100 pointsby somewhatrandom92 days ago9 comments
  • jazzyjackson2 days ago
    It makes me want to riot that we've allowed the presidents whole family to leverage their wealth on Bitcoin, its such an outrageous conflict of interest, literally with a few million up front you stand to become unbelievably wealthy by yanking the USD's reserve currency status.

    Real monkeys paw action here tho because I always liked the idea of BTC as a viable alternate to USD, but, not like this.

    • jiggawatts2 days ago
      As someone looking in at the USA from the outside, it absolutely blows my mind that the country went from “give up the peanut farm” to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$Trump

      Like… what!?

      I have no words.

      • wredcoll2 days ago
        It is genuinely amazing how fast it feels like it happened.

        The whole monica lewisnky thing happened because there was an investigation into Clinton making maybe 100k off a partnership with a guy who later got arrested.

        Granted that was over 20 years ago now, but like, hillarys emails???

        • billy99k2 days ago
          Yes. Hillary's emails: brushed aside with the added cherry from the 'security' community saying that hosting your own email server for confidental emails is no big deal.
          • estearum2 days ago
            That's not what happened. What they said is that it was definitely a violation, there did not appear to be a chargeable crime.
            • Khainea day ago
              [flagged]
            • AnimalMuppet2 days ago
              Regular people get charged for that level of violating regulations around classified information. They also get charged for having classified information in their bathroom or in their garage.
              • pyuser5832 days ago
                People like our current President. And former president. And former CIA director.

                It seems like lots of high level officials are being irresponsible in handling condfidential information.

                Either the rules are counter-intuitive, or difficult to follow, or officials are highly incentivized not to follow them.

                But for some reason, lots of them aren't.

                It makes public accountability very difficult.

              • oliwarnera day ago
                But the emails weren't classified. That was part of the problem, but that does stop it being a crime.
              • estearum2 days ago
                Yeah agreed. I'm not sure any civilian politician would really be charged for that type of violation though. Would've been nice if the DNC apparatus didn't downplay as if it didn't matter at all though: it does!

                Note that this is actually quite different from the Mar-a-Lago case where Trump was asked to return documents, he said he did, then said he didn't have them, then asked people "what if we just said we didn't have them", then he was asked to return them again, and he said he didn't know anything about it.

          • kahrl4 hours ago
            DAWG.
          • tastyfacea day ago
            Meanwhile, everything DOGE did was *orders of magnitude* worse. Republicans? Not a peep.
    • anon191928a day ago
      wait until you learn about where $trillions went in last decades of war.
    • JuniperMesosa day ago
      [dead]
    • 1oooqooq2 days ago
      they would have profited anyway. be it stocks or forex. using btc only makes it public i guess?
      • jazzyjackson2 days ago
        corruption is one thing, I would call it merely unfair (unfortunately not illegal) to trade with inside information or by pulling strings. Crashing the dollar for personal gain, tho, it's practically treason.
        • immibisa day ago
          Not practically - crashing the dollar on purpose is actually treason.
      • colonCapitalDee2 days ago
        BTC means they can pull wealth out of the system at astonishing rates. Trump & Co are hardly the first to be corrupt, but the scale, the blatentness, and the damage being done to the country as a byproduct is unprecedented in modern history
      • lesuorac2 days ago
        Stocks are public.

        There's a been a lot of people doing moves ahead of other tariffs announcements.

        • pyuser5832 days ago
          Bitcoin is arguably more public than stocks - all transfers are publicized. Transactions on major stock markets are publicized, but private transactions are not.
        • 1oooqooqa day ago
          they most definitely are not.
          • lesuorac2 hours ago
            How do you think the SEC finds it's insider trading cases?

            They see a giant position placed ahead of a movement in the market and then ask the exchange who placed those trades. The only difference between an exchange and crypto is that cypto you can also see.

