewing people in that area is laughable. When interviewing chess players it's clear even to me, a mediocre player who barely reaches 1500 in lichess, that he's totally out of his depth and wasting precious time asking generic questions.
Unfortunately the only good interviewer of this generation is the chiken wing guy.
Dwarkesh is basically doing what Lex tried to do early on before he became Rogan-lite. Looking at Lex’s range of topics in the last year it’s no wonder he’s out of his depth
He has access to the same resources that everyone here does, probably more actually. Instead of retweeting the first "interesting" thing that pops up on his feed, hear me out on this, maybe he could have quickly Google'd/DuckDuckGo'd/Kagi'd/Yandex'd this before he retweeted it.
No, they don't teach "meme coins" at university, but I don't think that's really relevant.
That's hilarious/interesting/terrifying, but my naive outsider understanding is that "risks impeachment" is just something opposition lawmaker Leandro Santoro said once, not, like, an impending problem. Anyone know anything more specific/to the contrary?
The opposition party doesn't have the numbers in Congress to even start the impeachment process. Regardless it's still a decent reputational hit for Milei
Despite the known facts is absolutely shocking that an economist promotes a cryptocurrency (even worse: a "meme" one that was created minutes before his tweet), as is widely known that there's no value at all in there but pure speculation, that's what puzzles me the most. If people with little knowledge on economics know this how can't he?
How can a president with an army of advisers let him publish something like that? Even if it was his very own mistake it is really unbelievable that people around him didn't know a thing on the matter, is just simply not possible.
He really should stay away from the stupidity of social networks and do better for the country that is still going through hard times.
In one occasion he also denied the climate change, possibly due to Trump's position, showing that he doesn't know a thing about certain topics. In such situations he should really shut up and get properly informed.
I'm sorry but anyone buying this story is clearly either
A) A fool that hopes to rugpull someone in the future
B) A fool who hasn't made a 5 second google search to how all these coins operate
Either way I have yet to meet any "investor" that has made any money in these investments that couldn't have been made by just parking some cash in Bitcoin / Ether / DOGE if you really wanted to get a taste of cryto.
It's a shame that as I watch more and more of these articles and investigations line up it's clear that there is such a demand to lose money from the populace that they will really turn a blind eye to when political leaders / oligarchs / techbros do it in hopes of being able to cobble together a get rich quick scheme like this.
"It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe"
Has the media or world at large even noticed the $TRUMP scam? I've only heard of it through Voidzilla, is that reflective of my bubble or is 'flood the zone' working?
The timing was definitely chosen to let it get lost in the noise.
It also plays neatly into conservative ideals of letting the free market reign and “do your own research” is an excuse for everything. It’s trendy to blame only the buyers of these coins while praising the creators as genius marketers.
That said, the Trump and Melania coins have generated a lot of anger in the crypto space. At first people were twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it was all very good, but one by one they seem to be capitulating to the idea that it’s not even good for crypto.
It's so transparently a way for Trump to extract money from his constituents that a part of me wants to respect it.
But no one deserves to be scammed. I don't really get along with Republicans, I gotta admit I don't really like most Republicans now, and I find the Republican platform reprehensible, but I wouldn't wish being scammed for a conman on my worst enemy.
To me Milei is worse because he should know better with his background in economics. Argentina is also a relatively big user of crypto due to their currency being worthless, crypto actually has utility there [1]
Trump has been licensing his name to anyone who asks for decades.
I mean... at a certain point, with memecoins, it's just about the scale of said pull, not the presence.
There have been concerns of a pump and dump scheme and analysts have viewed it as a "disaster." A forensic analysis commissioned by the The New York Times concluded that 813,294 wallets lost $2 billion by trading the coin while the president's company and partners profited about $100 million from trading fees. According to Fortune, "Less than three weeks after its release, President Donald Trump’s memecoin has produced more losers than winners. For every dollar in trading fees the Trump crypto creators raked in, investors lost $20."
As was noted elsewhere (I forget the source), it's zero sum: anyone who makes money is making it off someone who is losing money. In fact, it's less than zero sum because of platform fees.
Yeah, this is the thing that made me realize that cryptocurrency is pretty much always a bad investment.
Stocks aren't zero sum, at least in their idealized form; if I buy a share of some company, they can use that investment to create products or provide value in some form, and if the product is good then that gets reflected in the stock price increasing. It creates value, and the stock price follows.
With cryptocurrency (with maybe the exception of the more computation based stuff like Ethereum?), it doesn't really do anything, it's not creating value. It's just transferring between wallets, and the value increase is pretty much entirely speculative.
Obviously not all stocks are "ideal" like I mentioned above; there have been plenty of cases where stocks are ponzi-adjacent, and it's certainly not uncommon for stocks to be overvalued during bubbles and the like, but my point is that stocks aren't inherently zero-sum like cryptocurrency is.
So, to see if cryptocurrency is a pyramid or not, just look at how much is transacted compared to its total value...
Or don't, because you already know the result. But it's not inconceivable for a cryptocurrency to create value. It's just that nobody did one that does it yet, and the culture around them makes it less and less likely as time passes.
I don't think cryptocurrency in its current state could realistically work as currency though, because it's deflationary in nature. For the same reason we don't use gold or silver as currency anymore.
The purpose of buying a coin like $TRUMP is not to make money. It is to help Trump. You expect to lose money because the entire goal is to transfer money to Trump.
You and the New York Times seem to have misunderstood this important point.
Interesting thesis, hadn’t heard that! There’s lots of people on Twitter who admitted to losing tons of money unintentionally, but of course it’s hard to prove what the silent majority was thinking. I am still a little dubious tho, sorry:
1. Why didn’t any of the marketing materials say that?
2. Why launch $MELANIA?
3. Why didn’t people just trade around a couple bucks over and over to rack up fees, rather than investing as usual?
4. This is edging on partisan politics I guess, but: why donate to the billionaire president…? He doesn’t need a legal fund, he now has free housing, and he’s selling more direct merchandise (watches, NFTs, bibles, etc.) than ever. Just seems like a weird time to donate.
Surely all cryptocurrencies are memecoins. There's very little debt in these things, so that it isn't a source of value, and there are many popular systems, from Bitcoin to Ethereum, so isn't any that can be said to be somehow special.
In the US you can’t grant coins any ownership or benefits that might vary in value. Meme coins are the only legal crypto so that’s all you get. It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.
We had an entire saga of ICOs launch and fail to deliver value.
The notion that laws are preventing a golden age of crypto prosperity doesn’t make any sense. There are numerous countries where these coins can operate and they still don’t deliver any of these claims.
> It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.
What a weird claim. I assume you’re talking about CAFE regulations, but with an extremist conservative talking point twist.
This is a favorite talking point, but people conveniently ignore the fact that we have small and fuel efficient pickup trucks that people don’t buy. Honda made a FWD unibody pickup that fit many needs, but people just don’t want it.
Not to mention the fact that the CAFE regulations were 2025 targets, or that we have had multiple presidents since then and different political parties have had their chance to change things.
Has anything really changed since the ICOs? It’s just the same scams being wrapped up slightly differently but in the end 99.999% of these coins are net negative value to the world and their “investors”
Yes you can. Of course if your crypto is a security you have to treat it as a security, you have to register it file a prospectus, etc., but it is doable.
I am a “crypto adherent” who champions decentralized networks and byzantine-fault-tolerant protocols, and I have been using strongly pushing for the original narrative of trustless smart contracts cutting out the middleman. I think there are many use cases for it.
I think your pitch would be significantly stronger if the resources you linked didn't largely revolve around "What if Snoop Dogg had his own currency?"
I'm not ... completely unable to be persuaded that there are use cases for cryptocurrency. But "Ashton Kutcher should have Aston Kutchercoin, and develop some sort of referral-based pyramid-shaped scheme with it for his fans" is... what is that?
1) A way to fill unsold seats at venues, and always have sold-out events
2) A way to reward his members for spreading his message and bringing more people
3) A way to turn his audience into an army of promoters
4) A way to be independent of banks, and accept global payments
5) A way to have a global online movement that becomes bigger than Ashton Kutcher himself... having subcommunities be empowered to get together and form their own meetups, see it happen around the world, if they get large then Ashton and his crew can come and do a rock concert there
It's great for political campaigns and many movements as well. We did it for Yang's 2020 campaign for example, with "Yang Gangs", that was very early days in 2020
This is extremely vague and seems to be so on purpose in order to just have some nebulous "attack". Do you really think Web2 platforms aren't the epitome of rentseeking, by taking advantage of their role as middlemen?
This is like asking why people should switch from telephone switchboard operators, to automatic switchboards. Or why should anyone switch from livery cab services to Uber.
Technology may be "less proven" initially, but it's far more reliable in the end. It also removes a whole class of inefficiencies and conflicts that won't be possible with smart contracts, the same way that you could remove them if you switched from anything custom to anything standardized.
If you just stopped repeating the same tropes "web3 bad" for the sake of saying them, and engage with the substance, you'll see that this is a case of standardization, automation and programming what was previously ad-hoc and requires costly arbitration after the fact.
Okay but 1) arbitration is often desirable, which is why these systems allow it, and 2) traditional software can automate just about anything web3 can if you have the same degree of coordination among counterparties
No one said that arbitration isn't desirable, when there is a problem.
It's like saying doctors and medicine are desirable once a medical condition arises. But sometimes, preventative medicine and eating right in the first place is better.
An once of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix. It's better to just have existing systems. Like for example having red lights at intersections, where everyone knows when it's their turn to move.
You understand that software can automate things. That's good. Now you have to understand that web3 is nothing but software which is decentralized and byzantine fault tolerant, so you can trust that the code is being executed correctly. This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database, and then we can catch them and try to recover from this corruption using litigation. That's what MtGox was.
But you can implement transactions without any recourse trivially using existing technology today...
> Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix.
Such as?
> This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
Massive theoretical improvement. No debate there. The question is about applicability, which I notice you've still not made concrete.
> It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database
I don't know, it basically seems to work and as far as I can tell, you're about a billion times more likely to have your shit stolen from you in the web3/cryptoverse than using the traditional financial system... except of course if you're a criminal and/or a more grey-area "unsavory character" to some of the main stakeholders. Which that is a good usecase for this tech, of course.
Are you serious? There are so many problems it can prevent, because they are nearly impossible to occur now:
1) People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption (this is the big one)
2) Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should (this is the reason that databases use stored procedures, for example)
I can list a few, but there are literally thousands:
1) In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked. You can have N winners, and once the N+1st arrives, it returns the money to the lowest bidder who can bid again. Bids increase at a predictable rate, everyone knows the deal upfront, etc.
> People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption
I don't understand why you think this is so critical? This is a solved problem - just have backups and basic security. If it's really critical, there's a lot of ways to log changes. It's not a big deal.
> Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should
Ok, but we have that already. They're called regular contracts. If they have bugs or unexpected problems or someone doesn't follow through, you can get the state to make them.
> In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked
And how often is this a problem, exactly? The article says it happens maybe once every five or six years.
> 2-5
We have all of this already. Banks, HR software, escrow, reserves. It works fine.
You want the ability to unwind a contract or a transaction if something goes wrong. In fact, the contracts are only really used if things go wrong. Most of the time, the parties just follow the contact voluntarily.
To add on: if someone's "irreversible" crypto transaction goes awry, do people really think they're not going to go to court and/or that courts won't do exactly what courts do in every other case of fraud?
"Your honor, the smart contract was clear as day: this fraud was totally above board" is not going to work. I promise.
1. Well, you want to have your coin usable to pay for something in your own community. The first thing you can offer are unsold seats and other things that literally cost you nothing. People who earned your coin can buy seats at your events, or sell them to other people (e.g. who live locally) to attend the event.
2. With your own coin, obviously. If the coin has value aboard a cruise ship, or events, etc. then everyone wins. There are many businesses that can benefit from selling unused inventory, and they may as well sell it for coins earned for things like bring other paying customers, contributing great testimonials, content, etc. Imagine being able to go on stage if you earned enough "loyalty points" or whatever.
3. Loyalty points have been around forever. And no, fans are not already promoters. I know in my own personal experience that even INVESTORS who invested in your company often sit back and hope that you'll make them a profit somehow, instead of bringing others in behind them. Let alone people who just come to a show. The easier you make it for them, e.g. having your own site with custom links that they can share and earn "affiliate revenue" in your own coin, the more traffic you'll get.
4. You get more traffic. More audience. More capital. More money. More loyalty. Independence from having your speech restricted or demonetized. Look at all the youtube personalities openly saying that they can't say this or that. Many comedians and performers are sensitive to being censored.
5) Also you can easily collect money from a global audience, and pay out to a global audience, without being a central bottleneck (FinTech) and without being required to post surety bonds as a "money-transmitter", instead letting people transact directly and you don't have the liability, and they don't have to trust you like they trust Binance or FTX or Celsius with custody of their funds etc. etc. You just provide the Web interface, they do the transaction, facilitated by IMMUTABLE smart contracts.
Yes, exactly. It will be paid for in a coin that was issued by the community or the celebrity themselves.
The celebrity gets to have their own web server, their own coin, etc. making them independent of Big Tech and Big Banks. They can't get deplatformed. Their community can organize however they deem fit. The smart contracts allow everyone to trust the system.
Just saying someone will "pay you" like they did for millennia doesn't really discuss "in what medium". We have long moved past commodity money, gold blocks, then gold coins, then paper banknotes, to electronic money inside regulated banks, this is just the latest form that money can take.
Opposing it for the sake of opposing it, is like opposing the Web and HTTP and open protocols, because you think AOL and MSN walled gardens ought to be good enough for anybody, and no one really needs any custom servers or self-sovereign websites.
I had the exact same thoughts.
But, also, why is it a good thing that risk is passed down to the users of the currency?
In the regular system risk is passed upward to regular bank you deal with, then upward to the government bank. The frustrating part here is that the regular bank makes all, or very nearly all, the profit, yet passes on the risk. This gives them enormous amounts of power, through wealth, which is far from ideal.
But, much, much worse is the concept of removing the regular bank, and government bank, replacing them with a random person online. And passing the risk downward to the users of the currency.
You don't replace the bank with a random person, but with a smart contract trusted by the community. The whole point is to eliminate trust in the middleman completely from many transactions, and prevent a growing class of conflicts from even starting. That is why you don't need to post surety bonds, for instance!
Pyramid schemes are illegal, but Multi-Level-Marketing schemes are legal.
And you don't need multiple levels. You can have one level. That's called affiliate marketing.
Loyalty points are a thing. You can earn them as an affiliate, for instance. It doesn't have to be a pyramid. But if you are going that route, almost all startups are "pyramid schemes" that end up with an IPO where the public continues to demand rents be extracted perpetually to boost stock price endlesssly, resulting in increased "enshittification". I'd rather people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction and enshittification for everyone else.
