#quatloos

[handypolymath]

Jobs: In my life, I’ve witnessed three elite salespeople at work. You won’t like their secret.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The largest campaign finance violation in US history

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Earlier this month, some of the richest men in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (the billionaire VCs behind Andreesen-Horowitz) announced that they would be backing Trump with endorsements and millions of dollars:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/07/16/trump-lands-more-big-tech-backers-billionaire-venture-capitalist-andreessen-joins-wave-supporting-former-president/

Predictably, this drew a lot of ire, which Andreesen tried to diffuse by insisting that his support "doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations

In other words, the billionaires backing Trump weren't doing so because they supported the racism, the national abortion ban, the attacks on core human rights, etc. Those were merely tradeoffs that they were willing to make to get the parts of the Trump program they do support: more tax-cuts for the ultra-rich, and, of course, free rein to defraud normies with cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes.

Crypto isn't "money" – it is far too volatile to be a store of value, a unit of account, or a medium of exchange. You'd have to be nuts to get a crypto mortgage when all it takes is Elon Musk tweeting a couple emoji to make your monthly mortgage payment double.

A thing becomes moneylike when it can be used to pay off a bill for something you either must pay for, or strongly desire to pay for. The US dollar's moneylike property comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people need dollars to pay off the IRS and their state tax bills, which means that they will trade labor and goods for dollars. Even people who don't pay US taxes will accept dollars, because they know they can use them to buy things from people who do have a nondiscretionary bill that can only be paid in dollars.

Dollars are also valuable because there are many important commodities that can only – or primarily – be purchased with them, like much of the world's oil supply. The fact that anyone who wants to buy oil has a strong need for dollars makes dollars valuable, because they will sell labor and goods to get dollars, not because they need dollars, but because they need oil.

There's almost nothing that can only be purchased with crypto. You can procure illegal goods and services in the mistaken belief that this transaction will be durably anonymous, and you can pay off ransomware creeps who have hijacked your personal files or all of your business's data:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

Web3 was sold as a way to make the web more "decentralized," but it's best understood as an effort to make it impossible to use the web without paying crypto every time you click your mouse. If people need crypto to use the internet, then crypto whales will finally have a source of durable liquidity for the tokens they've hoarded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/#quatloos

The Web3 bubble was almost entirely down to the vast hype machine mobilized by Andreesen-Horowitz, who bet billions of dollars on the idea and almost single-handedly created the illusion of demand for crypto. For example, they arranged a $100m bribe to Kickstarter shareholders in exchange for Kickstarter pretending to integrate "blockchain" into its crowdfunding platform:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html

Kickstarter never ended up using the blockchain technology, because it was useless. Their shareholders just pocketed the $100m while the company weathered the waves of scorn from savvy tech users who understood that this was all a shuck.

Look hard enough at any crypto "success" and you'll discover a comparable scam. Remember NFTs, and the eye-popping sums that seemingly "everyone" was willing to pay for ugly JPEGs? That whole market was shot through with "wash-trading" – where you sell your asset to yourself and pretend that it was bought by a third party. It's a cheap – and illegal – way to convince people that something worthless is actually very valuable:

https://mailchi.mp/brianlivingston.com/034-2#free1

Even the books about crypto are scams. Chris Dixon's "bestseller" about the power of crypto, Read Write Own, got on the bestseller list through the publishing equivalent of wash-trading, where VCs with large investments in crypto bought up thousands of copies and shoved them on indifferent employees or just warehoused them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

The fact that crypto trades were mostly the same bunch of grifters buying shitcoins from each other, while spending big on Superbowl ads, bribes to Kickstarter shareholders, and bulk-buys of mediocre business-books was bound to come out someday. In the meantime, though, the system worked: it convinced normies to gamble their life's savings on crypto, which they promptly lost (if you can't spot the sucker at the table, you're the sucker).

There's a name for this: it's called a "bezzle." John Kenneth Galbraith defined a "bezzle" as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." All bezzles collapse eventually, but until they do, everyone feels better off. You think you're rich because you just bought a bunch of shitcoins after Matt Damon told you that "fortune favors the brave." Damon feels rich because he got a ton of cash to rope you into the con. Crypto.com feels rich because you took a bunch of your perfectly cromulent "fiat money" that can be used to buy anything and traded it in for shitcoins that can be used to buy nothing:

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/26/matt-damon-crypto-commercial/

Andreesen-Horowitz were masters of the bezzle. For them, the Web3 bet on an internet that you'd have to buy their shitcoins to use was always Plan B. Plan A was much more straightforward: they would back crypto companies and take part of their equity in huge quantities of shitcoins that they could sell to "unqualified investors" (normies) in an "initial coin offering." Normally, this would be illegal: a company can't offer stock to the general public until it's been through an SEC vetting process and "gone public" through an IPO. But (Andreesen-Horowitz argued) their companies' "initial coin offerings" existed in an unregulated grey zone where they could be traded for the life's savings of mom-and-pop investors who thought crypto was real because they heard that Kickstarter had adopted it, and there was a bestselling book about it, and Larry David and Matt Damon and Spike Lee told them it was the next big thing.

