Summary
Donald Trump’s meme cryptocurrency, $Trump, surged to a $14 billion market cap after launch but fell by over 50% after Melania Trump introduced her own token, $Melania, diverting investor interest.
$Trump partially recovered to $64 while $Melania reached a $13 billion valuation.
The tokens, marketed by Trump-controlled companies, sparked debate over their speculative nature, market volatility, and potential conflicts of interest.
Trump’s pro-crypto stance and promised deregulation have boosted digital currencies, though critics question the ethics of profiting from political office.
I miss when crypto’s purpose was to buy exotic drugs from strange corners of the internet.
I bought the first solid state drive I ever owned with about .7 BTC I mined on my GPU years ago, well before it blew up and when there was still a hope of it being a legitimate alternative currency. Now it’s just gambling.
I got a Galaxy S4 with my .5 BTC, I’m guessing around the same time.
What’s wild is I’ve seen vendors go from onion only, to telegram, to full on clearnet pages just with a coin wallet now.
Multiple consecutive legendary pump & dump schemes.
Grifting as a day job. Goddamn who are the morons buying this shit and propping up this thievery.
Partly, some of the same morons who voted him in. Mostly, a foreign government that starts with R and ends with ussia.
Part of me thinks some of these people know what they are doing. But they’ve heard people say Trump isn’t a billionaire that rather than admit they are wrong about him and hes actually a terrible business man, they can just make him into a billionaire and save face.
I have a feeling it’s no different than supporting televangelists. People trying to vicariously buy their fake jesus a victory, and buy their way to heaven by doing so.
I was curious what the official supposed purpose of these tokens was, since i have a hard time believing anyone would seriously see themselves buying anything with these at any point. The official website is hilarious. They’re not claiming any purpose at all, you’re just buying an “official meme”:
Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol “$TRUMP” and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency. See Terms & Conditions Here, See Card Allocation Here
The grift is fully out in the open I guess.
The new NFT. Buy this all but useless image.
Um, ackshually, these tokens are not NFTs, because NFTs are non-fungible, and these are fungible tokens. Still equally useless, though.
Same idiots that voted for him
Exactly and in their eyes, that moron can do no wrong. Half of them think he is the second coming of Christ.
Just morons. This is the era of the complete sucker.
The Onion singularity is happening in my lifetime!
We’re closing in to the maximum onion horizon.
Does this mean $Melania is worth more than $Trump? There’ll be ketchup on the walls of the Whitehouse today!
Smells and strumpets
Wide open grifting.
Are you saying the pedophile rapist traitorous treasonous lying coward convicted felon is a GRIFTER!?!?!?
Pity.
I hope it is not only those on Lemmy that see this man this way. I can’t see him either without seeing all those preceeding qualifiers. Those who omit them seem woefully ignorant. Not saying that they have to say the mouthful each time when mentioning the guy, but it’s refreshing to see it when others do!
Either they don’t see it or it’s what they want. I tend to think it’s the latter… He was voted in fair and square after all.
Don’t forget bribery and money laundering.
It’s hilariously corrupt and outright sad, but mostly just frustrating. I don’t have any sympathy for those who put money in to such obvious obvious bootlicking scam. Yet at least from Trumps perspective it’s gonna work, it’s guaranteed free money with no risk or consequences.
And that’s just how this administration STARTS.
Far more concerning is the fact that anybody (or country, company, etc) on the planet with enough money can now directly bribe the us president through crypto
Hilariously corrupt, sad, and frustrating is how I would describe everything he does.
I have a bit of bitcoin FOMO. Whether these coins crash in a week, or a year, BTC is probably going to keep hitting all time highs, due to the fact that it’s the major on-ramp to a lot of meme coins.
He’s going to pressure rich people to invest in his scam coin using his presidential powerers to actually keep it afloat. Right wingers have consistently railed against politicians who make money while in office. While I completely agree that making decisions that directly or indirectly affect politicians business or other investments is unethical I know the right wing echo chamber will declare this a good thing for America. I already see political commentators and others with a voice using caution out of fear of Trump retaliation. They all but call him dear leader. I won’t be surprised if Trump is the richest person in the world by the end of his term. That is, if there is an end.