>Pyramid schemes are illegal, but Multi-Level-Marketing schemes are legal.
In this case, this wouldn't even fit the mold for a multilevel marketing scheme, or even affiliate marketing. There are real cash flows detached from a buy-in both of those schemes.
>people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction
Again, there's cash flows underlying shares of a company. There's not in the case of a digital asset that people refer to as a coin or token.
Not sure I understand what you're trying to say. There are "real cash flows" in every case, just what you consider as the unit of account is different.
As far as shares, no. It's completely different. Shares are equity securities, that entitle people to dividends or they want the shares to go up in price. Regardless, it sets up a never-ending demand for enshittification and rent extraction that you see across Big Tech. Utility tokens are fundamentally different and don't have those perverse incentives, and remove the shareholder class. It's like comparing shares in Disney Corp, to Disney Dollars.
MLM schemes and affiliate marketing businesses will have, or be related to, underlying businesses of selling products which generate revenue, and they'll have some level of expenses related to producing these products. These are components of an operating cash flow. Businesses, whether private or public, are expected to either have healthy cash flows, or would be expected to grow their cash flows in the future in the case of a startup, to support the share price. Also, shares don't necessarily "entitle people to dividends" as shares often have no dividends. In the case of cryptocurrencies, there is no underlying physical product, nor underlying debt, nor a cash flow generating business.
You are correct about businesses, but very confused about Web3.
I am saying that Web3 should be used by existing celebrities to monetize their existing fame and social capital, sell unsold seats, etc.
I am saying that existing organizations, communities, including entire cities, can benefit from having a decentralized system powered by smart contracts, rather than a random FinTech that posts a surety bond, powering their commerce at scale.
Yes, shares don't necessarily entitle people to dividends, but the point is that the shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, forever. And this is a problem, that doesn't exist when you have utility tokens and cut out the parasitic shareholder class completely.
Which one of those five have actually happened in reality, and to what extent?
"The American Conservative further stated that a contingent of Yang's digital followers were only backing him for "a fresh platform for surreal and cynical humor" and that Yang had to denounce part of and distance himself from the movement, which largely stemmed from digital supporters of the Trump 2016 campaign.[85]"
Question for you - what are the most energy efficient crypto protocols that could serve as the underlying network for a distributed system? And have there been any studies that look at the total energy consumption of a system of any reasonable size using various crypto protocols?
Well, once you move beyond proof-of-work, the energy use drops 99%. It's not about energy, it's about bottlenecks. Blockchain has bottlenecks, and if you have one blockchain for all the apps, it's going to be either inefficient or centralized.
Back in 2017, I designed a system to avoid global consensus:
I have heard every reasoning for regular currency to have more value over cryptos since 16/17 when I started paying attention.
Gold Standard, Government Protection, Debt, Government credit instruments.
But everything I read about currency tells me that its largely always just agreed upon make believe. The case with the Real absolutely confirmed that for me.
The benefits of having a common/standard unit for an economic ledger are enormous, as it greatly reduces trading friction. That added benefit has real (i.e., not make believe) value, and the more liquid the currency the higher the monetary premium.
Even after hyperinflation, if you normalize to the money supply, currencies generally don't lose value without losing liquidity (being less "agreed upon") .. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
Just like currency. All of those were imaginary since they were invented. People have create physical representations for currency in particular, but that doesn't change the fact that it's only a group of people agreeing on something that only exist on their heads.
Equally imaginary things are "corporations", "governments", "military"... If you push hard enough, even "person" fits that, but this one is deeply entrenched in people's minds.
It's literally true, though. Cryptocurrency itself doesn't suddenly render contracts unenforceable or the ability to use courts etc to resolve conflicts. What hinders it is anonymity of the other party, but that's something that cryptocurrency merely enables; whether to engage with anonymous parties or not is still a choice. It does not preclude you from, say, suing Coinbase if they owe you some BTC.
And, conversely, if you try to pay with cash to some shady people in a parking lot, there's not much good you're going to get out of courts if they defraud you.
Ordinary currencies have value due to the enormous debt in it.
If people fail to obtain units of the currency, they default on obligations that have much greater value than the value of the all the cash in the currency. Thus in an ordinary currency the incentive isn't to ignore it, or to sell, but to hoard it so that people can't obtain the money to pay their loans in order to create a crisis so that they can obtain a large fraction of the value of collateral.
This is prevented by central banks. If you try to execute this corner, you will drive up prices, so they will start printing money.
So Bitcoin and Ethereum, both remain memes. Fiat currencies have non-mem value due to the debt.
Most people don't realize that governments can't just "print" currencies and the few that do (ie: Turkey, Argentina, etc...) have chronic hyperinflation. The US went a bit loose with supply and it already came back biting and still to this day struggling with the higher interest.
The government does constantly devalue the currency, though. It does it at an imperceptible pace to not scare the chickens and make business viable. But that's the most they can collect from this system. Anything more and they blow the whole monetary system away.
Yes, but when demand for the currency leads to a prices increasing,such as from an attempted corner, then you do not destroy price stability because the person operating the corner is buying the cash with something.
The money-printing used to break a corner can in principle be small and you can even have an inflation target of zero and still print money to break such corners.
What I want to emphasize with this though, is the source of a currency's value. The collateral of the debt of the loans denominated in it and the social and economic consequences to individuals of defaulting on loans in it. That is the end-source of demand for a currency, and that guaranteed demand is so great that it makes attempting to corner the market in the currency make sense.
If you cornered the market in bitcoin, there's no one who would have to buy even one. That shows how little bitcoin is worth, i.e. zero.
What you are saying, if I understood you correctly, is that money is a method of accounting. If all money is borrowed, then money is literally worth 0, which what a unit in an accounting system is worth.
If this makes sense to you, then it'll make sense why Bitcoin is worth something. There is a circular demand to it even without debt. I'll not argue to the legitimacy of that demands (scams, phishing, laundering, etc...) but it is demand and it creates a baseline value (beyond the boom/busts it cycles through).
No, absolutely not. Money has value because of the loans. It is not without value because of the loans.
Because there are denominated loans in dollars people who have those loans have to get dollars to avoid losing their houses etc., and therefore dollars have value.
Because there's very little in loans denominated in Bitcoin, bitcoin has no value.
Dollars ultimately have value because the United States government collects taxes in dollars. Who demands Bitcoin, except speculators? It's value is entirely propped up by it's cultural expectation - meme value - with no tether to a real source of demand for BTC.
Dollars are the currency Bitcoin is most commonly compared against, and for people who have easy access to USD it can be very hard to see how btc has utility. But if you compare to other things (e.g. commodities with a monetary premium, or fiat from a small country), it's much easier to comprehend.
It is work to 'get' it tho. All the info is available; I can't make it easier to understand than many others out there already have.
Anyone who needs to conduct transactions without having their name attached to it, and cannot meet personally to use cash. Online black market purchases, say.
You're not wrong that like 99.9% of BTC value is from speculation, but it does have its valid use cases.
It really isn't about taxes, and more about trust and collective faith. The USD isn't backed by cold economic calculation, it's... a big dream we all agree to keep dreaming. And that's mostly fine.
I mean, if you have 1 mil usd + of eth or bitcoin, you have a pretty decent pile of cash that is vaguely stable (not massively different to gold), and that government cannot touch or (if you do a good job) even know about.
From a personal perspective, that absolutely has value. From a public perspective, is the existence of that a good thing? Whole different kettle of fish (and then you're back on the whole "is end to end encryption bad" argument).
If Trump (or whoever) goes on social media to promote Bitcoin, it'll probably pump 5%-10%. And if it falls, it'll fall roughly back down to where it was.
If he goes on to promote some unknown shitcoin, said coin could easily pump 1000%, and fall harder.
I think the point was that it gave his supporters a quasi-legal way to donate money while skirting campaign finance regulation, making the trumpcoin itself not so much a unit of currency as a receipt - a proof of loyalty.
> You are equating legitimacy with liquidity, and the that isn't necessarily true.
How so? Liquidity is a measurement of how easy it is to trade, and if it's easy to trade there are many people/entities that believe it's "legitimate" currency, or they wouldn't trade for it
Parent said "store of value" not "currency". Liquidity is probably sufficient for a currency (depending on the features of the liquidity), but it is not sufficient for a store of value.
Fair enough; store of value additionally requires restricted supply so that the value isn't debased. But in the context of this thread, that just strengthens the argument that 'Bitcoin is different'.
It also requires a value proposition that doesn't depend on the current zeitgeist, among other things. Society changes, and stores of value need to exist outside that change, lest they be left behind with the norms and dogmas.
> Society changes, and stores of value need to exist outside that change
I completely agree. I don't think this is different from saying the store of value needs to stay liquid tho. Bitcoin is currently very illiquid compared to many things, but there's no reason to think it's liquidity will decrease, and based on trends and first principles of what makes something a good 'money', significant reason to believe liquidity will continue to increase
I don't even have a problem with some unwitting celebrity promoting this kind of stuff. They aren't subject matter experts and I imagine they have grifters targeting them all the time.
What I do take issue with is this keeps happening because there's a lot of money to be made off transaction fees so nobody looks too hard into how fraudulent any of these memecoins are before allowing them on the trading platforms.
Admittedly, I don't know how the trading system works so maybe the platforms taking a cut of the profits from the blatantly fraudulent activity are victims too? Crying all the way to the bank I suppose...
Yes, Milei is a amazing economist.
Yes, Milei and his team are improving the Argentinian economy more than anyone could have ever imagined after a single year.
Yes, Milei f*cked up incredibly and might be subject to legal consequences.
All three are true at the same time. Don't mix things up.
Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case:
1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".
2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.
I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.
How would he not be? If he did zero due diligence on this and then pitched it to his countrymen as an investment. Incredibly poor judgement no?
And not only as an investment, but as one that can lead to the salvation of the country...
Finance, Dealmaking and Economics are vastly different fields. Just because one is bad at one of them doesn't mean they can't be good at the others.
It's pretty bad, but smart people do stupid things all the time. Hopefully he learns from this mistake. And as pointed out, it does not automatically make all his prior decisions bad - we can actually analyse them each on their individual merit.
>>smart people do stupid things all the time
That may explain it but it does NOT excuse it or the consequences.
Smart people are also supposed to consider the consequences of their actions a bit more deeply than dumb people, and leaders are supposed to surround themselves with even smarter and more broadly experienced advisers to alert them to potential stupid actions and so moderate their actions to avoid harming others (as well as harming their own reputation or standing).
>>Hopefully he learns from this mistake. ...
Right: so just let smart people with a lot of power make whatever mistakes come along that damage others but face zero consequences for them beyond "we hope they learn".
That is an excuse for keeping incompetent autocrats or oligarchs in power, not a plan for a sustainable and growing complex society.
Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.
Sheesh
> Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.
It will probably be dismissed.
The judiciary in Argentina is largely at the beck and call of Milei's political godfather, former president Mauricio Macri, who uses them to put pressure on his political enemies (largely kirchnerismo), and also makes them quietly drop most lawsuits against him or his allies.
Now, to be clear, it's Macri (not Milei) who has the courts in his pocket, and lately they have a strained relationship, because Macri wants better positions in government for his cadres, while Milei is instead poaching them for his own party. So it's very likely this whole mess will be just a way for Macri to remind Milei who's who, and get a few favors, after which the whole thing will go away.
I'd love to be wrong about this, and for Milei to face the music, but I don't think I'm wrong.
Sadly, I don't think you are wrong either.
>while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden
Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.
You mean a very active Twitter user who is all about cutting government inefficiency didn't know repercussions of his tweet? It was up for 5 hours. By then damage was done. People with large loses have sued and are getting their money back directly from the scammers. How crazy is this
> that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden
Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
With (a previous to this event) 56% approval rating,
> Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
At least half those guys also approve of him. Thanks to his government's policies of reducing inflation and removing middlemen out of social assistance, those people can afford to sustain themselves, and poverty has gone back down to around 37% according to several private economists/universities.
I keep seeing these numbers being thrown around about inflation improving and poverty decreasing in argentina, but then i also read articles about the increasing poverty rates and diminishing of social welfare for the poorest segments of society. I don't live there so I can't say first hand, but this latest move by milei surely made my opinion on him settle on the "not a good guy for the people"
I live in Argentina and you're right.
Milei is not good for the people, and the inflation numbers are highly misleading because the cost in dollars is very high in Argentina right now. Plenty of people losing their jobs, factories closing (some with decades of existence in Argentina), plenty of people begging on the streets.
A lot of people who support him do so out of antiperonist feelings (which has a very strong tradition in Argentina), even as he makes their lives harder or they have to close their businesses due to Milei-induced crises.
I mean, there's such a thing as extending the benefit of the doubt too far, tbh. Presuming he wasn't in on it, if he's promoting stuff like this he's likely barely capable of managing his own finances, let alone a country's.
Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.
It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).
I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.
> stop spending money the government doesn't have
That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.
Sure, but Argentina wasn't doing ING what an MMT theorist would advocate for (which is balancing government spending with available productive capacity). This is evident because they had an out of control inflation rate.
Argentina's economy has been a shit show for a while. And of course outright killing the economy and everybody's standard of living in the process means you're doing something, but it's not what I'd consider helping the economy.
Of course, the first order effect of less spending is not usually good, particulary for those receiving the money.
However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
> it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking.
The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade.
When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).
Isn't this kind of statement metaphorical?
The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.
That depends to a great extent on how the money is actually spent. The USA spent huge amounts of money to get out of the Great Depression, much, much more than it was spending before, and it ended up in a much better economic position, despite a gigantic war soon after.
So, do you know how that magic money should be spent ? And, if you know, do you know how to elect the right people that will spend it on the right things ? There's a high probability it will be spent on friends' big businesses / fraud and abuse
I thought the reason the US ended up with a good economy was because of the war, not despite of it[1]. The war massively ramped up the US's industrial output, and unlike many of the other allied powers there was no need to rebuild once the war ended.
[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
A war doesn't directly improve the economy. It's spending on industry that was justified by the war (plus national fervor) that helped with this. But building ships and planes and tanks is not fundamentally useful for civilian industry. If the same level of investment had been directed to civilian industries instead of military, the economy would probably have been even higher.
I do agree that the relative value of the US economy shot up directly due to the destruction the war brought to European, Chinese, Japanese, and USSR industry and populations - so if you were discussing things in this sense, I can agree.
I really doubt the technology would've advanced as fast without such an adversarial setting. Economic warfare is child's play vs total war.
All that knowledge and redirected output ended up being extremely profitable once it could be used for civilians instead of the military when the war ended.
Not everyone believes in Modern Monetary Theory
Not everyone believes the earth isn't flat either unfortunately.
There's no need to adhere to a particular economic theory (I'm not particularly familiar with MMT) to realize that, at societies scale, money isn't some kind of scarce commodity.