Crypto isn't so much a financial innovation as it is a financial obfuscation. "Fintech" is just a cynical synonym for "unregulated bank." Cryptocurrency enjoys a "byzantine premium" – that is, it's so larded with baffling technical nonsense that no one understands how it works, and they assume that anything they don't understand is probably incredibly sophisticated and great ("a pile of shit this big must have pony under it somewhere"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

There are two threats to the crypto bezzle: the first is that normies will wise up to the scam, and the second is that the government will put a stop to it. These are correlated risks: if the government treats crypto as a security (or worse, a scam), that will put severe limits on how shitcoins can be marketed to normies, which will staunch the influx of real money, so the sole liquidity will come from ransomware payments and transactions with tragically overconfident hitmen and drug dealers who think the blockchain is anonymous.

To keep the bezzle going, crypto scammers have spent the past two election cycles flooding both parties with cash. In the 2022 midterms, crypto money bankrolled primary challenges to Democrats by absolute cranks, like the "effective altruist" Carrick Flynn ("effective altruism" is a crypto-affiliated cult closely associated with the infamous scam-artist Sam Bankman-Fried). Sam Bankman-Fried's super PAC, "Protect Our Future," spent $10m on attack-ads against Flynn's primary opponent, the incumbent Andrea Salinas. Salinas trounced Flynn – who was an objectively very bad candidate who stood no chance of winning the general election – but only at the expense of most of the funds she raised from her grassroots, small-dollar donors.

Fighting off SBF's joke candidate meant that Salinas went into the general election with nearly empty coffers, and she barely squeaked out a win against a GOP nightmare candidate Mike Erickson – a millionaire Oxy trafficker, drunk driver, and philanderer who tricked his then-girlfriend by driving her to a fake abortion clinic and telling her that it was a real one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/14/competitors-critics-customers/#billionaire-dilletantes

SBF is in prison, but there's no shortage of crypto millions for this election cycle. According to Molly White's "Follow the Crypto" tracker, crypto-affiliated PACs have raised $185m to influence the 2024 election – more than the entire energy sector:

https://www.followthecrypto.org/

As with everything "crypto," the cryptocurrency election corruption slushfund is a bezzle. The "Stand With Crypto PAC" claims to have the backing of 1.3 million "crypto advocates," and Reuters claims they have 440,000 backers. But 99% of the money claimed by Stand With Crypto was actually donated to "Fairshake" – a different PAC – and 90% of Fairshake's money comes from a handful of corporate donors:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/

Stand With Crypto – minus the Fairshake money it falsely claimed – has raised $13,690 since April. That money came from just seven donors, four of whom are employed by Coinbase, for whom Stand With Crypto is a stalking horse. Stand With Crypto has an affiliated group (also called "Stand With Crypto" because that is an extremely normal and forthright way to run a nonprofit!), which has raised millions – $1.49m. Of that $1.49m, 90% came from just four donors: three cryptocurrency companies, and the CEO of Coinbase.

There are plenty of crypto dollars for politicians to fight over, but there are virtually no crypto voters. 69-75% of Americans "view crypto negatively or distrust it":

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/

When Trump keynotes the Bitcoin 2024 conference and promises to use public funds to buy $1b worth of cryptocoins, he isn't wooing voters, he's wooing dollars:

https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-strategic-bitcoin-stockpile-bitcoin-2024/

Wooing dollars, not crypto. Politicians aren't raising funds in crypto, because you can't buy ads or pay campaign staff with shitcoins. Remember: unless Andreesen-Horowitz manages to install Web3 crypto tollbooths all over the internet, the industries that accept crypto are ransomware, and technologically overconfident hit-men and drug-dealers. To win elections, you need dollars, which crypto hustlers get by convincing normies to give them real money in exchange for shitcoins, and they are only funding politicians who will make it easier to do that.

