The fact that it is a Molly White project means take it with a basketball sized grain of salt. She has deeply held beliefs and keeps cherry picking until the data supports them.
I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying, I think they are just doing it via a single PAC rather than spinning up dozens of targeted PACs for each race.
> She has deeply held beliefs and keeps cherry picking until the data supports them.
That’s a big claim, but it’s presented without evidence. Do you have any examples?
On that note:
> I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying
What data are you using to support this belief? Do you have additional data that she left out? That would be a good way to support the allegation of cherry-picking.
> That’s a big claim, but it’s presented without evidence. Do you have any examples?
What do you mean? Her entire persona and relevance revolves around being anti-crypto. Of course she's heavily biased; this isn't even a remotely controversial claim.
> That would be a good way to support the allegation of cherry-picking.
The real story here is how much power individuals have over our political landscape. George Soros, for example, has injected more than $125M into the midterm race in 2022[1]. To be clear, this is not a partisan issue; the Kochs raised over $70M last year[2]. If you want to be critical of super PACs, crypto spending is literally a drop in the bucket and completely missing the forest for the trees. There is a story here, but crypto ain't it.
The more boring reality is that (like every nascent industry) crypto is going through some growing pains, so it makes sense a16z/Coinbase/etc. need to heavily lobby DC for favorable SEC rulings & legislation. This is, quite literally, business as usual.
> Her entire persona and relevance revolves around being anti-crypto. Of course she's heavily biased; this isn't even a remotely controversial claim.
As a generation, we really need to learn how to say: "I don't like this person and I believe they are biased and I hate their politics/tone/demeanour/ethos but that doesn't mean they are wrong about the facts."
The ability to make use of information and ideas from people we disagree with, and even agree with the correct findings or conclusions of people we dislike, is a skill we urgently need to learn.
Okay, what are the facts here? That crypto firms and VCs are lobbying politicians for favorable legislation? Um, okay. Everyone from farmers to auto-makers to tech companies do that. It's an absolute nothingburger.
Are the facts that there's over $200M injected in our political system by crypto firms? Um, okay. This doesn't even move the needle when compared to the billions injected by a class of ~30 ultra-rich individuals (both conservative and liberal) over the last 10 years.
At worst, this is misdirection, at best, it's gross ignorance of the ripple effects of the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling.
This is a political statement you're making. I get it: You want to assert that her work is about something else, and maybe Molly White wants it to be about something else as well. But that has nothing to do with the dataset.
When I look at that website I'm just looking at charts with numbers and breakdowns of those numbers. Sharing data is never "misdirection". It's just data.
The way to criticize her work is not to begin by attacking the person or their motives or the political or ethical implications of their work, but by describing and analysing her data.
Individuals can figure out for themselves if the data or its presentation is useful for them.
In general, you do your arguments a terrible disservice when you attack a person rather than engaging with their work. That approach makes one quickly lose the credibility they wish to assert that the person they're criticising doesn't have.
I'm not sure why you're being disingenuous here, it's clear as day she's not just "sharing data" (whereas Open Secrets, where the data is sourced from anyway, actually is). I mean, the title of the webpage is literally Follow the Crypto, but yeah, I'm sure no statement is being made here, it's totally "just data" ;)
But more saliently, as I said prior, the data isn't even that interesting. Wow, a16z and Coinbase are lobbying DC in an attempt to curry favors because they invested hundreds of millions in crypto startups, big whoop. It totally misses the larger problem with the data (namely that Citizens United, in its current incarnation, is a total disaster for democracy; crypto lobbying is a footnote).
> The real story here is how much power individuals have over our political landscape. George Soros, for example, has injected more than $125M into the midterm race in 2022[1]. To be clear, this is not a partisan issue; the Kochs raised over $70M last year[2].
I fully agree with you that the broader problem is Citizens United and the ability for corporations and the super wealthy to pour this much money into politics. In fact, I mention this here: https://www.followthecrypto.org/about/faq#what-about.
I think projects like mine would be extremely valuable for all industries, and I'm enormously grateful to groups like OpenSecrets that do excellent work making a far broader swath of the data more legible. But I am one person without the research team, time, or funding that would be necessary to analyze the data this deeply across industries, and so I focus on crypto (the subject of much of my research and writing).
The code is all open source, and I would be delighted if other projects like this one sprung up. It seems it would be a bit more productive to actually shine a light all the kinds of spending that happen throughout industries and across individuals, rather than using that other spending as a sort of whataboutist argument to dismiss projects like this one that (necessarily) focus on a subset of spending.