The government spending more money makes money less scarce [0], at any scale (macro, micro etc). That's what we're talking about here.
[0] Unless you believe in MMT
You're moving the goalpost. Here's the original quote:
> stop spending money the government doesn't have
Which has nothing to do with your response.
I interpret "government should stop spending money they don't have" metaphorically as standing in for "don't spend so much money (especially in economically unproductive ways) that it devalues money and misallocates resources so much that it slows down economic growth".
I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.
It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence.
It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend.
So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.
> I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.
There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong
> It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much eadier to overspend than to underspend.
You accidentally came up with the best possible illustration for the topic, and it's a really good illustration that actually goes against your argument:
- If you eat too much, you'll get fat and unhealthy.
- If you eat too little, you'll die from starvation.
And you're right, it's exactly the same for government spending: if the government spends too much, it's not good, but if it's spends too little the economy's dead.
Wouldn't an economic indicator for the "right level" be nice? Maintained by some economic research institute (without some obvious agenda)?
Or does that already exist, I just don't know it?
Maybe it's not just one-dimensional though, i.e., it could matter where exactly spending occurs.
There's no such thing as an economic institute without an obvious agenda, and generally no way that we know to compute the optimal spending. And even if there was some way to decide how much to spend, there would still be the insurmountable problem of deciding what to spend this money on.
It's pretty obvious that some uses of money are more useful than others - if the state spent large amounts of money on buying snow and storing it in the sun, that's not going to have the same kind of effect as spending the exact same amount of money on building new roads. But beyond obviously silly examples, no one can really agree on even the basics of the effects of government spending in other areas.
For example, a question like "if the government pays very large pensions and social aids, does that increase the economy as much as spending the same amount of money on subsidizing private business?" is extremely divisive in economic circles - with opposing schools of economics claiming opposite results as the "obvious scientific answer".
Technically there are a few different ways you can potentially eat yourself to death.
Also I'd say the balanced budget "extreme" is more directly analogous to maintaining a balance of calories in versus out, not starvation.
That's too much of a balanced take though than touted by lots of populists.
Germany put it recently into their constitution that new debt is strictly limited, literally called the "debt brake". That overlooks all the nuances you just explained and in the worst case can cripple the German economy. German politics is full of folks demanding the "black zero", meaning essentially no (new) state debt. It's the literal sense, not the metaphorical sense that you are describing. And people buy it, since that's how their household economy works too. They even have a metaphor for that ("schwäbische hausfrau").
It's terrible. The debt brake is just as bad for their economy as the "rent lid" that's very popular among the German left which is crippling their housing sector.
The worst thing about Germany is how the conservatives have brainwashed their citizens into believing that Hitler came to power “because of high inflation” because they wanted people to forget that Hitler came because of their policies (especially Brüning's deflationary policies). And in the end, with the debt break they just constitutionalized the economic policy that put the Nazi to power, and now unsurprisingly the AfD is booming.
Appreciate your defense of me - that is the point I was trying to make :)
I would go into more depth, but I find there are a lot of people that just fundamentally have different views on economics XD
I was answering to “ That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.”
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> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.
Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.
There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
Real cost in USD going up because they're releasing the artificial peg that most people can't access anyway?
No one says it's going to be all sunshine and roses, but fixing inflation and housing/rental prices seems like a pretty solid start, as well as moving towards eliminating a currency peg.
If real cost of living in USD is going up, how are they fixing inflation?
Where are you getting that they’re releasing the peg? No market instrument has priced that in and every time it gets raised the Minister of Economy moves the bar for when that will happen. They need a capital injection from the IMF that they will never get because Caputo asked for $45 billion loan for the IMF for the same purpose two presidencies ago and it changed nothing.
Poverty statistics are showing an improvement
You meant utilization not capacity. Your other points are similarly confused.
Argentinians disagree.
"The percentage of Argentines who say their standard of living is getting better (53%) has inched above the majority level for the first time since 2015." https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-c...
"Argentina's monthly inflation rate dropped to 2.2% in January, its lowest since mid-2020 after libertarian President Javier Milei took office just over a year ago ushering in austerity measures that have helped stabilize the embattled economy." https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-r...
Dropped to 2.2% after a 120% inflation in the past years?
Compared to before Milei, costs are completely high and people who could live with their (now considered low) income are barely surviving.
You can say he's fixing it, but at the same time pretty much driving almost the whole population into poverty. And then the next president will have to deal with it and probably undo whatever Milei did. It's unsustainable.
Hey, how much was inflation in 2023 when Milei didn't rule?
> 211.4%
https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-december-annu...
2024?
> 117%
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/indec-reveals-argent...
Has inflation been high over at least 2 years?
Yes.
Has it gone done by almost half?
Yes.
According to private economists/universities, poverty is around 37%, which is even lower than we he started to rule, we will have to wait for official statistics in March I believe.
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I’m sorry but opinion polls I this country are worth the paper they’re written on. Menem’s political program wrecked the Argentinian economy the same way this program is doing and the man got reelected with some of the highest increases in poverty during that period.
The important thing is that outsiders are falsely believing that the problem with this country is high inflation instead of low economic productivity. The country has dealt with high inflation for a century and during that time has the highest standard of living of Latin America and a solid middle class.
What Milei is doing is literally regressing in the public infrastructure needed to develop industry while keeping structural costs artificially high. Mark my words: very little will have been accomplished inflation wise but industrial activity will drop permanently as factories that cannot handle high costs leave.
Argentina has an economy that is strongly indexed on USD due to hyperinflation of the Peso and parallel exchanges everywhere ("cambio negro").
What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.
This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.
"However, some described Peronism as a Latin American form of fascism instead."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism
What do you want to say with that?
I know very little about Milei other than a few articles I have read but as someone who has been visiting Argentina on and off for the last 3 years, it does seem to me he has at least stabilized the currency much more than previous admins? I remember the bluerate for dollars being double the previous almost every time I returned and has now stabilized at around 1200 per dollar. I leave no comment on the rest of his policies but that rate of inflation seemed extremely unsustainable so this is no small feat. https://bluedollar.net/ I will admit to being uninformed so if something else is going on here I would like to understand.
The price of the dollar doesn't mean too much, the real cost in USD of living is through the roof and the official inflation index is not reflecting that, what's worse, if your salary is in USD or was tied to USD now you earn even less because they are pegging it so it doesn't go up.
Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.
In 2015 Brazilians could do a lot in Argentina for as low as R$30.
Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).
Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.
Instead, nowadays it's Argentinians that come to Brazil to make a killing at the low prices here.
Your local currency having a crazy valuation after your country just fixed hyperinflation isn't anything new. It's kinda of an obligatory stage. It can get fixed quickly enough if you remove the foreign exchange restrictions.
As always, how the government reacts now to solve all the disparity that high inflation created is what will tell it's a good government or not. The disparities being there right now isn't... But odds are that now his government will terminate before he can do any real work there.
Well, that's true, but I think it's based on the economic plan by Caputo.
Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.
>> how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.
> If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
> it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue
It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
It's been a very messy experiment - he is limited politically in what he can actually do. As as result it's going to be hard to draw firm conclusions about Austrian economics.
> the current increased poverty levels in Argentina
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
[1] https://elpais.com/argentina/2024-12-21/milei-celebra-una-ba...
> If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue.
... Not sure about that; it's not like it has had many success stories, and it somehow manages to chug along.
I went through an Austrian School binge during the financial crisis. The Austrian school had some very prescient and relevant observations on price signalling and why orthodox communism would inevitably fail because of it. Basically when you mess with prices, things get out of whack because they're a very basic and powerful signal of all the inputs into any product or service.
But the school is also a spectrum. If you watch interviews with Hayek, he's quite pragmatic in some ways; he concedes that some social programs can be desirable, particularly around heathcare, but pushes that such programs should be as market oriented as possible. He's also fine with taxes on negative externalities, like pollution.
Von Mises, who many consider the father of the movement, was extremely rigid and uncompromising in his classical economics view and how government should be minimal (though being jewish and watching the nazis operate greatly influence this viewpoint). Add to the fact that much of the modern torch has been carried by American advocates who were heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard (who was a student of Mises and can best be described as anarcho-capitalist through and through) and the whole movement has took a nosedive off the crazy tree.
IMO the movement is now mostly made up of people who at best can no longer see the forest for the trees and at worst are bigoted or terrible people who can't stand that "the government" won't let them do terrible things. I've literally seen videos of Rothbard disciples advocate for debtors bondage/slavery, child labour, and even worse things.
> 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
As in three days before Trump's inauguration? And then $MELANIA the day before? Yes, absolutely no obvious ethical violation there (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-new-crypto-coin-spar...).
> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.
he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises"
Is there any evidence that LIBRA can do that? If not it's even more scammy.
Obviously it's just a memecoin, but that's what Milei's tweet said, he never mentioned "meme" in his tweet unlike Trump.
> Obviously it's just a memecoin, but that's what Milei's tweet said, he never mentioned "meme" in his tweet unlike Trump.
Who gives a shit? Let's stop pretending that utilising the word 'meme' in any sort of associative context is some airtight legal defense against this being a lowest common denominator scam. These are both absolutely illegal and disgusting acts that aim to rob people of their money, using the word meme does not absolve Trump from anything.
https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3241
One of the co-creators of Libra coin reveals that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
> Who gives a shit?
Nobody really should. This is just to make the scam more obvious to Milei's shrinking supporters.
Milei and his closest circle are now stuck in a loop, trying to argue simultaneously that "$LIBRA and cryptocurrencies are just a gamble, a casino for very technical people", "this only affected a minority of crypto gamblers", and that "he wanted to spread the word about a project that could be good for Argentina".
Anyone with a gram of brain matter can tell these assertions are incompatible.
And yes, one of the co-creators of $LIBRA candidly said the way these things work, only insiders make money, and the rest loses. He claims he's upset by "insider trading" being considered a naughty thing, when it's "the way these things work".
Before anyone asks: I've watched all the interviews, with Milei, his economy minister Caputo, and this Davis guy. Not hearsay, they are literally saying all these things now.
It'll be hard to argue Milei is such a savvy guy now (he often makes a show of calling his opponents "econochantas" -- slang for "econo-fraudsters"). And now he's proven himself to be either a bumbling fool, a scammer, or both. A losing proposition for anyone trying to defend his actions.
>and that cannot be further from the truth sadly.
Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.
>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?
Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.
Uh, let's not do that? You can criticize his policies just fine without talking about what preceded him.
Really? A politician shouldn't be criticized or applauded within the context of the long-running political system that preceded him and just maybe, you know, possibly might have had something to do with his being elected, the choices he makes, and their social effects?
Don't be ridiculous. Decades of abysmal government in Argentina is damn important in any conversation about its current administration.
A lot of words for, let’s remind ourselves, is a head of state endorsing a crypto scam. I’d be far more sympathetic if this was a discussion of something complex like Argentina’s economy. It’s not.
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Maybe it can be a place where the world is not always split into team read and blue, hating on each other forever?
Oh god yes please!
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> 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.
Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.
> but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people
Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).
Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.
> usually notable people accept money to promote things
Some businessmen and entrepreneurs (or shady kinds of guys calling themselves so, anyway) are already denouncing Milei (or his close representatives, like his sister Karina, nicknamed "the boss") demanded money in exchange for favors / photo ops / etc. These are guys who have photos with him, not random strangers.
I think there's little doubt Milei is dirty, for all his talk denouncing the "political caste".
Exactly, this was not a memecoin. Agree with your view about Javier Milei.
>I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds
I don't think this is the approach if you want people to side against Milei.
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
> inflation is way down
Inflation is still far higher than it was 15 years ago without contractive policies that are destroying the industrial fabric of the country, and the local understanding of economist that actually know a thing or two is that there is inflationary inertia that will not be solved by the current policies.
> the economy is growing
By no means is the economy growing; industrial capacity is down. The nominal price of goods is going up and the cost of living is going up which appears in some metrics as more money moving in the economy, alebeit for drastically lower production as the real price in US dollars has doubled across every product line. The indexes that show progress use outdated purchasing baskets.
> percentage of poor people is down
Poverty went drastically up at the beginning of his mandate and still has not recovered baseline values. Most poverty indicators continue to undercount the impact of the cost of food, medical insurance and services, which hit poor homes disproportionately. This can be observed by the fact that medicine and food consumption are the categories whose consumption has been hit the hardest.
> salaries are up
Registered salaries using indices that have no accomodated for the changes in inflationary inertia are not very useful. [Consumption, however, is the lowest it's been in 20 years with no sign of recovery](https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/15/el-consumo-masiv...).
Is this article out of date then? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/12/7/a-year-int...
From the article:
> For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.
When he started, the poverty index was around 40%, not 25%. Then it peaked to almost 55%, but now they claim it has descended to around 40% again (It's probably down, but I'd wait a few months for confirmation.).
Also, from 2007 to 2015 the numbers were heavily cooked, so take that period with a grain of salt.
And in ~1990 we had an hyperinflation, that may skew the average in weird ways.
> But two months ago, their rent mushroomed from 90,000 Argentinian pesos to 150,000 — a leap from roughly $88 to $148. It was beyond their ability to afford.
We had a heavy rent control, so most apartments were out of the market and it was difficult to find one.
For some time it was ilegal to raise the rent and the inflation was 100% yoy. So a contract for two years used to say something like you have to pay an average of AR$75K, but only AR$50K during the first year and AR$100 during the second year. So no "rise", only a weird paying scheme.
Also, to renew it, you must pay the new market rate, but the inflation was 200% yoy instead of the predicted 100% yoy. So the new prize was AR$150K and AR$300K (with an average of AR$225K).
(IIRC there were some changes to allow increments that follow the inflation index, but only every 6 months. With an inflation rate of 250% yoy, that means that every 6 months your rent double overnight.)
So IMO it's not outdated, but the numbers are cherry picked and are difficult to understand if you never lived with a 200% yearly inflation.
Difficult to confirm but various sources are reporting a steep drop in poverty from the 50s to the 30s over the past year. https://x.com/michaelaarouet/status/1891031131375423725?s=46 https://x.com/bowtiedmara/status/1883202966900900218?s=46
I have no desire if to influence if people side with or against Milei. If you want to follow him, by all means go for it.
I am however, still going to mock obviously bat shit insane ideas, and telepathically speaking with your cloned dogs for policy advice is absolutely bat shit insane
It would be if it was true.
He apparently did clone his dogs but can you point to the source material (in this case Milei) about speaking with them telepathically?
This just sounds super made up.
I've listen to his interview with Lex F. and his WEF speech and he sounded like a principled free market advocate. Not a single thing he said was crazy so I wonder where did you get this factoid.
Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
It's not made up.
He's said so in speeches I've listened to. He claims his dog Conan (deceased) gives him advice from the Beyond. You can also google the myriad of interviews with him that mention this (and note: not all of them are critical, some found this touch of craziness endearing!).
