[HN Gopher] Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'ins...
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Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket
$87M
Author : techlover14159
Score : 302 points
Date : 2025-02-16 23:15 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coindesk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coindesk.com)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies are volatile "investments".
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I don't get the point you're trying to make?
| santoshalper wrote:
| That legitimate stores of value are typically not that
| simple to manipulate.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Like real estate?
| BobbyJo wrote:
| You are equating legitimacy with liquidity, and the that
| isn't necessarily true.
|
| Liquidity is necessary, and a good marker, but not
| sufficient.
| cwalv wrote:
| > 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
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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.
| cwalv wrote:
| 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'.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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.
| cwalv wrote:
| > 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
| UncleEntity wrote:
| 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...
| dashundchen wrote:
| 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.
| marssaxman wrote:
| 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.
| topranks wrote:
| 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).
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| 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?
| EGreg wrote:
| 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
| miunau wrote:
| 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_presidenti
| al_...
| habinero wrote:
| 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?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Oh sorry, this way the creator of the underlying
| infrastructure can collect rent from all aforementioned
| re-implementations of existing services.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| But people can already pay for unsold seats... with
| money. The same way the sold seats were paid for.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Same way people have earned money for millennia I
| suppose. If it has value it will be paid for.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| rprwhite wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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!
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Point 2 is the basis for a pyramid scheme.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| 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?
| EGreg wrote:
| 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
| hermanubis wrote:
| 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.
| necubi wrote:
| Can you name a single ICO that produced something of value
| before the SEC cracked down on what are (obviously)
| unregistered security offerings?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 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.
| hristov wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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"
| lmm wrote:
| The likes of Bitcoin or Ethereum aren't really "memes" in the
| modern sense, at least no more than any fiat currency is.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| 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).
| cwalv wrote:
| Bitcoin really is different. It's a commodity rather than a
| security, and proof of work consensus is essential for its use
| case.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| 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.
| cwalv wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
| 7speter wrote:
| Neither the rule of law nor following through on contracts
| and other obligations are imaginary
| int_19h wrote:
| And both equally apply to cryptocurrencies.
| brookst wrote:
| And now I have to clean coffee out of my keyboard.
| Thanks.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| cwalv wrote:
| > 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"
| crimsoneer wrote:
| 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).
| xrd wrote:
| I was excited about Cabbage Patch Kids, but I missed $TRUMP.
| Where is the $PUTIN token?
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| xrd wrote:
| 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?
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.
| argentinian wrote:
| That rent prices are out of control is not true
| https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/02/17/sin-ley-de-
| alqui...
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this is horribly embarassing_
|
| He made a mistake and backtracked instead of instinctively
| doubling down. Count your blessings.
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| His approval rating says otherwise
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| > 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?
| notahacker wrote:
| 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)
| xrd wrote:
| Thank you, exactly. Anyone who isn't holding crypto to a
| higher standard cannot pretend they are well versed in
| economics.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >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?
| xrd wrote:
| 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>
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| donavanm wrote:
| 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]
| santoshalper wrote:
| Or, perhaps he was just lying.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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
| throwcatowayne wrote:
| > 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.
| chubot wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's a false dichotomy. Terry Gross does a great job of
| getting her subjects to talk freely, while still asking
| hard questions.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > 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.
| chubot wrote:
| 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.)
| spacechild1 wrote:
| 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 :-)
|
| :)
| simiones wrote:
| 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| > 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?
| chubot wrote:
| 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.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Have you considered they didn't teach meme coins at his
| university?
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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.
| iamnotagenius wrote:
| > 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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."
| iamnotagenius wrote:
| 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.
| topranks wrote:
| Putin prefers stablecoins denoted in US dollars.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| dashundchen wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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).
| franciscop wrote:
| 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?
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| It's not unreasonable to backpedal even harder
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Retweet doesn't mean endorsement.
| levanten wrote:
| he didnt just retweet. even if he did, president of the
| country should be held to higher standards than your
| average influencer.
| karparov wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I'm responding to the post above, not TFA.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I would think a head of state has a responsibility to check
| what he promotes.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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...
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| thrance wrote:
| _Liz Trussed_ : f*cking up the economy so badly and so
| quickly your own party ousts you. I love it!
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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...)
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| 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).
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| droptablemain wrote:
| 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.
| manquer wrote:
| > 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".
| quantified wrote:
| Sort of like a casino version of musical chairs, but the
| there's no music.
| maxbrt wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| andyferris wrote:
| 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...