      • finghin2 days ago
        Perhaps it makes the burden of proof for the accusation higher, though?
  • pants22 days ago
    Worth noting that this whale has/had $10B worth of Bitcoin. So his $27M in profits is a whopping 0.27% gain while the rest of his portfolio dipped 10%.
    • Gigachada day ago
      There can’t be that many people with $10B in bitcoin. Surely someone can work out who this is?
    • jijijijija day ago
      I hope they lose it all to some teenagers getting kicks on discord.
  • gautamcgoel2 days ago
    I'm confused: why would you short BTC if you knew in advance that additional tariffs would be announced? Wouldn't you expect that to increase the dollar value of BTC due to depreciation of the dollar?
    • energy123a day ago
      It helps to not be too academic about it and just check what happened to BTC the last few tariff announcements.
    • rhyperior2 days ago
      If only BTC were a decorrelated, alternative investment.
      • rcxdudea day ago
        This. It has not, in practice, turned out to be the hedge that people assumed that it was.
    • pfannkuchena day ago
      How do tariffs depreciate the dollar? Do you just mean in the “prices go up” sense? I’m not trying to nitpick, just wondering if there is some mechanism I don’t know about that actually devalues the dollar in a fundamental way. Like if there is a chicken flu and the price of eggs skyrockets, I wouldn’t say that depreciates the dollar, for example, in strict terms, prices have just risen.
      • immibisa day ago
        Prices going up is dollar devaluation. One doesn't cause the other - they're already two different words for the same thing.

        If potato prices rise but soybean prices fall, then you can say potatoes got more expensive, soybeans got cheaper, and the dollar is worth the same. But if prices go up all across the economy in general, that is dollar devaluation.

        • pfannkuchena day ago
          But tariffs don’t cause prices to go up all across the economy in general. Domestic products will get more expensive in the short term due to a positive demand discontinuity, but they will fall again in the medium term as domestic producers regain access to the large swaths of the market they lost access to under the old global free market trade policy. If the tariffs continue for a long time (not guaranteed) then domestic labor compensation will also recover (perhaps not fully due to automation, but automation on the high volume stuff would free up workers to work on smaller volume products).

          Side question - would you consider the converse, globalization, to be a deflationary force?

    • Finnucane2 days ago
      Why would you expect anything with BTC?
      • henry2023a day ago
        Hating on Bitcoin was cool in 2015. It’s proven to be a reliable store of value asset, to the point that central banks are considering reserves on it.

        Bitcoin maybe as useless as gold, but that doesn’t make it more or less valuable.

        • pfannkuchena day ago
          Tangential, but I find it strange how bank “reserve” means something entirely different from what it used to mean.
        • lern_too_spela day ago
          > to the point that central banks are considering reserves on it.

          Specifically, central banks run by scammers and imbeciles. Nobody with any brains is going to put their reserves in something whose only value comes from the existence of greater fools and has the downside of propping up the North Korean government.

  • jwpapi2 days ago
    I think Occams Razor. Here I think it’s way more likely that the person who holds 10B in Bitcoin somehow by now has contacts to the inner circle of US government as being someone in the administration.
  • w10-1a day ago
    I'm grateful to those tracking and publishing this information, but as smoking guns go, the evidence doesn't seem particularly compelling.

    China announced their rare-earth restrictions on 10/9. Trump predictably over-reacts with tariffs on 10/10. The trader had plenty of reason to expect new tariffs, and some reason to expect Bitcoin to go down.

    If I were corrupt, I'd always make sure there was some justifying event in advance of my trade, even if I knew there was to be some precipitating event for a market swing. Plausible deniability.

    • juntoa day ago
      I wouldn’t be surprised if people connected to the Chinese government are not also taking advantage of the fact that Trump is extremely easy to trigger, manipulate and predict.
  • luxuryballs2 days ago
    So if the government itself is the one holding the bitcoin then you can bet it won’t investigate itself… and a few billion in bitcoin wouldn’t even go very far if they tried to use it as a funding source which is wild to think about.
  • bentta day ago
    It was Bernie. He's had enough of this horseshit.
  • Finnucane2 days ago
    it’s hard to believe anyone in this administration would something so blatantly corrupt.