He also claims his dogs (all clones of his revered Conan) are his "children", because they are the only "people" -- along with his sister -- "who will not betray him". Note that very few people have seen these dogs alive (very few recent photos or videos), and there's concern they may also be providing him comfort from "the Great Beyond". He gets enraged if people question him about this.
The guy is mentally unstable.
> Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
Sadly, in this case the truth is stranger than fiction.
> His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Do you live in Argentina? Because none of this is actually true.
Look at the other side of the coin, too: his policies are authoritarian, he's dismantling science and industry, he's becoming like a religious leader automatically aligned with the US in whatever random things Trump says (e.g. attempting to leave the WHO just because Trump claimed he would do so).
Lots of poor people begging on the streets for a country where "the percentage of poor people is down". Also, this percentage is compared to the previous administration, which wasn't very good and also went through the COVID pandemic.
He's also been sacking close associates left and right, not exactly a sign of a competent government that inspires confidence.
> salaries are up and so on
This is false, but also, the cost of living is going up. Oh, "inflation" won't show you this, but the actual cost in dollars will.
Great take regarding 1 and 2.
Regarding 3 it seems clear to me that he was not an insider, but he was scammed into spending his political capital and reputation.
As a whole, it's classic cargo cult situation,imitating what a more powerful country is doing without understanding the nuances.
If you as the President get scammed into scamming your people, there should be consequences
Milei's hardcore followers are now in an impossible situation:
- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.
Or,
- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.
Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?
Or 3: he was ill advised from someone in his close circle, and their head will roll, but I don't see any minister that would take the fall, maybe a kid under the economy minister, either truly responsible or willing scapegoat
> Great take regarding 1 and 2.
lmao, where is the great take?
Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3241
>Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam.
You lack the gift of nuance, your axiom is crypto=bad, so you are not seeing any difference between what the coin was technically and how it was sold, and that very difference is the basis of fraud.
A "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" would be a completely legitimate enterprise, it implies that whatever money is deposit will go towards that purpose.
I heard the trump thing and it's hearsay for now. They are two different cases, Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.
> You lack the gift of nuance
No, I lack patience for obvious bullshit, and to even attempt to defend such an obvious grift is genuinely pathetic.
> Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.
Let me paraphrase: "Trump said it was a scam up-front, so therefore he's absolved of any responsibility for it being a scam. Trump announced his scam three days before his SECOND inauguration, therefore there is no conflict of interest or abuse of power."
> he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.
> In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year.
We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.
> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"
Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.
I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.
Can you share some link proving that Universidad de Belgrano is a third rate university? I believe it has a good reputation in the country
We don’t really look at publishing metrics here to define what makes a good university; that is mostly determined here by the difficulty and completeness of the programs.
The University of Buenos Aires and a few other national public universities are considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA. Lesser national universities rank second along with specific degrees from some private unis. Then you have several tiers of private universities.
The UB looks good externally because it’s the school for rich kids who don’t have the chops for public uni, as such it invests its money in nice facilities and exchange programs, while its research shines by its absence and it’s really not harder than high school even for STEM degrees, due to its ridiculously low bar.
This is highly opinionated obviously because there are no hard metrics but I can more or less confirm this, the University of Belgrano is generally seen as fairly mediocre, even for private university standards.
The University of Buenos Aires is excellent. Is ranked, by the same rank you dismissed in another message, as the 71th place, the number 1 in whole Latin America. You cannot dismiss every University below 71th place as "ridiculously low bar". This is like saying "UBA is shit, because MIT is better".
I know your type: you throw bold assertions left and right, without a single source to back up. When somebody ask for sources you reply "trust me bro". You back up your assertions with "I never met anyone from Belgrano" (I never met anyone from MIT or Harvard, yet I thing they are good Universities) or "there are no famous people from Belgrano"... well, turns out that Milei is very famous and from Belgrano, so your argument falls apart.
But the whole point (Miley is bad because his University is bad) is invalid. You can study at MIT and be mediocre. You can study at a mediocre University and be top notch. Heck, you can even almost fail at high school and be excellent at your work. Dan Luu, University of Wisconsin after nearly failing high school come to mind, or John Carmack (two semesters at University of Misouri before dropping out, after a sentence of one year in a juvenil home). Guess they are bad at their job, according to your standards. Talk about elitism...
You ask from us a full "believe me because I say so, ignore whatever data you might find that contradicts me, I won't explain why nor point you to alternative sources. Just everything that doesn't agree with me is tainted, manipulated, or wrong. And if you don't have a degree in one of the best 100th Universities in the world and I can't find your research, you are unworthy". Nah, I'm not debating in those terms.
PS. Just noticed this:
> [...]considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA[...]
Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!
We don't care about in Latin America about first-world instutional ranking metrics that play by the game of publish-or-perish and I don't care about convincing anyone; just ask around in Argentina or ask any academic researcher from the country what the most prestigious institutions are and you'll get a unanimous opinion.
> Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!
He did not _finish_ the master at all. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura/otro-dato-academico-impr...
He is a fraud. His thesis is plagiarized wholesale. He is an absolute moron addled on mood stabilizers as has been said by everyone who knows him.
Just look at him in one of the _very few unscripted interviews he's had_ . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpAtBNzQEQ
There's a reddit user with your same nick, and 80% of his posts are about criticizing Milei. The passion with which you do that is remarkable.
The day you realize that defunding critical public institutions sets backs countries by decades maybe you’ll get pissed off too.
I'll see the effects in poverty and employment statistics. Then I may understand your perspective.
I consider now that the country was already being set back for decades.
I like seeing statistics, not arguing emotionally.
And yet, he just did the most impressive turn on a economy on the run towards a hyperinflation ever seen.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Milei: this memecoin event is bad, but so is his political friendship with open self declared fascists, him being a libertarian. He is a populist. But about macroeconomics he is doing, at least, good. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that minimum is simply a hater that doesn't want an honest debate. You can even argue that he did good at macro but bad at micro, and there is a debate. But to call the man "sheer utter moron" in macroeconomics is just wrong.
You are just argueing with the fallacy ad personam: instead of explaining us what policies were moronic, you say "the guy is a moron" and pretend that is enough to have a debate? And then you resort to the fallacy of association: Milei went to this University. I say this University is bad. Then Milei is also bad. Even 20 years after leaving the University and working in innumerable places (among them senior economist at HSBC), or authoring many academic papers. Turns out that https://www.topuniversities.com places the University of Belgrano at 465 best in the world: not impressive, but still of the 132 listed Universities of Latin America Belgrano is ranked the 18th.
If it is third rate and blacklisted, what about the next 114 Universities in the rank?
I don't see his feats as impressive when he was responsible for putting more than half of the population in poverty when he started.
You can look at these numbers and say it's an improvement, but half of the population is still considered poor and the rate at which it's decreasing is not fast enough to consider Milei as a "genius".
That's not true! The poverty rate went from something like 40% to 55%. Now it's back again to 40%. Not good, but not horrific either.
And every economist worth their salt tells you that the number is based on an outdated basket of goods that underweights what has increased in price the most: household services and health care.
Health insurance prices have tripled and household services more than doubled. Basic foodstuffs are now more expensive than they are in developed countries; a pack of pasta is cheaper Costco than a local supermarket.
> And yet, he just did the most impressive turn on a economy on the run towards a hyperinflation ever seen.
This is said by no one except Milei. No serious economist has claimed that we were going towards a hyperinflation. I have lived through hyperinflationary periods and that was not it.
It is _trivial_ to disable inflation if you’re willing to wreck an economy.
I’m sorry I have no intention to reply to this because you’re just making stuff up. Milei has not published a single academic paper and has been credibly accused by many of plagiarism. His h-index is 0. His doctorate is from a degree mill. University metrics are easy to game and about as useful as the Top 50 restaurants in the world. While you’re at it tell me where all those famous academics in UB are, because in years of perusing computer science academia in Argentina I literally never ran into one.
Research Gate lists several publications and two citations:
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Javier...
And https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/autor?codigo=3854649 , where H=1 (not 0 like your parent says)
He's not a great researcher, because he was not a researcher! He was more of a consultant, and published from time to time until around 2016, when he switched to another type of job.
Yeah, this pretty much shows him up, as either best-case, an idiot (duped by an obvious fraud) or worst-case, part of the fraud himself.
Milei's hardcore followers are still reeling. Either way, they'll have a hard time justifying his actions. His reputation has taken a major hit.
was the coin explicitly sold as a memecoin?
Is it not?
I mean, honestly, I think Milei has a bit more plausible deniability here; he _could_ merely be extremely gullible/incompetent. Trump deliberately fleeced his supporters; it's very hard to read his shitcoin any other way.
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Easy champ. This is not X.
If you are driving the bus you should break and accelerate gently.
We found the kuka
Nonsense.
"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.
The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.
Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.
I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?
> ...and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly.
Tell me you don't live in Argentina without telling me you live in Argentina.
How are comments like this ("Tell me X without telling me X") helpful? This is such a low-effort reply; at least briefly explain why you disagree with OP.
Why am I being judged by a low effort reply when even OP didn't care to tell us in detail why "Milei helping the economy is far from the truth". Such stupidity should only be answered with another low effort statement. It doesn't care where you are in the political spectrum, objectively Milei is annihilating inflation, we have primary superavit, lowered state expenses among other fantastic things he did for our country and we are doing great, a lot more is needed but we have 3 more years ahead. Saying he's not helping the economy can only be justified by not living here and having no fucking idea how we are doing. I live here, so I can tell you we are doing FAR better than a year ago.
A very partisan statement from you.
In reality, Milei is wrecking our country. Very high cost of living, poor people begging on the streets, inflation kept low at the cost of depressing the economy and wrecking our industry, factories closing down, etc. It's not hard to keep inflation low if you're willing to destroy the country.
And, you know, being involved in crypto-scams. But that's just the cherry on top. Maybe his dead dog Conan told him to do it, or so his medium told him. (Yes, he does speak to his dead dog via a medium, not making this up).
The Solana trenches are effectively a giant crime-riddled casino. Everyone who plays understands this -- you can make money but you're essentially gambling. I'm not saying this is OK, but it's the current state of things.
When this $Libra token launched, everything else dumped as capital flowed into it, and then effectively got siphoned off by insiders. So even people that didn't chase "Argentina's coin" got screwed. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are some winners in this game, mostly insiders and cabals, but a whole bunch of losers.
I would say something's gotta give, but the stark reality is that America's casinos are always jampacked with dream chasers.
> you can make money but you're essentially gambling.
It is much worse than that, legitimate gambling is fine.
In meme coins everyone knows they are scamming and and it is a pump and dump but just think that there would be some dumb "bag holder".
I was at an (academic!) conference about Crypto recently with a friend. I am an outsider to the whole topic and wanted to "expand my horizon" and see if maybe my expectations of if it being mostly a scam were wrong.
In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.
These people fully know what they are doing.
Sort of like a casino version of musical chairs, but the there's no music.
I don't get the crime part for the most part.
If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
I don't buy into any of the people that claim they were scammed, they knew the rules and they tried to make money out of nothing. Other than perhaps trading unregulated securities, I don't see the actual fraud.
To be clear it is distinct from pretending to be a security for an actual productive company, that is actual fraud, but usually the coins are very transparent about having no underlying value.
> If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.
These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.
(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)
Yet people play at casinos all the time.
There's always people that are ok with gambling and losing on the long run.
But there's people that recognize the zero sum, and bet that they are the ones having the advantage.
It's not like people bought the coin thinking they were helping the country, only conmen trying to outcon the conner bought it.
Although there definitely is an argument for tricking laypeople, I think it was just crypto traders and kids speculating on a coin.
It's very common in cons for the mark to think they are the conmen I hear.
It’s true that the gaming industry has leaned heavily into monetization, especially with loot boxes and microtransactions. Many games now create systems where players feel pressured to spend money to keep up, and younger players can easily get caught up in it. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, and even FIFA have built entire economies around this model. While some argue that it’s just part of modern gaming, it does raise ethical concerns, especially when minors are involved. It’s always a good idea to set spending limits or monitor transactions to avoid unintended charges. Platforms like https://melbet.tg/en also highlight how digital spending is everywhere, not just in gaming. Whether it's online games or other digital services, understanding how these systems work is key to making informed decisions. Games should be fun, but they shouldn’t encourage spending beyond what’s reasonable.
Cigarettes also exist and people smoke and get cancer from smoking all the time.
Does this mean cigarettes are a good thing? Why do they exist in society if they so clearly harm people?
There's a big industry around smoking that has managed to perpetuate itself in society despite the fact that it causes harm. This doesn't mean there's a good reason reason for it to exist; the reality of the situation is that you can entrench yourself in society and become very difficult to remove if you have enough power to do so. It might be that in 100 or 200 years the cigarette industry is finally gone.
Pretty much the same applies to Casinos. Yes, people play at them, and a lot of people that go to Casinos have a gambling addiction. For some, perhaps most, casinos provide a degree of entertainment that is not really a problem but ultimately Casinos are set up as a business that relies on people losing more money than they win. There's things like lotteries which seek to channel gambling addiction into social good.
And even in this scenario; Casinos are highly regulated. Which crypto ponzis are not. The existence of crypto gambling is simply a failure of regulation which is slow to adapt to new technologies. Yeah, crypto bros are in luck that there's an administration that goes as far as to encourage people to fall for these scams. It doesn't mean it's something that's going to last.
I concede that just because something is consensual doesn't mean that it is ethical or legal.
However there is and should be a legal difference between selling tobacco to unknowing customers, like in unlabeled soda or ice creams, against selling to cigarette buyers who are informed.
Similarly security laws are in place to protect legitimate investments, the courts do not want to be involved in inproductive speculative trades. You need to have some nuance between speculative casino games and genuine trading.
You can't treat both cases the same, if you do you do it at the expense of genuine commerce.
In this case, it crossed over to the criminal kind because it passed as an investment security, and was sold as such. So I do backtract in what I said in my original comment, I do see how THIS is a crime, but not other stuff like say, other typical pump.fun coins. Mostly because I learned a bit more about the case.
>I don't get the crime part for the most part.
Neither do many of the people who say such a thing here. Instead they regurgitate classic HN talking points around crypto without really considering their logic.
Simple example: calling something like bitcoin a "ponzi scheme" when it's literally run by nobody in particular and has no specific fraudulent promotion being done by its administrators (since there are none) for the sake of personal gain through redirected funds.
I do think that there' nuances to crypto. But even bitcoin has some ponzi like properties:
1- high reward to early adopters 2- needed to be shared to have value
Although I will make the important distinction that the asset doesn't lose value once it can no longer be shared, which is typical of pyramid schemes. Quite the contrary, it reached critical mass and gained first mover monopoly
_Bitcoin_ isn't a Ponzi scheme, though it does tend to behave a little like one. Many of these memecoins are, essentially, intentional Ponzi schemes, tho.