The crypto will be how the bribe money is funnelled. Just like all the tech bros going to “service the Donvict” at Mara Lago and then paying their fee for the inauguration, that’s just so he doesn’t go after them.
Plain and simple it’s the new way to pay bribes.
I worked in a place during the 2016 election with a lot of old-school Conservatives who hadn’t fully drunk the MAGA kool-aid yet, but did loathe Hillary with a passion. I vividly remember one of them explaining all of the meticulous research he claimed he did to go through the financial records Hillary released that prove that she was making all sorts of crooked money through speaking fees. When I pointed out that we didn’t even know where all Trump’s money came from because he didn’t release his taxes, he replied “That’s OK, I trust him”.
It will always be “rules for thee, not for me” with these folks. When the opposition looks like it is making any money at all it immediately looks suspect, but when their side does it it’s just capitalism.
And we’ll be on a path toward economic depression within two years of him being gone.
He isn’t going to pressure anyone. This is a path to legal bribery. The blockchain can be used to verify which wallets bought coins and if you decide to prove to Team Trump that you have invested millions in his wealth you will have influence. This is especially important for foreign donations.
Both of these are about bribing Trump.
“critics question the ethics of profiting from political office.” Jesus christ. Have they never seen Trump before? Like wondering if water is wet.
“A fool and their money are soon parted”
I’m constantly surprised that those fools haven’t run out of money yet.
They should create a crypto calles $Jesus .
They already do, you can buy 15M $JESUS for $1.
What even goes into making/marketing these coins?
Solana has a HOWTO on making a new token here:
https://solana.com/developers/guides/getstarted/how-to-create-a-token
It requires some knowledge, but not really that much. Also note there are further FAQs in the bottom on other topics.
Anyone can create any arbitrary token. At the start they are all worthless. But there are ways to provide liquidity to exchanges and then use that liquidity to open a market. There is a Medium post here outlining one way to do it:
From there, the marketing part of it is like any other pump and dump scheme. Associate it with some pop culture figure, create a fan base willing to pay for anything associated with it, milk them to get the price up, then dump all the coins you have been keeping for yourself directly into the market, absorbing all the demand and leaving everyone with worthless numbers on the Solana Blockchain.
(It is important to note that it is only this easy for tokens that are implemented on existing Blockchains, using Smart Contracts. The Blockchains themselves are not so easy to establish. Anyone can start their own Blockchain project but they have to get other people involved in their project to get any momentum. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, even Dogecoin all have their own Blockchains whose history can’t simply be copied just because their code can be used to start up a new one.)
It should be noted that many new tokens, NFTs, etc, will openly advertise that they are pump and dumps. They will literally recruit people to buy in under the pretense that they are going to win big as part of the dump, only for them to discover that they are actually going to be the bag holders.
Before crypto they used to just do regular pyramid schemes.
MLMs have been around for a long time. Pretty much any woman I graduated high school with has sold Mary Kay, Herbalife, Young Living… and it’s 100% the same kind of scam.
I think the legal loophole there is they actually have a product, which makes it legal (though still a scam.)
I was referring to the online scams they used to refer to as things like HYIP (high yield investment program) or whatever. Which were straight up ponzi schemes.
PayPal (who was kind of the only game in town at that point) started banning a bunch of these as they just got complaints from everyone left holding the bag.
Then crypto came along and now even the president gets to run open scams. Yay.
Bad things happening to bad people? Works for me.
Bad? Trump’s coin went to $75 for a total value of $14 billion, of which he owns 80%. Melania’s release dropped Trump’s by 50%, so down to only $7 billion… Only $7 billion… briefly. The article states that his coin recovered to $64 or, I’m estimating here, around $12 billion total value. Her coin topped at $13 billion total value which, again, he owns 80% of through his companies. That means off these two scams, he raked in 80% of $25 billion dollars. That’s around $20 billions dollars in value.
This is, in your opinion, a bad thing?
Bad things? Launches crypto, gains a ton of money, crypto crashes, keeps money.
I’m just glad I bought all the trump NFTs.