As a political matter, "crypto" is a shorthand for "allowing scammers to steal from working people," which makes it a very Republican issue. As Hamilton Nolan writes, "If the Republicans want to position themselves as the Party of Crypto, let them. It is similar to how they position themselves as The Party of Racism and the Party of Religious Zealots and the Party of Telling Lies about Election Fraud. These things actually reflect poorly on them, the Republicans":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/crypto-as-a-political-characteristic

But the Democrats – who are riding high on the news that Kamala Harris will be their candidate this fall – have decided that they want some of that crypto money, too. Even as crypto-skeptical Dems like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester see millions from crypto PACs flooding in to support their primary challengers and GOP opponents, a group of Dem politicians are promising to give the crypto industry whatever it wants, if they will only bribe Democratic candidates as well:

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=00000190-f475-d94b-a79f-fc77c9400000

Kamala Harris – a genuinely popular candidate who has raised record-shattering sums from small-dollar donors representing millions of Americans – herself has called for a "reset" of the relationship between the crypto sector and the Dems:

https://archive.is/iYd1C

As Luke Goldstein writes in The American Prospect, sucking up to crypto scammers so they stop giving your opponents millions of dollars to run attack ads against you is a strategy with no end – you have to keep sucking up to the scam, otherwise the attack ads come out:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-31-crypto-cash-affecting-democratic-races/

There's a whole menagerie of crypto billionaires behind this year's attempt to buy the American government – Andreesen and Horowitz, of course, but also the Winklevoss twins, and this guy, who says we're in the midst of a "civil war" and "anyone that votes against Trump can die in a fucking fire":

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1813952816840597712/photo/1

But the real whale that's backstopping the crypto campaign spending is Coinbase, through its Fairshake crypto PAC. Coinbase has donated $45,500,000 to Fairshake, which is a lot:

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/how-to-get-regulatory-clarity-for-crypto

But $45.5m isn't merely a large campaign contribution: it appears that $25m of that is the largest the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history, "by far," a fact that was sleuthed out by Molly White:

https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/

At issue is the fact that Coinbase is bidding to be a US federal contractor: specifically, they want to manage the crypto wallets that US federal cops keep seizing from crime kingpins. Once Coinbase threw its hat into the federal contracting ring, it disqualified itself from donating to politicians or funding PACs:

Campaign finance law prohibits federal government contractors from making contributions, or promising to make contributions, to political entities including super PACs like Fairshake.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/federal-government-contractors/

Previous to this, the largest ever illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor appears to be Marathon Petroleum Company's 2022 bribe to GOP House and Senate super PACs, a mere $1m, only 4% of Coinbase's bribe.

I'm with Nolan on this one. Let the GOP chase millions from billionaires everyone hates who expect them to promote a scam that everyone mistrusts. The Dems have finally found a candidate that people are excited about, and they're awash in money thanks to small amounts contributed by everyday Americans. As AOC put it:

They've got money, but we've got people. Dollar bills don't vote. People vote.

https://www.popsugar.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dnc-headquarters-climate-speech-47986992

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased

[deerspace9]

Oompa loompa doompety doos

You are a thrall being sold for quatloos

Oompa loompa doompaty beth

You and your friends will all fight to the death

Oompa loompa doompety dellion

This is your fate on the planet Triskelion

[misforgotten2]

“I bet 4000 quatloos on the female.”

Good Housekeeping - January 1947

[kilowogcore]

I made this meme a full year ago, an' I really thought I wuz gonna have ta' update it, but nah, it still tracks. That's sad.

Let's cheer up with a game! What ridiculous thing do ya' think the douchebro "fans" will be mad at next year? Whoever I like most will win 10,000 quatloos (assumin' they can get to Oa to pick them up).

(Art sampled from "Peacemaker Tries Hard!" Vol. 1 #2 by Kyle Starks, Steve Pugh, Jordie Bellaire, Becca Carey, Matthew Levine, and Chris Conroy, Edits: Dialogue)

[fairestmusesofthemall]

"Well, I think I have exhausted all I can from Rupaul's Drag Race for my next report on earth culture..."

"Twenty quatloo on the rattus jersi to win!"

[vbartilucci]

New Kamen Rider series announcement for America on Valentines Day.

Considering Fourze is in that vid, I might be willing to lay a few Quatloos on the board next to his name.

[fostertheory]

Forty quatloos on the Japanese Knotweed.

this redditor has the fucking battle royale of invasive plants (in the US) happening in their yard jesus christ. sentences of hate and destruction

[internutter]

Challenge #04352-K334: Inherent Instability

The ones seeking to be kings wanted to outlaw schools. The people educated themselves. The ones seeking to be kings vilified those who had intelligence and compassion. The lands taught these would-be kings that it was this intelligence and compassion was the only reason they survived. -- Anon Guest

Of all the universal truths, the one most forgotten is: Those who actively seek power should never have it. Those sorts of people never seek power to do good for others. Especially beware those who dress their power-hunger in glitter and sugar.