Is there such a thing as truly "unregulated" here? What I mean is - pyramid schemes are illegal irrespective of the mechanism, so there's always _some_ basic regulation for these things.
I feel pyramid schemes are just a special kind of pump-and-dump scheme, and I don't understand how these aren't being punished effectively and swiftly by the existing laws and enforcement agencies...
Unregulated means that it isn't presented to the regulating authorities, not only is it not submitted for approval to the SEC or the Argentina equivalent (CNV), but it wasn't even submitted for chartering as an LLC (SRL) or Corp (SA) in any Argentina Jurisdiction.
> the company informed him about the Libra blockchain project and its aims to finance private ventures in the country.
I can’t believe people are still falling for these claims. Every single time someone launches a coin with claims that purchasing it will help fund some special cause, there is no basis to the claim.
If you want to fund or finance a cause, give your money to that cause. If you buy a meme coin, you’re only giving your money to insiders who held the coins before the pump.
But of course the motivator wasn't actually to "finance private ventures", it was to rent seek and to speculate about making profit by being first to be in on the thing.
The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my character."
And the little bastard scorpion isn't actually sorry.
Let's see it another way: there's absolutely no way that in the 2-3 hours the post was up a person not familiar with the gamblecoin ecosystem could purchase $LIBRA, let alone pour thousands of dollars in. The people who lost money are all professional memecoin gamblers, and the ones who pocketed in are obviously connected to the project leaders. Cyptobros want to have unlimited freedom to trade whatever they want without regulation, which is fine for me, but then they shouldn't whine when/if they are rug-pulled.
For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project. This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click. Meanwhile, states operate their own lotteries and casinos (e.g. "Lotería de la Provincia") where the poor and hopeful go to pay a tax on their ignorance.
Of course, the president and his advisors are responsible for not investigating enough and blindly trusting these so-called "businessmen". We'll see what the Law has to say about that, but I remind you that Argentina is a place where a vice-president tried to steal a company (look up Ciccone Calcográfica).
Last, the 4.4B number looks huge, but that is just "market cap", i.e. valuation extrapolated to the total supply of tokens, and not the actual amount of money that went into the coin.
> For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project.
Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.
Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
In fact, people who criticize Milei or deviate from what he considers the norm, however mildly, get thrown out of government (see: Ramiro Marra). He has a troll farm run by influencers who will ostracize anyone who criticizes Milei. It's very likely Fran Fijap was told by them to delete his post "or else"...
> This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click.
You would've definitely been able to buy it with cash and a few clicks, for example using moonshot. (And I'm sure a couple other / similar platforms)
The point is the window to buy was 2-3 hours: you had to be ready to trade, and watching either charts or being on a discord or actively checking X and with cash in an account.
People lost money but I doubt there was much collateral damage
Though I agree that the damage will be limited I don't think it would be very concentrated on people paying attention. Considering notifications get pushed and heavy use of large group chats is common in south America does not take much for it to be promoted to laypeople by the more active followers of Javier. Older people particularly at risk given the excessive trust they give to people In position of power, knowledge of technology and readily available savings in USD on non savings accounts or investments.
Older people have their USDs in hard cash and will wait hours at the bank each month to withdraw their pension in cash (i.e. not even use the ATM).
> Older people particularly at risk given the excessive trust they give to people In position of power, knowledge of technology and readily available savings in USD on non savings accounts or investments.
Older people have seen one hyperinflation, a few high inflation periods, sudden jumps in prices, perhaps two or three bank runs followed by confiscation of the deposits exchanged for long term bonds, and I may be missing a few "interesting" events. They don't trust anybody anymore.
>For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project.
So, it's OK to participate and promote a memecoin rugpull if they're not from your own country?
No, it's not OK, but I also don't think a president has any responsibility towards gamblers in the US or China. Also, "I invested because the president of a random country told me so" is a pretty bad excuse for losing money.
This reminded me of WorldCoin and it was sad to see it's still trading 0.01 above its all time low. I had expected it to go much much down further.
My introduction to it was at a local mall here. A person just approached and me and I politely said "I don't want it" assuming it was the credit cards or donations and he chuckled and said "sir, it's not credit cards" but I kept moving and then he pointed me to that creepy looking shiny globe/round thing. The moment I saw "Sam Altman" mentioned on a print-out kept there, I couldn't run faster out of there. I later read about it and found out this time around the creepy bugger was out scanning everyone's iris.
I think there are many types of scams after all. Good scam, bad scam, legit scam, illegitimate scam et cetera.
This is a variant of a pig butchering scam. Pig butchering scams are a dime a dozen and screw over many who get so deep in the game they can't stop.
Cryptocurrency 'pig butchering' scam wrecks Kansas bank, sends ex-CEO to prison for 24 years
The massive embezzlement led to the collapse and FDIC takeover of Heartland Tri-State, one of only five U.S. banks that failed in 2023.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/cryptocurrenc...
Wild story. This is more perverse than rugpulls (i.e., $libra).
I'd blame the bank staff just as much as the CEO. No controls, signing off on wire transfers above material thresholds...I assume that Board and bank officers will get reamed for gross negligence and willful misconduct. Those can pierce liability caps and insurance.
I seem to be in the minority here, and I would definitely be framed as a supporter for saying this, but I'm a nuanced person.
He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although definitely someone near him definitely was, not necessarily a dev, but definitely someone with a "bag", holding it and speculating that it would go up, essentially utilizing their position for personal gain, which I think is a very classic form of corruption.
It's not the minister of economy, it's not his modus operandi (Funds and offshore accounts), this has the markings of someone young. Whatever he got out of it, either by buying early and holding, or by founding it himself, he for sure lost of all of his political capital.
I'll take a look at the specific contract, and addresses, I'm assuming it's a basic pump.fun thing, but there may be more to it.
I dont know which scenario is worse for a president, an experienced economist like him not understanding what he was endorsing or being part of the scam.
That's an interesting question, would we rather have our president be a scammer or scammed.
Similar question, is it better or worse if our country commits war or war is committed upon us?
And perhaps a different question, regardless if whether it is better or worse, which would we rather be if we had to chose.
Also let's remember that 'neither' is also an option. And oops just happened once but let's not make it a habit, is too. No need to go to extremes.
He is not an experienced economist. He holds a Master's from a third-rate private university and a doctorate from a degree mill. This myth needs to die.
He worked for various years as senior economist in a bank, and a high position in an economy consulting firm.
You are systematically commenting trying to harm his reputation in issues not linked to his disreputable act of promotion of the shitcoin.
> He worked for various years as senior economist in a bank
Ah, it looks like you were in a coma between about 2006 and 2012. I have bad news. Sometimes (whisper it!) banks _employ incompetent people_. I would be reluctant to take "oh, well, he once worked for _HSBC_" as that much of an endorsement.
Not to say that everyone who worked for HSBC was incompetent. But, er, clearly they were not all hypercompetent either, given what happened.
He is experienced. I didn't say he did or didn't do a good job there. My answer is a response to "he has no experience as an economist". It's not a response to what you are argumenting.
Note, it still remains disputed whether it is a scam, devs related are not admitting fraud yet. Although there was an admission of insider trading.
It's very likely they are denying to delay legal consequences or continue monetizing.
This would imply he got nothing out of it or even lost money and I highly doubt it because if he lost money he have have instantly sent out the police and justice department until he was made whole. The truth is this is plain corruption but instead of making millions he probably made a few $ 100ks over the span of a few hours.
That level of idiocy for sure begs impeachment. But he's not an idiot if he arose to the presidency, he's got a lot of savvy about how things work and who does what. Definitely worth inspecting inside and out.
You don't need to be a genius to become president as a populist - you just need to get rid of any kind of morals (if you still had some at the outset).
Yes, but you do need some kind of intelligence to last a year as a non peronist in Argentina and getting the economy to turn around and prevent a hyperinflation.
Either way, this event is bad, he is either negligent or criminal, and the opposition has been looking for a motive to impeach him since he took power, I can't believe he gave it to them.
"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by corruption" - Argentinian saying
Crypto finally found a great use case then -- It's clearly scam artists and people exploiting their popularity to screw over regular people. There has been an implosion of those recently.
In the future we could use it to measure real popularity by the value of their coin. side note: I've been thinking there should be a HN store where we can buy ingame cosmetics from all these points we've gathered.
Christ, why is it just ok for politicians to outright create and promote Ponzi and Pump 'n Dump schemes?
It doesn't seem that long ago that this would have been a scandal but now with the moron in the Oval Office creating his own meme coins without even trying to hide his business interests, and now the president of Argentina is doing the same shit?
Is this really the world that we want? I mean, I guess the answer is "yes", but I don't have to like it.
Insane timeline. Jimmy Carter had to sell his unprofitable peanut farm to avoid the appearance of conflict of interests, but the current president did a shitcoin pump and dump and his supporters eat it up and ask him for more.
Not quite. Carter put his farm into a blind trust during his administration; when he left office, he sold the farm because it was deeply unprofitable (and had been mismanaged by his chosen trustee).
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A for-profit media company that foreign interests can pile money into for a quid pro quo, that’s somehow not legally a quid pro quo anymore.
Meanwhile there's a quid pro quo to avoid prosecuting Eric Adams for bribery if he changes his policies. Absolute banana republic stuff.
That one is such a clear, obvious case of corruption. I wish more people were screaming it from the rooftops. I've told a number of people about it IRL and it's shocking how few know. But I guess that's part of the "flood the zone" tactic of the fascists.
For those who haven't been following along, here's the highlights.
Adams did some corrupt shit, like really obviously corrupt. Foreign sources made gift offers. Advisors said "no, the mayor definitely doesn't want those gifts because that would be highly inappropriate and illegal." The mayor's office said "actually, we would love those gifts please continue!" All of this is well documented; yes, they took notes on a criminal conspiracy. Naturally, this resulted in criminal charges. Adams screams political persecution because that's what corrupt politicians do when they're caught.
Trump takes office, and this creates an opportunity for further corruption. Adams and Trump make a deal. Adams will facilitate anything Trump wants to do in NYC vis a vis immigration (which may include tactics of questionable legality), Trump's DOJ will drop the charges.
DOJ lawyers who were in the meetings discussing this arrangement were told not to take notes. Hm. Then DOJ leadership directs the lawyers assigned to the case to file a dismissal. They burn through 7 DOJ lawyers who resign rather than sign a dismissal.
The dismissal was eventually signed by Emil Bove, who had been recently appointed to the #2 position in the DOJ by Trump. Bove's previous role was as one of Trump's criminal defense lawyers.
Absolutely fucking corrupt.
Yep, Adams is terrible.
To everyone who lives in NYC, remember that there is a primary in June. We can minimize how long this asshole is in power.
Because he didn't. As he explains, it seems like all he did was do a retweet of what he thought might be a good thing (like he does a lot), not create the coin and not profited from it. According to his own words:
> "A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever. I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)."
Either the headlines know something we don't know to say he "backtracks on a memecoin" and "Argentinian President Milei launched a memecoin, $LIBRA" or they are not true. Given the context, it seems to be the latter, so I wonder why they'd be lying?
Even if everything you said here is true, he's the president of the country. It is not unreasonable for the president of a nation to do the research of what they're endorsing before they endorse it, instead of backtracking immediately after backlash.
It’s not unreasonable to backpedal even harder
Sure, it's better that he backpedaled than doubling down, but that doesn't mean that he cannot be criticized for the initial transgression.
If I drive drunk and then hit someone with my car, I'm not immediately forgiven just because I called 911 and offered to pay the hospital bill.
Retweet doesn't mean endorsement.
Standard defence after sth retweeted blew up. And it doesn't work like that.
Also, it wasn't "just a retweet". He literally wrote that he supported it.
I'm responding to the post above, not TFA.
he didnt just retweet. even if he did, president of the country should be held to higher standards than your average influencer.
Who decided that? Would you hold that same standard if a politician you didn’t like did it?
I don’t like most politicians, but if Bernie Sanders (someone I do like) blanket retweeted a crypto scam, I would say that that’s bullshit. Unless he was the biggest moron on the planet, he would have to know that a retweet will be read as an endorsement by a large number of people.
A public figure, particularly a high-profile elected figure, particularly a figure who is in charge of how laws are enforced, should be held to a high standard.
But as other people have pointed out, it actually wasn’t just a retweet.
> As he explains, it seems like all he did was do a retweet of what he thought might be a good thing
No, he wrote the Tweet himself. His words, not a retweet.
It’s right there in the article. I don’t know why people are trying to defend him and rewrite the story.
I would think a head of state has a responsibility to check what he promotes.
I thought a military had a responsibility to run tribunals and then execute a head of state that uses their power for a promotion, greatly reducing the chance of getting this far into a fraudulent one. Bringing a promotions run to an end, leaving the impeached with whatever profits were already made is obviously not good enough for sorting out the problem.
> Because he didn't.
Really not sure why you say that with such authority.
https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3891
The finances of Argentina are probably unfixable, but the sad thing is that the United States is now collapsing to Latin American standards of governance. I expect there to be Brazil-style duelling sets of corruption cases after every future election.
Fraud runs rampant before large market collapses.
https://www.history.com/news/roaring-twenties-scams-ponzi-wa...
It happened in the 20s, before 2008, and it's happening again. Trump doing this is an extra level of depraved, and I suspect the coming crash will follow suit.
It makes me wonder if I should pull my savings out of index funds and just keep cash in a savings account in the short term.
Normally I'd buy treasury bills, but honestly considering that Elon has been fucking around with the treasury's code with no oversight, and considering that Trump's big strategy for eliminating national debt has been to "declare bankruptcy" (whatever that would even means in regards to an entire country that is the world's reserve currency?), I'm hesitant to even do that.
I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
> and just keep cash in a savings account in the short term.
Ah, but remember the tariffs stuff; you could be looking at _pretty dramatic inflation_ depending on how that works out (personally I suspect he will be ultimately unable to do that much for long; there is likely a level of market disruption at which he will be Liz Trussed, but who knows). All is risk.
> I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
No such thing; the EU doesn't really have debt-raising powers. This confuses people, but the EU/EC is _not_ a conventional government, and has only a tiny budget (170bn this year). You can buy European sovereign debt, but it's on a per-country level. Bear in mind that by doing this you'd also be taking on currency risk. Personally I wouldn't touch sovereign debt denominated in another currency; YMMV.
Liz Trussed: f*cking up the economy so badly and so quickly your own party ousts you. I love it!
I think she's possibly the _clearest_ example of this in recent years; there've been others (realistically, "screwed up, or is perceived to have screwed up, the economy" is one of the more common reasons for national leaders to get their marching orders), but the sequence of "deranged budget proposal, catastrophic market crash, no more Liz" was just perfect. She didn't even, in the end, really _do_ anything; even the suggestion that she might do the things that she wanted to do was enough to cause a crisis.