> If you want to be critical of super PACs, crypto spending is literally a drop in the bucket and completely missing the forest for the trees. There is a story here, but crypto ain't it.
As this project highlights,[1] crypto is far from a "drop in the bucket" when it comes to super PAC fundraising this cycle. The industry has dramatically ramped up its spending compared to previous election years, which is a large part of why I felt it was important to keep an eye on the spending.
Okay, you don’t like her. Cool, nobody’s required to but that’s a feeling, not data, and the accusation I responded to was a specific claim of dishonesty of the sort which, if true, could easily be supported by logic and evidence, not just emotion.
Wait what? I think she's doing a great job exposing crypto grifts/scams/hacks/etc. and I check her web3 feed at least once a week, but she does have a persona to uphold. Why would I pretend she's some platonic ideal of objectivity? For reasons mentioned, I do think this SuperPAC stuff is a bit reaching, but that's neither here nor there.
The claim that she is cherry picking data is quantifiable, not just a subjective assessment. If that’s true, especially given the public records available, it should be possible to back the claim up with examples.
> That’s a big claim, but it’s presented without evidence. Do you have any examples?
I am not OP but yes, I sent some information to her via their different contact mediums and she never got back, she is not responsive and could have at least said: "I am not interested".
"[She] keeps cherry picking until the data supports them" certainly sounds a lot like you saying the data and/or code is flawed. What "fantastic claim" am I making that you don't think I'm addressing?
Yes, this and her previous projects have started to look more of a crusade to me, than a critique of "cryptocurrency", whatever that is, bundling them all together rather than analysing the merits and faults of each.
Mind you, given the deep bias HN has against cryptocurrencies of any shape or form, I feel here she has her ideal audience here and we're the ones swimming against the current.
Where is the "crusade"? This just shows political donations. Is the FEC engaging in a "crusade" by publishing details on PACs?
There are constantly HN commenters on a crusade to extol and defend the alleged virtues of various "crypto" projects. We could accuse these folks of having a "bias against government-backed currency".
Perhaps HN has a bias _for_ true stories of fraud, corruption and crime rather than a bias _against_ all crypto projects.
Perhaps. HN also has stories of random software libraries and deep discussions of those. Whenever a mismanaged business in other sectors is discussed its only about that business, not the entire sector that business operates in. Whenever a devastating hack occurs directly on an end user, its a discussion of the browser and tools that can be improved to thwart it.
Crypto sector has many libraries that power it too with extremely active discussions in other tech forums, and thats totally missing from HN in favor of discussion of random mismanaged businesses and phishing attacks as representative of the entire concept of crypto. When that’s further from reality, as the tooling has improved a lot and is constantly evolving. There are many best practices that are actively discussed and worked on, elsewhere.
While the crowd on HN peculiarly acts completely segregated from that with a blissful ignorance filled with glee over frauds in the crypto sector, an extremely strange and impossibly different standard then how everything else is discussed.
> HN also has stories of random software libraries and deep discussions of those. Whenever a mismanaged business in other sectors is discussed its only about that business, not the entire sector that business operates in.
The major difference seems to be that there doesn’t seem to be anything in the entire crypto industry that isn’t fraud or crime. And a lot of vague promises that typically turn out to be just more fraud in a year or two. It’s not prejudice if it’s true.
the libraries don’t have anything to do with fraud, crime, vague promises
the governance proposals don’t have anything to do with fraud, crime, vague promises
the software standards don’t have anything to do with fraud, crime, vague promises
same for nodes, consensus mechanisms, package management, type safety, languages, operator instructions, smart contract auditing space, financial auditing and transparency space, block and transaction indexing, legislation that leverages the technology to reduce redundancy, and the list goes on
its an approach and what I would expect to see on HN more often regarding the crypto asset space
Almost every “Show HN” that’s about a library has someone ask what the library actually does and why is it useful. If the only answer is “crpyto” and essentially all crypto is fraud, I can’t imagine why people aren’t more excited.
I think vague promises is exactly how you could sum up most crypto-related libraries as well. There’s supposedly some useful usecase, but right now it only contributes to North Korean nuclear program.
Nakamoto consensus (the combination of longest chain rule for consensus and PoW for sybil resistance) was a minor innovation in distributed computing, specifically state machine replication. That had previously been solved in the late 1990s in the permissioned setting with BFT-type protocols (such as PBFT).