Benevolence is a large and very pretty cloak. It covers so much.

Witness the miracle of the self-made idol of thousands. A man who lifted himself up by his bootstraps with a small investment of fifty trillion quatloos. The one who started competition against the establishment with a revolutionary pod system that brought the dream future to the public today.

[Check the source for the rest of the story]

[cmweller]

Challenge #04352-K334: Inherent Instability

The ones seeking to be kings wanted to outlaw schools. The people educated themselves. The ones seeking to be kings vilified those who had intelligence and compassion. The lands taught these would-be kings that it was this intelligence and compassion was the only reason they survived. -- Anon Guest

Of all the universal truths, the one most forgotten is: Those who actively seek power should never have it. Those sorts of people never seek power to do good for others. Especially beware those who dress their power-hunger in glitter and sugar.

Benevolence is a large and very pretty cloak. It covers so much.

Witness the miracle of the self-made idol of thousands. A man who lifted himself up by his bootstraps with a small investment of fifty trillion quatloos. The one who started competition against the establishment with a revolutionary pod system that brought the dream future to the public today.

[Check the source for the rest of the story]

[handypolymath]

The fast approaching end-point on the horizon:

-- most jobs are commission sales

-- most products are non-functional props

-- most services are tiered to sort marks and drive customers to pay for upgrades

- cream and gold tier: hollow luxury of commodity servitude for end-users who can pay

- chrome and bare edison bulb tier: a dog-and-pony show to lure wallets investors to the Big Egress

- unwashed tier: the self-serve obstacle course of doing a company's administrative work for them, possibly to the point of needing to best the devil at the violin.

Eventually The Economy will eject all human activity from the balance sheet as being unprofitable, and then I guess we go to Quatloos?

[milf--adjacent]

400 quatloos on this being his bizarre attempt to get a girl to like him!

its pretty likely the failed assassin was a liberal cause a true actionable leftist would have known to aim for the torso. libs dont have firearm knowhow cause theyre too busy trying to ban them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

#15yrsago Saul Bass’s iconic logos https://blog.signalnoise.com/inspiration-logos-by-saul-bass/

#15yrsago Interoperability and the DMCA: comprehensive look at problems, some good solutions https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1224742

#15yrsago How to Ditch Your Fairy: hilarious kids book about the problems with fairies https://memex.craphound.com/2008/09/16/how-to-ditch-your-fairy-hilarious-kids-book-about-the-problems-with-fairies/

#10yrsago Video of top NSA spook Gen’l Alexander’s Starship Enterprise clone/Information Dominance Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFNUbdARitk

#10yrsago Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection https://memex.craphound.com/2013/09/16/rewire-digital-cosmopolitans-in-the-age-of-connection/

#10yrsago Prince Jefri of Brunei: how to blow billions https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/07/prince-jefri-201107

#5yrsago AMA study: shooters armed with semiautomatic rifles kill twice as many people https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2702134

#5yrsago More googlers are quitting over the company’s plan to launch a censored, surveilling search product in China https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google-project-dragonfly-employees-quitting

#5yrsago Our political upheaval wasn’t caused by mob rule, but by institutions designed to preserve elite oversight https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/democracy-threat-from-minority-rule-not-people.html

#5yrsago An “obsessive,” “anti-imperialist” Turing Complete computer language with only one command https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emn-UF4ArWk

#1yrago Moneylike: My Locus Magazine column about what makes money money https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/#quatloos

[gorematchala]

They could make a billion quatloos if they made a new Pokémon Stadium game, but you start with rental Pokémon only and battling earns you resources to build your own pokemon from scratch. Maybe put a lil tutorial in there that explains EVs. Like if they went the Guilty Gear route and put super deep guides in the game it might reduce some of the stigma that competitve Pokémon has surrounding it

[fairestmusesofthemall]

"Changing my bet. Seventy-five quatloo that they kiss."

"Or that the rattus jersi tastes the centipede. Either way, I think we're moving into some kind of tongue territory!"

[vbartilucci]

I can foresee a viable scenario where followers of the incoming president will either try to forcibly raise flags to full mast, or try to take them down entirely, having been convinced they their being at half-mast is an insult to their leader.

Anyone want to lay a few quatloos on the table?