Seems like what's happening is unsurprising. A nation of spectators, not citizens.

I'd suspect there will be a lot of room for "non-official acts" charges related to Trump's pump-and-dump crypto schemes after he leaves office.

And fewer politicians are going to have incentive to stick with him then.

But after spending ~2y in the space, I realized another thing -- the people in this space right now are in it purely for speculation and monetary gains. There's a lot of talk about decade long horizons, but any app that achieves pmf in the short to medium term has to cater to the speculators or die.

We chose not to go down the path of launching a coin or doing speculative stuff, even though the demand for it was intense. We hit some PMF around creators, but didn't have the conviction that it would scale without speculation. A year down the line, I believe that was the right pov to have.

what ever gave you that thought? There are countries that do this right out in the open. The rest of the countries do it in various shades of gray to not be right out in the open, but still visible for those that can see in higher bit depths of gray than black and white

John Adams told us the Constitution is intended for a moral (or virtuous) people.

The point is the law isn't self enforcing. People have to insist upon Constitutional order, not because of (blind) faith in it, but because the alternative is tyranny. Not anarchy.

Does this country deserve Constitutional order? The People abandoned it by electing someone virulently and openly opposed to it.

The regulation you seek is utterly meaningless in an autocracy. Or even in a unitary executive theory of Constitutional order.

But in the specific case of Trump, among the most untrustworthy liars America has produced, what does Constitutional duty mean to him? What does it mean that he took the oath of office? He said the words but no serious person believes he took an oath.

People still have no idea what we've done. And what is yet to come.

The POTUS is a psycho. And the replacements aren't good people either.

100 days down, 1369 to go. It's going to get much worse.

There's an old saying that goes something like there is crime, there is organized crime and there is government.

I really wonder how you come up to that conclusion especially that there is more than a degree of regulation. If regulation will not apply for the top anyway, then it's better to remove all regulation.

Its called kleptocurrency for good reason.

Those who support it on philosophical grounds will destruction on everyone else for the sake of their own gain, and should be viewed with all possible hostility as they constitute an intentional community of public enemies in the plainest possible sense.

Say what you will about "the swamp" (not a big fan myself), but as a metaphor it kinda works since a swamp may be noxious and filled with unsavory swamp creatures... but it's still an ecosystem where competition and co-evolution amongst these swamp species in response to external environmental changes would still be expected.

OR they aren’t ignorant, and are fully aware of things, and instead are scum.

Bitcoin solves (or attempts to solve) for exchange in absence of trust and regulation. But this is a stupid thing to solve for, because without trust and regulation you can’t even have a functioning society.

Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).

You could spend an entire college semester discussing how and why. Immigration is the current scapegoat for the effects of a hollowed out middle class, though.

To win the libs, women, colored, foreigners, woke, dei - as long as they can satisfy their general hatred for "others" they are ok with collapsing America.

A elite that fights social welfare as socialism, while at the same time removing the middle class and handing the lower classes infinite competition. Nobody cares about who the elite pretends to care for, nobody cares about corruption, they want to see that house burn down, like theirs was torched. The sounds of humanism the enemy makes, are irrelevant, as the sound of compassion made while doing nothing.

Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government contracts.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: to clarify further, in the context of the reply below -

The thing that's particularly bad about this comment is that it pours scorn on a group of people that is defined by their class and intellect, which is just the kind of sentiment we don't want to see on HN. By all means, criticize politicians and others in power. Let's not scapegoat people at the very bottom of the heap for all the ills of the world.

Do that multiple times and you may end-up with a dicator(or at least someone who can become a dictator) sooner or later.

If any of this is (arguably) normal we should tear down the systems that support these norms. They are bad norms. The solution is never, “Welp, people are corrupt, what can you do?” You start making changes in the legal system. Because if you don’t you’re giving the country away as though there were no other course of action.

What? Campaign donations are not tax exempt.

> Hunter Biden made multi-million dollar deals, and got paid 50k a month for a being on various boards... despite being a known drugie.

Musk is also a "known druggie"; his ketamine habit is self-admitted, and he smoked pot on Rogan. (Briefly risking his contracts, even!)

> the "Top 200 holders" get a dinner with the president. Not saying it's better or worse, just saying it's pretty much the same thing that every president has had access to.

Not in the slightest. There are legal limits on how much money you can give the President.