👁️ Why the Attempted Trump Assassination Triggered a Crypto Rally

Because markets are ENTIRELY RATIONAL. Also: Tornado Cash; BitConnect conviction (!!!); and literally gambling with investor money.

The past weekend’s attempt on the life of former President and current candidate Donald Trump is bad in every possible way, from every possible angle – except for what it can teach us about the depravity of our society.

One of those lessons can be seen in the Bitcoin chart, which has shot up by around 10% in the few days since the assassination attempt. Nobody should in any way celebrate this, though, unless you are yourself proudly depraved: The damage the incident has and will cause is in no way a fair trade for your bags getting a little heavier.

While even Bitcoin partisans shouldn’t consider this rally “good,” there is a revealing and simple logic to it. It was clear almost immediately after the failed attempt that it made Trump look good, in a very visceral way, thanks to what has been widely described as his “defiant” and immediate reaction to the attempt on his life.

This made it more likely that Trump will be re-elected, and in turn, that a more crypto-friendly regulatory regime will come into power. Hence, number go up. And frankly, it sickens me.

The Biden administration has pursued a strategy on crypto that is, in no uncertain terms, simply wrong in nearly every way that matters. The SEC in particular has been so rogue that its living example of imperial overreach can only have nudged the Supreme Court even further in its overturning of “Chevron deference” for regulatory agencies.

And now we are learning that Biden has been so incompetent and wrongheaded on the issue that it’s pushing people to support Donald Trump strictly on the grounds that he’s pro-crypto. This is a Rubicon that I cannot and never will cross, because I genuinely believe (as much as the Democrats have turned it into a toothless claim) that Trump is an antidemocratic force.

Trump’s impacts in the here and now outweigh whatever long-term benefit democracy might see from better crypto policy.

It’s also worth reminding folks that Trump’s grasp of crypto and its implications is almost certainly shallow – and therefore transitory. Remember, he’s like a cat with a pair of keys: if the next person he talks says just the right things, Trump’s love of crypto could be gone like a spring rain.

The Tornado Cash Trial is About YOUR Rights

I was honored to be invited to write about the criminal trial of Roman Storm, one of the founders of the Tornado Cash crypto mixing protocol, for a new cypherpunk-aligned publication called The Rage. I wrote first about a pretrial hearing last Friday, which included the judge’s decision to delay the proceedings until December.

Today, we published a followup piece digging into the Constitutional implications of the case, having to do with the roles of money and code as varieties of protected speech. However, as I also explore in today’s piece, the specific behavior of Storm and his team make their conviction more likely than if this were purely an exercise in Constitutional theory.

The Rage is a shoestring operation run by a very dedicated advocate for pro-freedom technology. If you’d like to see more coverage like this, from myself or others, please consider supporting the Rage via Geyser.

BitConnect Promoter John Biggaton Convicted in Australia

About 18 months ago now, I finished some of my proudest work: two seasons of the audio documentary series Crypto Crooks. The second episode we made is titled “Where is Madeline Biggaton,” for the disappeared wife of John Biggaton. Biggaton was the lead Australian promoter of the crypto fraud BitConnect, earning perhaps millions in commissions for effectively conning people. His wife Madeline disappeared in a possible suicide after the scam collapsed, and victims began harassing the family.

Now, Biggaton has been convicted in Australia of providing unlicensed financial advice. Unfortunately, this seems like a slap on the wrist: he will essentially be on probation for a few years, and it isn’t reported that there was any disgorgement or financial penalty element at all. There’s also no sign yet that the trial uncovered anything about his wife’s fate, though that could still emerge.

Literally Gambling Away the Investors’ Money

Everything that’s very funny is also very sad, including this incredible story of a casino founder who gambled away his investors’ money by putting it into leveraged long positions on Bitcoin, which were then liquidated.

The excellent Sam Kessler over at CoinDesk actually interviewed the founder in question, Richard Kim, who seems like a very sad person. Kim essentially acknowledges he has a compulsive gambling/risk problem. But he also assures investors that he’s going to … wait for it … win it all back.