(With Trump, the dynamic is a bit different, at least for now; he claims to want to do all sorts of absolutely bonkers things, and the markets are generally going "well, yeah, but you're not really going to, are you?")
Yeah, inflation worries have me concerned too. I am not sure what to do.
I might look into one of the “total world” funds instead of just the US based ones like I usually do.
Beware the confusing naming! The big index is MSCI All World. Not to be confused with MSCI World, which is pretty much just the US, Europe and Japan.
(You may be _slightly_ late. After years of not doing anything much, European markets are up about 10% YTD, Chinese even more, vs S&P500 4%. There's always a bubble, somewhere...)
Yeah FOMO in the stock world is a losing game, there's always a place that you could have invested earlier.
I was looking into the VT Vanguard fund. I already own a few shares of that, I could always buy more.
Whatever you do, do not buy bonds right now. As they sell off and rates rise, the value of your bonds on the secondary market will get trashed. You'll also have an opportunity to buy bonds with massive yields if the market crashes due to a debt crisis. I mean imagine getting paid 20% per year, tax advantaged, for the next 30 years.
Honestly, the rule with indexes is buy and hold. Although I'm confident we have a crash incoming, unless you need the money soon, you should just hold your index funds and add everything you can to it at the bottom. You'll also have to pay taxes on the realized gains if you go to cash. I do believe that Trump's entire presidency is going to be a massive crash, temporary rebound, and then downtrend through 2028. We will probably not return to highs until the 2030s.
I wasn't planning on buying long-term bonds regardless; historically I have bought short-term treasury bills, usually 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the coupon rate, so I'm not too worried about the value on the secondary market. I'm much more concerned with the fed defaulting on paying me back.
I more or less came to the same conclusion that you listed; I don't really want to create a big taxable event, so I think right now I'm going to keep the stock I have, and in the shorter term keep future income in a savings account for awhile and suss out if there's going to be a crash or not.
Obviously you can't really "time" the market but it's a pretty low-risk experiment on my end.
Coffeezilla has a really good interview about it https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM
Listening to it now and it's so eye opening, these guys literally do NOT care about the project, all they care about is making money and using any advantages to get one up on the loser holding the bag.
-"Every one of these memecoins serves to make insiders money, what am i supposed to do NOT launch the project?"
-"This famous person lost $5 million so we made him whole and refunded to avoid any issues"
-"These coins are just a casino"
It's so funny that these guys are way more lucid and honest than most of the "investors"
Edit:
Oh man so this guy spends 40 minutes moaning how sniping and scams are rife in the Solana ecosystem but he himself sniped $MELANIA and claims "To not have made any money" which means nothing to me because I'm sure your bank account grew.
Also looked him up and he has 0 experience in development, LA Based, and was an "entrepreneur" for 7 years before becoming the CEO of a Bitcoin consulting company. This guy is the stereotypical rug pull con artist.
How come Milei, a master economist, go on to promote something he later said he didn't understand? This is the quality of leaders coming into power all over the world. Bunch of incompetent people (in the most charitable read of the situation) or bunch of grifters (in the least charitable read).
Milei, a master economist? Great joke!
Some reports indicate he gets paid to say things about products or companies, which has more credibility because he’s, you know, the president. And that’s what happened with this meme coin thing.
He was never a master a master economist. This is a purposeful memetic disinformation campaign promoted by the owners of first-world mass media.
He holds a degree from a third-rate private university. Private university is where you go to school in Argentina for when you don't have the chops for public university and need to go to a degree mill.
His doctorate is from another bullshit institution made up by a rotting old landowning oligarch who holds prehistoric beliefs in just about everything.
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I was excited about Cabbage Patch Kids, but I missed $TRUMP. Where is the $PUTIN token?
Putin prefers stablecoins denoted in US dollars.
In all honesty, I've read a bunch of positive articles about Millei, and watched the Friedman interview with him. He has multiple economics degrees and really seems to understand economics in a way that Trump does not, IMHO. And, so this is horribly embarassing that he does not understand the basics of cryptocurrencies and tokens and the scoundrels. Understanding economics is not the only point when you are running a country. You need to create a stable environment for citizens.
You don't seem to be considering the possibility that he knew perfectly well what he was doing, and that this was intentional. Rug pulls are popular among celebrities.
You are right, I assumed he was principled and dedicated to the good of the country above all else. Should I reconsider that? Like I said, I read positive things about him and thought was a sincere person. If you have something else I should read, I would be very interested to know what to add to my list.
I've been following Argentina's struggles for a while given my time in Brazil and the parallels to hyperinflation so I was willing to consider his unorthodox approach, but perhaps it blinded me?
There are some good takes in both directions throughout this thread. Based on talks I had with friends and family living there:
Reasons for liking him: he's bringing inflation down, he has been keeping his promises towards retirees, and he's been reigning in some egregious examples of corruption that previous administrations ignored because it gave them political power.
Reasons for not liking him: he's strangling Universities, rent prices are out of control and not properly reflected in the inflation index, and after being first row during Trump's inauguration he decided to withdraw Argentina from the WHO.
A friend of mine who doesn't like him described his policies as "Ron Swanson from Parks & Rec". I think there's a lot to it.
That rent prices are out of control is not true https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/02/17/sin-ley-de-alqui...
The article explains that this is the first time since 2020 that prices stopped increasing, which doesn't mean they are at a level where people can afford them - the article itself attributes the lower purchase power of the average family as one of the main drivers for why they stopped raising. The article also explains that maintenance (expensas) are 22% of the final rent price and those increased 170% from last year. "We stopped raising prices because we priced everyone out" is definitely what I'd call "out of control".
Anecdotally I also know three families who had to move back to their parent's house because they were priced out of the rental market. I won't say that all of this is Milei's fault (although I do have thoughts about his handling of the Rents law), but nonetheless the current situation is far from good.
I also had a good impression from hearing him speak. He's clearly highly educated and intelligent. But he's also a supporter of Carlos Menem, a famously corrupt politician in the long history of corruption in Argentina.
Whether or not Milei truly wishes to help his country, or if he's using his power for personal gain, is difficult to say. As an outsider, I don't have an informed opinion. But I'm inclined to believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The reality is that the vast majority of people who seek political power are egomaniacs and sociopaths. Very few actually want to help their country.
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I really appreciate your comment. I'm being totally sincere.
I did see the news reports about him with a chainsaw. He seemed like a nut when I saw that.
And I then watched the Lex Friedman interview and read the profile in the New Yorker.
I was surprised in that my initial glance at him was not positive but my opinions shifted.
Please give me other nuanced and intelligent discussions. I'm sorry I missed the ones you read.
I am a us citizen. I will say the fact that Milei seems very enthusiastic about Trump is very damaging to his brand for me.
Check out some of the reporting from before the election https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/09/07/meet-javie...
Look at some of the actual details around his wish list, the fantasy of dollarization is a favorite of mine https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-11-24/d...
Compare what's promised to what actually occurs. Did he attack the privileged, were the poor lifted out of poverty, has free enterprise restored a moribund economy? https://www.npr.org/2025/02/09/nx-s1-5280631/argentinas-rece...
I don't know how productive it would be to give you random examples as I am wuite biased and find just about all of his actions to be despicable. It sounds like you may be living in something of an echo chamber of sorts. I recommend seeking out news sources that may challenge your beliefs and relying less on social media and YouTube videos. I'm not really sure how to help you to be honest though. Are you watching/reading some form of news on the regular? For me it's NPR but I try to watch some conservative news as well to see what the other side is up to, how they're reacting.
that you mention lex and the new yorker in the same sentence is very damaging to your brand for me.
He is talking about Argentinian President, not Trump
I don't think that's right.
> I've been following Argentina's struggles for a while given my time in Brazil and the parallels to hyperinflation so I was willing to consider his unorthodox approach, but perhaps it blinded me?
???
> this is horribly embarassing
He made a mistake and backtracked instead of instinctively doubling down. Count your blessings.
He met with the founder of this thing several times. They lowered the age allowable for trading to 13 years and up right around the time he met with these people. The con wouldn’t have worked without him spreading it. Multiple of his closest allies immediately replied that this was not a mistake.
The man as in an irredeemable narcissistic moron. We’ve had this conversation several times with the same conclusion over and over again. I get that not everyone is into Argentinian politics but by this point it’s well-established knowledge.
Ridiculous! His closest advisor, Conan, endorsed the era of treats and prosperity it would bring to all Argentinians!
[to boil the frog for others, he's claimed his dogs (Conan) are his closest advisors]
Sorry, when you are the president you don't get that leeway to make mistakes and then correct them by saying "sorry, my bad!" No way.
If I'm just a blogger on Twitter, then sure.
It is hard to tell whether the US president is more than an effective tweeter. That distinction is important to me.
> Sorry, when you are the president you don't get that leeway to make mistakes and then correct them by saying "sorry, my bad!" No way.
What does "don't get to" mean? Descriptively, this is false; normatively, this seems like a completely impossible standard to hold presidents to. You want them to literally never make any mistakes?
I think not endorsing specific crypto rugpulls as a solution to help small businesses [on the day they rugpull] in the first place isn't a particularly high normative standard to hold public officials to, especially not public officials who claim to be experts in economic revitalisation. Owning mistakes feels like "with hindsight, I probably shouldn't have pursued this tax policy", not "with hindsight I probably shouldn't have been the prime pumper in a pump and dump scam, but now I'd like to put this experience behind me"...
(cf some fashion blogger with no understanding genuinely being able to claim that promoting crypto was an easily-made mistake)
Thank you, exactly. Anyone who isn't holding crypto to a higher standard cannot pretend they are well versed in economics.
His approval rating says otherwise
I mean, the standard for politicians, especially US ones is to never ever admit mistake. If they do, they get no leeway. However, if they double down, they get their camp defend them up to absurdum.
So maybe, the "sorry, my bad" is the superior way about mistakes.
>Sorry, when you are the president you don't get that leeway to make mistakes and then correct them by saying "sorry, my bad!" No way.
Did you really put thought into saying this or are you just voicing absurdities for the sake of it?
Either you're saying that an all too human political leader/head of state should never once make any mistakes during their administration, or you're saying that they should double down on anything they claimed and never admit wrong-doing (Trump-style, essentially)
So which is it?
I'm saying crypto should be held to a higher level of scrutiny by everyone, and if you are the president of a country you should not involve yourself in crypto without thinking it through a bit.
You might disqualify yourself for running for office in the future if you want to continue to argue with me on this. </joke>
The Lex Fridman interview was awful. Milei hasn't said a single interesting thing. I was expecting a lot more from (I think) the first politician following the Austrian school of economics.
> I was expecting a lot more from (I think) the first politician following the Austrian school of economics.
This is exactly why you've heard only demagoguery; Austrian school is fringe.
I don't see how that follows.
Many of the people who appear to me to talk the most sense (eg: Tyler Cowen) follow the Austrian school. It being fringe does not mean they're wrong. It could be the mainstream is wrong. I'm not an economist and don't know.
In all likelihood, the reason they appear to talk the most sense to you is that both you don't understand what is wrong with them¹ and you never even read the actual theories they pose themselves against.
Anyway, the criticism about the Austrian school isn't even that it's wrong. It's that it's neither a theory nor a school of though. There isn't much "though" in it. But when you get to the views of an actual person, they will necessarily be more complete than the school, and need to be evaluated independently.
1 - "I can clearly see that objects stop moving without anybody messing with then. That Newton guy makes no sense whatsoever."
Fringe means that it attracts weirdos, demagogues etc, as things normally fringe for a reason, but even if they are not, people have so much reputational risk for publicly advertising these views, so that either suggests they are grifters, so they do not have reputation to start with or they have poor judgement.
You got conned. Anyone who watches his actual interviews first hand can see that he’s mentally unstable, holds a degree from a third-rate university, and is more concerned with his own narcissistic tendencies than actually governing.
I do have to admit more and more Friedman seems like he is more intent on building his subscriber count than actually asking tough questions. I can't say I feel like his fact checking is worth anything if it ever was. I should have known better.
> he is more intent on building his subscriber count than actually asking tough questions.
It's quite a sad indicator of the state of knowledge in the world where Fridman is considered the more "intellectual" of pop podcasters when the most popular podcasts are crap like Rogan, Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, and Call Her Daddy.
Because Fridman will literally have a guest with platform A, like Netanyahu, and agree on 95% of his controversial points with little pushback. And then immediately after have on Yuval Harari, with the opposite opinion on those controversial points... and agree with 95% again with little pushback. Fridman softballs and is almost useless except as a megaphone. You'd rather have him cut out and have Netanyahu and Harari debate on their own merits.
> Because Fridman will literally have a guest with platform A, like Netanyahu, and agree on 95% of his controversial points with little pushback. And then immediately after have on Yuval Harari, with the opposite opinion on those controversial points...
Isn't that his whole schtick? Letting people voice their different opinions? Yes his questions are soft. And yes, I'd love to see Netanyahu and Harari debate - can you make that happen?
I don't actually see a problem with that ...
He is uncritical, yes. But he doesn't deny being uncritical.
It's a useful "service" to get people with diametrically opposite viewpoints to talk freely, and he does that well
The interviewer doesn't need to impose their world view on the guest, or the audience -- it's OK to let the audience make up their own minds.
Contradictions aren't inherently bad, either ... "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", etc.
Staying their and listening to people make false claims over and over again without challenging them on any of the lies or grandstanding is not a service to anyone. At the very least, no one should be looking at a Lex Friedman interview hoping to hear the truth of any kind.
It's a false dichotomy. Terry Gross does a great job of getting her subjects to talk freely, while still asking hard questions.
> The interviewer doesn't need to impose their world view on the guest, or the audience -- it's OK to let the audience make up their own minds.
What if the guest lies or omits crucial facts? How is the audience supposed to know that? Fact checking is the very basis of responsible journalism.
What if I go to a dinner party and someone lies or omits crucial facts?
I guess take it for what it is -- it's a conversation recorded on YouTube ... maybe don't be fooled by the suit and the mics. Anyone can buy those, there is no certification AFAIK :-)
(I'd also say that 95% of journalism you see on TV is not much different than a conversation recorded on YouTube, i.e. they don't do fact checking themselves.)
The dinner party isn't broadcast to millions of people. With a great audience comes great responsibility. "Just let people talk" doesn't cut it. Of course, there is also lots of bad journalism in traditional media.
> maybe don't be fooled by the suit and the mics. Anyone can buy those, there is no certification AFAIK :-)
:)
It's not useful if you don't push back on people who have agendas and who are willing to lie their teeth off to promote whatever grift they're pushing.
Fridman gets his guests to open up, which is valuable, but yes he does that by being uncritical of basically all guests ...