What's new in crypto is permissionlessness which enables decentralisation [1]. That has
a) basically no benefits that cannot be achieved through (permissioned) distributed computing, except censorship resistance, or, as normal people call it, regulation dodging, and
b) it comes at enormous costs (in terms of inefficiency, cumbersomeness, etc.)
Crypto is systematically and inherently designed for and suitable for crime.
[1] You can claim that LCR also expanded the design space in the partially synchronous model from always consistent and eventually available to always available and eventually consistent, but again, not a huge benefit.
so, your main supposition about crypto being all fraud is inaccurate, and the standards you present apply to fields you respect as well. for example, north korean expropriation and fraud is happening across the entire tech space, even a bunch of remote roles in the US are and were filled with north koreans, hence supporting the nuclear program [1]
this is a common theme I’ve seen that reinforced my perspective: the criticism applies to things the critic respects and the critic saying it doesn't seem to know that, and they also don’t seem to even be aware of other benign things in the crypto space that are working fine and fit the social contract of all participants. I don't know if thats you, but it is applicable to the responses you chose
so that observation, in combination with how so many intelligent researchers and programmers take a different approach ultimately towards improving the crypto space due to its malleability, keeps me interested and confused by the unsubstantive and reductive nature of HN consensus on this one topic
> so, your main supposition about crypto being all fraud is inaccurate
Sure, but what are some actual generally useful non-fraud uses? I know Marc Andreesen failed to come up with a single credible one after investing billions into the industry.
> for example, north korean expropriation and fraud is happening across the entire tech space, even a bunch of remote roles in the US are and were filled with north koreans, hence supporting the nuclear program
The difference is again the share of North Koreans working remotely in the US tech industry vs the amount of fraud in crypto.
the use cases for me are where DTCC and the transfer agent industry are disintermediated as an option for people that want an option, and there are a lot of competitors trying different approaches using distributed ledgers. that's useful for me and I use that every day, and I don't expect financial plumbing to be "actual generally useful" to everyone else. most people go their entire lives unaware of DTCC and the transfer agent industry.
the settlement time of 1 block is great for me.
chaining transactions within 1 block creates trading opportunities that are otherwise reserved for banks participating in the Overnight Reverse Repurchase Agreement facility
I don't really think you not being the target audience is an "actual useful" goal post to determine whether something is worth discussing on a tech forum, since the question is about non-fraud, but your bar is something that has to then be debated per use case based on whether you unilaterally derive utility from that.
the observation is that there is a group of people that have caked yourself in layers of news only about fraud, and my observation is that that's not the only news there is. that's the aberration in this tech community that's otherwise more discerning, I mean - crypto people are absolutely here - the contributors to all those parts of the stack are here and have been for over a decade. Brian Armstrong initially posted about Coinbase here. Its just the consensus is odd and has only chiseled away, while people have continued to build and grow the industry just in other forums.
> The difference is again the share of North Koreans working remotely in the US tech industry vs the amount of fraud in crypto.
Why is Marc Andreesen the voice of cryptocurrencies? He is ONE voice. A loud one for sure, one I do not like either, but he's got no more authority than a random joe in Indonesia, for example.
1-2. ETFs are not uses for crypto. They’re a vehicle to hold crypto, not a usecase. Blackrock doesn’t even use the blockchain and doesn’t have custody of it’s own keys. It’s a bit of an own goal as far as crypto adoption goes.
3. Tether totally has $110+B in holdings, though they’ve never produced a financial audit and they try to pass off attestations and non-financial audits as such to believers. Both times they’ve been forced to open their books, they turned out to be unbacked. Also, Circle and Tether are centralized entities who have full control of their currency and can and will censor transactions and block accounts, just like a regular bank.
4. Sure, cool, but is it actually used for anything anywhere or is that more of a “vague distraction”
Commenting sporadically on a forum in favour of cryptocurrencies is not being a crusader.
On the other hand, building and paying for (in resources and time) two websites against crypto, buulding your entire social media persona around it and being recognizable by name for that effort, you will have to agree is a couple orders of magnitude more effort and "involvement" in a cause, compared to a disinterested anonymous coward like me.
I kind of wish Molly White spent more time researching and disseminating information on CBDCs — the PACs to me are emergent behavior due to popularity and rise of crypto ETFs so there's not much of a story there.
ETFs aren't really financial instruments that the mainstream public will likely interact with or directly invest in, but CBDCs will probably proliferate wildly throughout the global economy in a matter of years so it's a bit of a missed chance for the public to weigh in on them.
I'm not sure the data supports crypto spending more than other industries in lobbying, I think they are just doing it via a single PAC rather than spinning up dozens of targeted PACs for each race.