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| _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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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)
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| jerojero wrote:
| 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.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Someone sold 1.9% of coin (seems fair) and entire thing busted?
| adastra22 wrote:
| There's not a lot of depth propping these things up.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Grifters all the way down.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Crypto is the best way for poor people to part with their money.
| dysoco wrote:
| 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.
| draxofavalon wrote:
| Exactly, this was not a memecoin. Agree with your view about
| Javier Milei.
| wmf wrote:
| _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.
| dysoco wrote:
| Obviously it's just a memecoin, but that's what Milei's tweet
| said, he never mentioned "meme" in his tweet unlike Trump.
| nextworddev wrote:
| was the coin explicitly sold as a memecoin?
| yalogin wrote:
| Is it not?
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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.
| karparov wrote:
| > stop spending money the government doesn't have
|
| That shows quite the misconception about what "money"
| actually is.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Not everyone believes in Modern Monetary Theory
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| ttoinou wrote:
| 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
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| andriesm wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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.
| karparov wrote:
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| 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".
| absolutelastone wrote:
| 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.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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
| karparov wrote:
| 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_ ( "schwabische 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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 Bruning '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.
| ttoinou wrote:
| I was answering to " That shows quite the misconception
| about what "money" actually is."
| concordDance wrote:
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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...
| simiones wrote:
| 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.
| ttoinou wrote:
| 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
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > 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.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| 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.
| simiones wrote:
| If real cost of living in USD is going up, how are they
| fixing inflation?
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| zone411 wrote:
| 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...
| xinayder wrote:
| 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.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| argentinian wrote:
| Poverty statistics are showing an improvement
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "However, some described Peronism as a Latin American form of
| fascism instead."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism
| spacechild1 wrote:
| What do you want to say with that?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| If you as the President get scammed into scamming your
| people, there should be consequences
| the_af wrote:
| 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?
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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
| JavierFlores09 wrote:
| > 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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?
| seu wrote:
| And not only as an investment, but as one that can lead to
| the salvation of the country...
| hawk_ wrote:
| 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.
| andriesm wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>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
| the_af wrote:
| > _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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| > 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...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| 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"
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >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.
| negamax wrote:
| 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
| lovich wrote:
| >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
| Xuban wrote:
| 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.
| lovich wrote:
| 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
| kjksf wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| EricDeb wrote:
| Is this article out of date then?
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/12/7/a-year-
| int...
| Empact wrote:
| 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/1891031131
| 375423725?s=46
| https://x.com/bowtiedmara/status/1883202966900900218?s=46
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > 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...).
| the_af wrote:
| > _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.
| otherme123 wrote:
| > 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > 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.
| argentinian wrote:
| 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
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| dysoco wrote:
| 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.
| otherme123 wrote:
| 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 _macro_ economics 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?
| xinayder wrote:
| 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".
| otherme123 wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > 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.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| > ...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.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| 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.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| 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.
| lavezzi wrote:
| > 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Uh, let's not do that? You can criticize his policies just
| fine without talking about what preceded him.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| hylaride wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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?
| mrbombastic wrote:
| 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.
| ajot wrote:
| 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.
| dysoco wrote:
| 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.
| xinayder wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| koolba wrote:
| > 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| the_af wrote:
| > _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".
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| 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?
| ryandvm wrote:
| How quaint
| courseofaction wrote:
| 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?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| 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."
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24Trump
|
| I hope we can all agree, crypto-fans or no, that moon coins
| are at best a very risky, unregulated gambling prospect!
| adriand wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The term you're looking for is seigniorage [1]. Crypto
| privatises seigniorage to the financial promoters.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| fulladder wrote:
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Maybe they view it as offering to their god
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| lavezzi wrote:
| > 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.
| cavisne wrote:
| 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...
| bbor wrote:
| 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?
| polsaker wrote:
| 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
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| 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."
| ourmandave wrote:
| And the little bastard scorpion isn't actually sorry.
| greenavocado wrote:
| 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...
| caminante wrote:
| 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.
| shelled wrote:
| 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.
| yalogin wrote:
| 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| quantified wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| 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).
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| levanten wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| argentinian wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| argentinian wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| pera wrote:
| _" Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately
| explained by corruption"_ - Argentinian saying
| miamibre wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| Coffeezilla has a really good interview about it
| https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM
| miamibre wrote:
| 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.
| ekkiren wrote:
| 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.
| jcarrano wrote:
| 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. "Loteria 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 Calcografica).
|
| 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.
| mhmmmmmm wrote:
| > 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)
| djtango wrote:
| 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
| guax wrote:
| 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.
| jcarrano wrote:
| 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).
| masijo wrote:
| >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?
| jcarrano wrote:
| 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.
| ranyume wrote:
| > 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.
| nisalperi wrote:
| Truly the dumbest timeline
| liendolucas wrote:
| 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.
| miamibre wrote:
| 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"
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