As usual with the tech industry, cryptocurrencies weren’t just sold as a risky investment — they were framed as a social good. Now that the crash has ruined lives, those who promised societal transformation through crypto should be held accountable.
The Trump administration has issued a blanket ethics waiver to venture capitalist David Sacks, the president’s new special advisor for AI and crypto. The waiver clears Sacks to work on regulatory issues directly related to his financial holdings.
Some of the world’s biggest football clubs are using their supporters’ loyalty to sell them blockchain assets, “fan tokens,” and NFTs. The crypto takeover of football promises to empower supporters — but in truth, it’s just marketing fluff for a web of pyramid schemes.
Years of efforts by crypto interests — most prominently, Sam Bankman-Fried — to deregulate the industry have finally paid off. Last month regulators at a small federal agency allowed a cryptocurrency firm to vertically integrate, endangering customer assets.
Former FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried is now on trial for massively defrauding his company’s customers and lenders. The lurid web of lies the trial is uncovering strengthens the case that crypto is a giant scam.
Crypto millionaires are attempting to buy an island in the Southwest Pacific. It’s the latest in a long line of schemes by libertarians asserting the rights of private capital above all else.
Sam Bankman-Fried, apostle of “effective altruism,” has done one good thing for humanity: he’s revealed that finance, and particularly crypto, is a wasteful cesspool that must be reined in.
Sam Bankman-Fried fanned the flames of crypto madness. And he couldn’t have done it without his powerful friends.
Bitcoin was not just a consequence of public disillusionment during the 2008 financial crisis — it was also a response to neoliberal monetary policies that saw money as somehow above politics. But questions about monetary policy are questions about democracy.
The crypto takeover of European football promises to empower supporters — but in truth, it’s just marketing fluff for a giant pyramid scheme.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, had a mandate for change. He used it to build a police state and buy coin.
Liberals tend to worship a specific kind of hero: highly credentialed, media-friendly, foe of both conservative Republicans and “liberal pieties” — someone exactly like former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, cryptocurrency failure extraordinaire.
Steering the country toward another potential financial crisis, the Trump administration has moved to completely gut the federal regulatory agency tasked with reining in financial institutions.
Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble. It’s worse than that: it’s a full-on fraud.
Cryptocurrency promises to liberate the monetary system from the clutches of the powerful. Instead, it mostly functions to make wealthy speculators even wealthier.
For all its utopian trappings, web3 tech like cryptocurrency only deepens the problem of elite control over the internet. We have an alternative.
Republican representative Patrick McHenry is staunchly defending a bank deregulation law passed under Donald Trump just days before leading an inquiry into the collapse of Signature Bank — which is his top donor.
In early 2020, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink announced that the firm was turning toward climate-friendly investments. The record, though, shows that Fink’s green branding turned out to be entirely bogus.
Mario Gómez is one of El Salvador’s most prominent critics of the government’s recent embrace of Bitcoin — which may explain why he was recently arrested by Salvadoran police, he told Jacobin in an interview.
Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods have been exploited by predatory financial institutions and starved of desperately needed investment. Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson could change that by creating a public bank.