https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/07/backing-the-truck-up-to-the-government/
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/embedded-video/mmvo226432069961
I’m neither rich enough nor libertarian enough to have invested my time in deciphering how cryptocurrency works, much less invested any of my money. But uber-rich crypto investors, Chris Hayes reports, now have a president-elect ready to backstop their funny money with public money. Even after watching his Friday night report, I still don’t understand how crypto works. But he confirms how oligarchy does.
Like much libertarian dogma, protestations by these shrugging Atlases that government stay out of the way of their Randian penis-enhancement schemes is so much Trumpian puffery. Government is not their enemy. It’s a tool of the moneyed class for making more money.
Matt Taibbi in his heyday understood this. He wrote in Griftopia (2011), “There are really two Americas.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”
Elon Musk invested — what other word is there for it? — over a quarter billion dollars in getting Donald Trump reelected. Now it’s time for Trump to pay dividends. Not from his own stash, of course. From America’s. “They’re just backing the truck up to the government,” Hayes warns.
Brendan Greeley opines at The Financial Times:
In July, Cynthia Lummis, a US senator from Wyoming, introduced a bill to establish what she called a “strategic bitcoin reserve”, a programme instructing the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to buy a million bitcoins over the next five years to then hold them for at least 20 more years.
Greeley roughs out the basic details but, more importantly, explains what this reserve would mean to the hodlers (I had to look it up):
The bill lays out a mechanism for paying for the reserve. Any surplus the Federal Reserve returns to the Treasury would be spent instead on bitcoin. The Fed doesn’t currently return any money to the Treasury. No matter. The bill also proposes that Fed banks mark all their gold certificates to the current market price of gold, then remit the difference to the Treasury to buy bitcoin. This is all plausible, but the bill doesn’t answer the most important question facing any piece of legislation: how will this change anything at all, for anyone?
A reserve would present both a consummation and an irony for bitcoin’s hardcore supporters — the hodlers. The state would recognise what hodlers call freedom money, but also prop that up with a state programme. The preamble to Lummis’s bill argues that in return, a million bitcoin would diversify America’s assets, improving financial and monetary resilience. Unlike a traditional banking reserve, however, they would be held by the Treasury and couldn’t start to be sold until 2045. An asset you cannot sell does not give you resilience. It gives you storage costs.
Greeley considers the financial ins and outs of this effort by the oligarchs, but there is another more insidious aspect of this scam.
‘Tis the season for Hans Gruber to fall to his death from the Nakatomi building. Before that, Gruber (the late Alan Rickman) quotes a version of another of those spurious quotes that spread wildly in the Internet Age: And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
What do men with more money than God, like Elon Musk, do with themselves when adding to their dragon hoards is as pointless as making the rubble bounce after a nuclear exchange?
Money is a kind of power. Controlling billions of dollars is even more power. But it’s like bitcoin that way. Money power is not altogether tangible. If an oligarch wants real power, life-and-death power, he wants political power. Naturally, without the bother of rich narcissists having to serve humanity, perfect the union, defend the proposition that all persons are created equal, or any of that nonsense.
Oligarchs have discovered there are indeed more worlds to conquer: yours.
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