For example, I didn't know who Vivek R was before a month or so ago, and I watched the Fridman interview with him. I actually thought he came off very well ... He got to hit his high notes
Then I watched this Ezra Klein interview, and I got a better picture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY6NGom3gvU
Vivek got challenged a bit there, in a good way. I saw a lot more of the holes and inconsistencies
(Ezra Klein seems to be a reasonable centrist, more like the reporters of 20-30 years ago. After reading NYTimes since the 90's, I stopped taking at least half of NYTimes seriously maybe around 2015. They were/are literally trolling in their Op Eds for clicks, and greatly expanded that section. But there is still some stuff worth reading)
I also watched parts of Fridman's interview of Milei, and didn't form a strong impression, maybe because of the translation.
Friedman is, like many people in this age of podcasters and influencers, another fool who's not only out of his depth in most interviews, but too self-centered to do anything to change it.
His political analysis when interviewing people in that area is laughable. When interviewing chess players it's clear even to me, a mediocre player who barely reaches 1500 in lichess, that he's totally out of his depth and wasting precious time asking generic questions.
Unfortunately the only good interviewer of this generation is the chiken wing guy.
Dwarkesh is basically doing what Lex tried to do early on before he became Rogan-lite. Looking at Lex’s range of topics in the last year it’s no wonder he’s out of his depth
Have you considered they didn’t teach meme coins at his university?
He has access to the same resources that everyone here does, probably more actually. Instead of retweeting the first "interesting" thing that pops up on his feed, hear me out on this, maybe he could have quickly Google'd/DuckDuckGo'd/Kagi'd/Yandex'd this before he retweeted it.
No, they don't teach "meme coins" at university, but I don't think that's really relevant.
Or, perhaps he was just lying.
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That's hilarious/interesting/terrifying, but my naive outsider understanding is that "risks impeachment" is just something opposition lawmaker Leandro Santoro said once, not, like, an impending problem. Anyone know anything more specific/to the contrary?
The opposition party doesn't have the numbers in Congress to even start the impeachment process. Regardless it's still a decent reputational hit for Milei
Someone sold 1.9% of coin (seems fair) and entire thing busted?
There's not a lot of depth propping these things up.
Truly the dumbest timeline
Despite the known facts is absolutely shocking that an economist promotes a cryptocurrency (even worse: a "meme" one that was created minutes before his tweet), as is widely known that there's no value at all in there but pure speculation, that's what puzzles me the most. If people with little knowledge on economics know this how can't he?
How can a president with an army of advisers let him publish something like that? Even if it was his very own mistake it is really unbelievable that people around him didn't know a thing on the matter, is just simply not possible.
He really should stay away from the stupidity of social networks and do better for the country that is still going through hard times.
In one occasion he also denied the climate change, possibly due to Trump's position, showing that he doesn't know a thing about certain topics. In such situations he should really shut up and get properly informed.
I'm sorry but anyone buying this story is clearly either
A) A fool that hopes to rugpull someone in the future
B) A fool who hasn't made a 5 second google search to how all these coins operate
Either way I have yet to meet any "investor" that has made any money in these investments that couldn't have been made by just parking some cash in Bitcoin / Ether / DOGE if you really wanted to get a taste of cryto.
It's a shame that as I watch more and more of these articles and investigations line up it's clear that there is such a demand to lose money from the populace that they will really turn a blind eye to when political leaders / oligarchs / techbros do it in hopes of being able to cobble together a get rich quick scheme like this.
"It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe"
Cryptocurrencies are volatile "investments".
This is why we can't have nice things.
Grifters all the way down.
Has the media or world at large even noticed the $TRUMP scam? I've only heard of it through Voidzilla, is that reflective of my bubble or is 'flood the zone' working?
The timing was definitely chosen to let it get lost in the noise.
It also plays neatly into conservative ideals of letting the free market reign and “do your own research” is an excuse for everything. It’s trendy to blame only the buyers of these coins while praising the creators as genius marketers.
That said, the Trump and Melania coins have generated a lot of anger in the crypto space. At first people were twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it was all very good, but one by one they seem to be capitulating to the idea that it’s not even good for crypto.
It's so transparently a way for Trump to extract money from his constituents that a part of me wants to respect it.
But no one deserves to be scammed. I don't really get along with Republicans, I gotta admit I don't really like most Republicans now, and I find the Republican platform reprehensible, but I wouldn't wish being scammed for a conman on my worst enemy.
> It's so transparently a way for Trump to extract money from his constituents that a part of me wants to respect it.
It's also a potential rail to launder bribes and campaign funding, you name it.
Maybe they view it as offering to their god
Some might, though I've seen some people responding with "stay poor then" when people like me criticize the DJT ticker and $TRUMP coin.
I think a lot of them genuinely think that their godking is going to make them rich and reward their loyalty.
To me Milei is worse because he should know better with his background in economics. Argentina is also a relatively big user of crypto due to their currency being worthless, crypto actually has utility there [1]
Trump has been licensing his name to anyone who asks for decades.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/devon-zuegel-on-inflation-argentina...
Not comparable, politically or financially
Politically, Trump’s party controls the government and Trump is incredibly popular with his party. Financially, there hasn’t been a rug pull.
The comparable situation would be Trumpcoin gets wiped out in 2026 amidst the Democrats taking back the House.
I mean... at a certain point, with memecoins, it's just about the scale of said pull, not the presence.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24TrumpI hope we can all agree, crypto-fans or no, that moon coins are at best a very risky, unregulated gambling prospect!
As was noted elsewhere (I forget the source), it's zero sum: anyone who makes money is making it off someone who is losing money. In fact, it's less than zero sum because of platform fees.
Yeah, this is the thing that made me realize that cryptocurrency is pretty much always a bad investment.
Stocks aren't zero sum, at least in their idealized form; if I buy a share of some company, they can use that investment to create products or provide value in some form, and if the product is good then that gets reflected in the stock price increasing. It creates value, and the stock price follows.
With cryptocurrency (with maybe the exception of the more computation based stuff like Ethereum?), it doesn't really do anything, it's not creating value. It's just transferring between wallets, and the value increase is pretty much entirely speculative.
Obviously not all stocks are "ideal" like I mentioned above; there have been plenty of cases where stocks are ponzi-adjacent, and it's certainly not uncommon for stocks to be overvalued during bubbles and the like, but my point is that stocks aren't inherently zero-sum like cryptocurrency is.
The term you're looking for is seigniorage [1]. Crypto privatises seigniorage to the financial promoters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
Being used as money creates value.
So, to see if cryptocurrency is a pyramid or not, just look at how much is transacted compared to its total value...
Or don't, because you already know the result. But it's not inconceivable for a cryptocurrency to create value. It's just that nobody did one that does it yet, and the culture around them makes it less and less likely as time passes.
I don't think cryptocurrency in its current state could realistically work as currency though, because it's deflationary in nature. For the same reason we don't use gold or silver as currency anymore.
The purpose of buying a coin like $TRUMP is not to make money. It is to help Trump. You expect to lose money because the entire goal is to transfer money to Trump.
You and the New York Times seem to have misunderstood this important point.
Interesting thesis, hadn’t heard that! There’s lots of people on Twitter who admitted to losing tons of money unintentionally, but of course it’s hard to prove what the silent majority was thinking. I am still a little dubious tho, sorry:
1. Why didn’t any of the marketing materials say that?
2. Why launch $MELANIA?
3. Why didn’t people just trade around a couple bucks over and over to rack up fees, rather than investing as usual?
4. This is edging on partisan politics I guess, but: why donate to the billionaire president…? He doesn’t need a legal fund, he now has free housing, and he’s selling more direct merchandise (watches, NFTs, bibles, etc.) than ever. Just seems like a weird time to donate.
Crypto is the best way for poor people to part with their money.
Surely all cryptocurrencies are memecoins. There's very little debt in these things, so that it isn't a source of value, and there are many popular systems, from Bitcoin to Ethereum, so isn't any that can be said to be somehow special.
Crypto adherents seem to have given up on any other narrative this time yeah.
Scammers gonna scam. Suckers gonna lose (including the suckers who fancy themselves as scammers but don’t realise it’s a rigged game).
In the US you can’t grant coins any ownership or benefits that might vary in value. Meme coins are the only legal crypto so that’s all you get. It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.
We had an entire saga of ICOs launch and fail to deliver value.
The notion that laws are preventing a golden age of crypto prosperity doesn’t make any sense. There are numerous countries where these coins can operate and they still don’t deliver any of these claims.
> It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.
What a weird claim. I assume you’re talking about CAFE regulations, but with an extremist conservative talking point twist.
This is a favorite talking point, but people conveniently ignore the fact that we have small and fuel efficient pickup trucks that people don’t buy. Honda made a FWD unibody pickup that fit many needs, but people just don’t want it.
Not to mention the fact that the CAFE regulations were 2025 targets, or that we have had multiple presidents since then and different political parties have had their chance to change things.
Yet blaming Obama is fun, so let’s go with that.
Has anything really changed since the ICOs? It’s just the same scams being wrapped up slightly differently but in the end 99.999% of these coins are net negative value to the world and their “investors”
Yes you can. Of course if your crypto is a security you have to treat it as a security, you have to register it file a prospectus, etc., but it is doable.
The idea that “you must be regulated as a security” and “you cannot issue” are synonymous is one of the weirder parts of modern crypto.
Can you name a single ICO that produced something of value before the SEC cracked down on what are (obviously) unregistered security offerings?
I am a “crypto adherent” who champions decentralized networks and byzantine-fault-tolerant protocols, and I have been using strongly pushing for the original narrative of trustless smart contracts cutting out the middleman. I think there are many use cases for it.
Before you knock it, look at the following:
https://intercoin.app/investors.pdf
https://intercoin.app/currencies.pdf
Or if you want to see actual open source solutions, coded, see here:
https://intercoin.org/applications
I know some people will knee-jerk downvote this. But actually look into the substance, first.
TLDR: I have been speaking against “HODL” and zero-sum games just for “number go up” nonsense, and been building solutions for maximum utility.
I think your pitch would be significantly stronger if the resources you linked didn't largely revolve around "What if Snoop Dogg had his own currency?"
I'm not ... completely unable to be persuaded that there are use cases for cryptocurrency. But "Ashton Kutcher should have Aston Kutchercoin, and develop some sort of referral-based pyramid-shaped scheme with it for his fans" is... what is that?
That's...
1) A way to fill unsold seats at venues, and always have sold-out events
2) A way to reward his members for spreading his message and bringing more people
3) A way to turn his audience into an army of promoters
4) A way to be independent of banks, and accept global payments
5) A way to have a global online movement that becomes bigger than Ashton Kutcher himself... having subcommunities be empowered to get together and form their own meetups, see it happen around the world, if they get large then Ashton and his crew can come and do a rock concert there
It's great for political campaigns and many movements as well. We did it for Yang's 2020 campaign for example, with "Yang Gangs", that was very early days in 2020
Ok, I'll bite. I read this and my first reactions are:
1. How?
2. Reward them with what?
3. Fans are already promoters.
4. Why is this a good thing?
5. This is just describing fandom, which already exists?
Oh sorry, this way the creator of the underlying infrastructure can collect rent from all aforementioned re-implementations of existing services.
This is extremely vague and seems to be so on purpose in order to just have some nebulous "attack". Do you really think Web2 platforms aren't the epitome of rentseeking, by taking advantage of their role as middlemen?
Obviously existing middlemen are rent seekers. The question is why anyone should eat the cost of switching to a new, less proven rent seeker.
To the hopeful new rent seeker, the pitch is obvious. To everyone else, the provided rationales tend to sound like a whole lot of bullshit.
Why should people use automation at all?
This is like asking why people should switch from telephone switchboard operators, to automatic switchboards. Or why should anyone switch from livery cab services to Uber.
Technology may be "less proven" initially, but it's far more reliable in the end. It also removes a whole class of inefficiencies and conflicts that won't be possible with smart contracts, the same way that you could remove them if you switched from anything custom to anything standardized.
If you just stopped repeating the same tropes "web3 bad" for the sake of saying them, and engage with the substance, you'll see that this is a case of standardization, automation and programming what was previously ad-hoc and requires costly arbitration after the fact.
Okay but 1) arbitration is often desirable, which is why these systems allow it, and 2) traditional software can automate just about anything web3 can if you have the same degree of coordination among counterparties
No one said that arbitration isn't desirable, when there is a problem.
It's like saying doctors and medicine are desirable once a medical condition arises. But sometimes, preventative medicine and eating right in the first place is better.
An once of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix. It's better to just have existing systems. Like for example having red lights at intersections, where everyone knows when it's their turn to move.
You understand that software can automate things. That's good. Now you have to understand that web3 is nothing but software which is decentralized and byzantine fault tolerant, so you can trust that the code is being executed correctly. This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database, and then we can catch them and try to recover from this corruption using litigation. That's what MtGox was.
But you can implement transactions without any recourse trivially using existing technology today...
> Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix.
Such as?
> This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
Massive theoretical improvement. No debate there. The question is about applicability, which I notice you've still not made concrete.
> It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database
I don't know, it basically seems to work and as far as I can tell, you're about a billion times more likely to have your shit stolen from you in the web3/cryptoverse than using the traditional financial system... except of course if you're a criminal and/or a more grey-area "unsavory character" to some of the main stakeholders. Which that is a good usecase for this tech, of course.
Are you serious? There are so many problems it can prevent, because they are nearly impossible to occur now:
1) People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption (this is the big one)
2) Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should (this is the reason that databases use stored procedures, for example)
I can list a few, but there are literally thousands:
1) In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked. You can have N winners, and once the N+1st arrives, it returns the money to the lowest bidder who can bid again. Bids increase at a predictable rate, everyone knows the deal upfront, etc.
As opposed to, say, this on the highest level: https://observer.com/2018/03/christies-sothebys-lawsuits-sho...
2) Salaries can be paid out to specific addresses, at a specific rate, and be approved by managers, with the history of all this preserved
3) Atomic swaps between tokens, escrow, each side knows the money is there and will be released if they do their part
4) Rules about staking reserves, guarantee the money is there for vendors to cash out, vendors must be whitelisted to cash out, etc. etc.
5) Large Communities can enforce their "constitution" and which roles invite which roles, at what rate, etc. Ah here, just look:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-defi-communityco...
and so on and so forth
> People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption
I don't understand why you think this is so critical? This is a solved problem - just have backups and basic security. If it's really critical, there's a lot of ways to log changes. It's not a big deal.
> Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should
Ok, but we have that already. They're called regular contracts. If they have bugs or unexpected problems or someone doesn't follow through, you can get the state to make them.
> In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked
And how often is this a problem, exactly? The article says it happens maybe once every five or six years.
> 2-5
We have all of this already. Banks, HR software, escrow, reserves. It works fine.
You want the ability to unwind a contract or a transaction if something goes wrong. In fact, the contracts are only really used if things go wrong. Most of the time, the parties just follow the contact voluntarily.
To add on: if someone's "irreversible" crypto transaction goes awry, do people really think they're not going to go to court and/or that courts won't do exactly what courts do in every other case of fraud?
"Your honor, the smart contract was clear as day: this fraud was totally above board" is not going to work. I promise.
1. Well, you want to have your coin usable to pay for something in your own community. The first thing you can offer are unsold seats and other things that literally cost you nothing. People who earned your coin can buy seats at your events, or sell them to other people (e.g. who live locally) to attend the event.
2. With your own coin, obviously. If the coin has value aboard a cruise ship, or events, etc. then everyone wins. There are many businesses that can benefit from selling unused inventory, and they may as well sell it for coins earned for things like bring other paying customers, contributing great testimonials, content, etc. Imagine being able to go on stage if you earned enough "loyalty points" or whatever.
3. Loyalty points have been around forever. And no, fans are not already promoters. I know in my own personal experience that even INVESTORS who invested in your company often sit back and hope that you'll make them a profit somehow, instead of bringing others in behind them. Let alone people who just come to a show. The easier you make it for them, e.g. having your own site with custom links that they can share and earn "affiliate revenue" in your own coin, the more traffic you'll get.
4. You get more traffic. More audience. More capital. More money. More loyalty. Independence from having your speech restricted or demonetized. Look at all the youtube personalities openly saying that they can't say this or that. Many comedians and performers are sensitive to being censored.
5) Also you can easily collect money from a global audience, and pay out to a global audience, without being a central bottleneck (FinTech) and without being required to post surety bonds as a "money-transmitter", instead letting people transact directly and you don't have the liability, and they don't have to trust you like they trust Binance or FTX or Celsius with custody of their funds etc. etc. You just provide the Web interface, they do the transaction, facilitated by IMMUTABLE smart contracts.
But people can already pay for unsold seats... with money. The same way the sold seats were paid for.
And how are they going to earn this money for actions that help the community?
It's much better when you can issue your own money supply
Same way people have earned money for millennia I suppose. If it has value it will be paid for.
Yes, exactly. It will be paid for in a coin that was issued by the community or the celebrity themselves.
The celebrity gets to have their own web server, their own coin, etc. making them independent of Big Tech and Big Banks. They can't get deplatformed. Their community can organize however they deem fit. The smart contracts allow everyone to trust the system.
Just saying someone will "pay you" like they did for millennia doesn't really discuss "in what medium". We have long moved past commodity money, gold blocks, then gold coins, then paper banknotes, to electronic money inside regulated banks, this is just the latest form that money can take.
Opposing it for the sake of opposing it, is like opposing the Web and HTTP and open protocols, because you think AOL and MSN walled gardens ought to be good enough for anybody, and no one really needs any custom servers or self-sovereign websites.
Almost nobody considers "deplatforming" to be a serious concern.
The kinds of people who are concerned are almost always people who engaging in risky or criminal behavior.
In the existing system, people can claw back money if they're defrauded or money is stolen. Under the memecoin system, that's impossible.
I had the exact same thoughts. But, also, why is it a good thing that risk is passed down to the users of the currency?
In the regular system risk is passed upward to regular bank you deal with, then upward to the government bank. The frustrating part here is that the regular bank makes all, or very nearly all, the profit, yet passes on the risk. This gives them enormous amounts of power, through wealth, which is far from ideal. But, much, much worse is the concept of removing the regular bank, and government bank, replacing them with a random person online. And passing the risk downward to the users of the currency.
You don't replace the bank with a random person, but with a smart contract trusted by the community. The whole point is to eliminate trust in the middleman completely from many transactions, and prevent a growing class of conflicts from even starting. That is why you don't need to post surety bonds, for instance!
Point 2 is the basis for a pyramid scheme.
Pyramid schemes are illegal, but Multi-Level-Marketing schemes are legal.
And you don't need multiple levels. You can have one level. That's called affiliate marketing.
Loyalty points are a thing. You can earn them as an affiliate, for instance. It doesn't have to be a pyramid. But if you are going that route, almost all startups are "pyramid schemes" that end up with an IPO where the public continues to demand rents be extracted perpetually to boost stock price endlesssly, resulting in increased "enshittification". I'd rather people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction and enshittification for everyone else.
>Pyramid schemes are illegal, but Multi-Level-Marketing schemes are legal.
In this case, this wouldn't even fit the mold for a multilevel marketing scheme, or even affiliate marketing. There are real cash flows detached from a buy-in both of those schemes.
>people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction
Again, there's cash flows underlying shares of a company. There's not in the case of a digital asset that people refer to as a coin or token.
Not sure I understand what you're trying to say. There are "real cash flows" in every case, just what you consider as the unit of account is different.
As far as shares, no. It's completely different. Shares are equity securities, that entitle people to dividends or they want the shares to go up in price. Regardless, it sets up a never-ending demand for enshittification and rent extraction that you see across Big Tech. Utility tokens are fundamentally different and don't have those perverse incentives, and remove the shareholder class. It's like comparing shares in Disney Corp, to Disney Dollars.
MLM schemes and affiliate marketing businesses will have, or be related to, underlying businesses of selling products which generate revenue, and they'll have some level of expenses related to producing these products. These are components of an operating cash flow. Businesses, whether private or public, are expected to either have healthy cash flows, or would be expected to grow their cash flows in the future in the case of a startup, to support the share price. Also, shares don't necessarily "entitle people to dividends" as shares often have no dividends. In the case of cryptocurrencies, there is no underlying physical product, nor underlying debt, nor a cash flow generating business.
You are correct about businesses, but very confused about Web3.
I am saying that Web3 should be used by existing celebrities to monetize their existing fame and social capital, sell unsold seats, etc.
I am saying that existing organizations, communities, including entire cities, can benefit from having a decentralized system powered by smart contracts, rather than a random FinTech that posts a surety bond, powering their commerce at scale.
Yes, shares don't necessarily entitle people to dividends, but the point is that the shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, forever. And this is a problem, that doesn't exist when you have utility tokens and cut out the parasitic shareholder class completely.
Which one of those five have actually happened in reality, and to what extent?
"The American Conservative further stated that a contingent of Yang's digital followers were only backing him for "a fresh platform for surreal and cynical humor" and that Yang had to denounce part of and distance himself from the movement, which largely stemmed from digital supporters of the Trump 2016 campaign.[85]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang_2020_presidential_...
Question for you - what are the most energy efficient crypto protocols that could serve as the underlying network for a distributed system? And have there been any studies that look at the total energy consumption of a system of any reasonable size using various crypto protocols?
Well, once you move beyond proof-of-work, the energy use drops 99%. It's not about energy, it's about bottlenecks. Blockchain has bottlenecks, and if you have one blockchain for all the apps, it's going to be either inefficient or centralized.
Back in 2017, I designed a system to avoid global consensus:
https://intercoin.org/technology.pdf
If you want to see a visual presentation that explains why we need to go beyond blockchains, then check this out:
https://intercoin.org/intercloud.pdf
I have heard every reasoning for regular currency to have more value over cryptos since 16/17 when I started paying attention.
Gold Standard, Government Protection, Debt, Government credit instruments.
But everything I read about currency tells me that its largely always just agreed upon make believe. The case with the Real absolutely confirmed that for me.
> largely always just agreed upon make believe
The benefits of having a common/standard unit for an economic ledger are enormous, as it greatly reduces trading friction. That added benefit has real (i.e., not make believe) value, and the more liquid the currency the higher the monetary premium.
Even after hyperinflation, if you normalize to the money supply, currencies generally don't lose value without losing liquidity (being less "agreed upon") .. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
Neither the rule of law nor following through on contracts and other obligations are imaginary
Well... they both are.
Just like currency. All of those were imaginary since they were invented. People have create physical representations for currency in particular, but that doesn't change the fact that it's only a group of people agreeing on something that only exist on their heads.
Equally imaginary things are "corporations", "governments", "military"... If you push hard enough, even "person" fits that, but this one is deeply entrenched in people's minds.
And both equally apply to cryptocurrencies.
And now I have to clean coffee out of my keyboard. Thanks.
It's literally true, though. Cryptocurrency itself doesn't suddenly render contracts unenforceable or the ability to use courts etc to resolve conflicts. What hinders it is anonymity of the other party, but that's something that cryptocurrency merely enables; whether to engage with anonymous parties or not is still a choice. It does not preclude you from, say, suing Coinbase if they owe you some BTC.
And, conversely, if you try to pay with cash to some shady people in a parking lot, there's not much good you're going to get out of courts if they defraud you.
The likes of Bitcoin or Ethereum aren't really "memes" in the modern sense, at least no more than any fiat currency is.
Ordinary currencies have value due to the enormous debt in it.
If people fail to obtain units of the currency, they default on obligations that have much greater value than the value of the all the cash in the currency. Thus in an ordinary currency the incentive isn't to ignore it, or to sell, but to hoard it so that people can't obtain the money to pay their loans in order to create a crisis so that they can obtain a large fraction of the value of collateral.
This is prevented by central banks. If you try to execute this corner, you will drive up prices, so they will start printing money.
So Bitcoin and Ethereum, both remain memes. Fiat currencies have non-mem value due to the debt.
Most people don't realize that governments can't just "print" currencies and the few that do (ie: Turkey, Argentina, etc...) have chronic hyperinflation. The US went a bit loose with supply and it already came back biting and still to this day struggling with the higher interest.
The government does constantly devalue the currency, though. It does it at an imperceptible pace to not scare the chickens and make business viable. But that's the most they can collect from this system. Anything more and they blow the whole monetary system away.
Yes, but when demand for the currency leads to a prices increasing,such as from an attempted corner, then you do not destroy price stability because the person operating the corner is buying the cash with something.
The money-printing used to break a corner can in principle be small and you can even have an inflation target of zero and still print money to break such corners.
What I want to emphasize with this though, is the source of a currency's value. The collateral of the debt of the loans denominated in it and the social and economic consequences to individuals of defaulting on loans in it. That is the end-source of demand for a currency, and that guaranteed demand is so great that it makes attempting to corner the market in the currency make sense.
If you cornered the market in bitcoin, there's no one who would have to buy even one. That shows how little bitcoin is worth, i.e. zero.
What you are saying, if I understood you correctly, is that money is a method of accounting. If all money is borrowed, then money is literally worth 0, which what a unit in an accounting system is worth.
If this makes sense to you, then it'll make sense why Bitcoin is worth something. There is a circular demand to it even without debt. I'll not argue to the legitimacy of that demands (scams, phishing, laundering, etc...) but it is demand and it creates a baseline value (beyond the boom/busts it cycles through).
No, absolutely not. Money has value because of the loans. It is not without value because of the loans.
Because there are denominated loans in dollars people who have those loans have to get dollars to avoid losing their houses etc., and therefore dollars have value.
Because there's very little in loans denominated in Bitcoin, bitcoin has no value.
Bitcoin really is different. It's a commodity rather than a security, and proof of work consensus is essential for its use case.
Dollars ultimately have value because the United States government collects taxes in dollars. Who demands Bitcoin, except speculators? It's value is entirely propped up by it's cultural expectation - meme value - with no tether to a real source of demand for BTC.
Dollars are the currency Bitcoin is most commonly compared against, and for people who have easy access to USD it can be very hard to see how btc has utility. But if you compare to other things (e.g. commodities with a monetary premium, or fiat from a small country), it's much easier to comprehend.
It is work to 'get' it tho. All the info is available; I can't make it easier to understand than many others out there already have.
Anyone who needs to conduct transactions without having their name attached to it, and cannot meet personally to use cash. Online black market purchases, say.
You're not wrong that like 99.9% of BTC value is from speculation, but it does have its valid use cases.
It really isn't about taxes, and more about trust and collective faith. The USD isn't backed by cold economic calculation, it's... a big dream we all agree to keep dreaming. And that's mostly fine.
I mean, if you have 1 mil usd + of eth or bitcoin, you have a pretty decent pile of cash that is vaguely stable (not massively different to gold), and that government cannot touch or (if you do a good job) even know about.
From a personal perspective, that absolutely has value. From a public perspective, is the existence of that a good thing? Whole different kettle of fish (and then you're back on the whole "is end to end encryption bad" argument).
If Trump (or whoever) goes on social media to promote Bitcoin, it'll probably pump 5%-10%. And if it falls, it'll fall roughly back down to where it was.
If he goes on to promote some unknown shitcoin, said coin could easily pump 1000%, and fall harder.
He did a rugpull in a shitcoin right before his inauguration and likely pulled megaprofit out of some bag holders.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
Any other administration this would have been a huge scandal but when we're in an avalanche of corruption I guess it can be missed.
I think the point was that it gave his supporters a quasi-legal way to donate money while skirting campaign finance regulation, making the trumpcoin itself not so much a unit of currency as a receipt - a proof of loyalty.
I don't get the point you're trying to make?
That legitimate stores of value are typically not that simple to manipulate.
You are equating legitimacy with liquidity, and the that isn't necessarily true.
Liquidity is necessary, and a good marker, but not sufficient.
> You are equating legitimacy with liquidity, and the that isn't necessarily true.
How so? Liquidity is a measurement of how easy it is to trade, and if it's easy to trade there are many people/entities that believe it's "legitimate" currency, or they wouldn't trade for it
Parent said "store of value" not "currency". Liquidity is probably sufficient for a currency (depending on the features of the liquidity), but it is not sufficient for a store of value.
Fair enough; store of value additionally requires restricted supply so that the value isn't debased. But in the context of this thread, that just strengthens the argument that 'Bitcoin is different'.
It also requires a value proposition that doesn't depend on the current zeitgeist, among other things. Society changes, and stores of value need to exist outside that change, lest they be left behind with the norms and dogmas.
This is where I personally think bitcoin fails.
> Society changes, and stores of value need to exist outside that change
I completely agree. I don't think this is different from saying the store of value needs to stay liquid tho. Bitcoin is currently very illiquid compared to many things, but there's no reason to think it's liquidity will decrease, and based on trends and first principles of what makes something a good 'money', significant reason to believe liquidity will continue to increase
Like real estate?
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I don't even have a problem with some unwitting celebrity promoting this kind of stuff. They aren't subject matter experts and I imagine they have grifters targeting them all the time.
What I do take issue with is this keeps happening because there's a lot of money to be made off transaction fees so nobody looks too hard into how fraudulent any of these memecoins are before allowing them on the trading platforms.
Admittedly, I don't know how the trading system works so maybe the platforms taking a cut of the profits from the blatantly fraudulent activity are victims too? Crying all the way to the bank I suppose...
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How quaint
Yes, Milei is a amazing economist. Yes, Milei and his team are improving the Argentinian economy more than anyone could have ever imagined after a single year. Yes, Milei f*cked up incredibly and might be subject to legal consequences.
All three are true at the same time. Don't mix things up.