Posts Tagged ‘cryptocurrency’

The mainstream media is avoiding calling disgraced Democrat contributor Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX a megadonor

Posted: November 20, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

While increasingly irrelevant, the mainstream media is still a force to be reckoned with in regard to shaping opinion. Despite paywalls at many newspaper and magazine sites, revenue is down, and layoffs are up. The paywalls of course limit readership, and usually, considering what is produced by the MSM, that’s a good thing.

You probably that FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency firm that is incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda, filed for bankruptcy protection a few days after Election Day.

Oh, Election Day, is that a non-sequitur? 

Nope.

The co-founder, and until November 11, the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the second-largest contributor to Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Nearly $40 million in SBF funds went to the Dems, most of that money ended up in three Democrat-PACs. Only George Soros, who made his fortune in currency trading, donated more to the Dems during the midterm cycle.

Bankman-Fried, often referred to as SBF, has not been charged with any crimes. Still, there are comparisons being made between SBF and Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, as well as the collapse of Enron. Bankman-Fried’s successor at FTC, John Ray III, who did the best he could in cleaning up Enron, had this to say about his new employer, “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” Larry Summers, alluded to the Enron debacle too. “The smartest guys in the room. Not just financial error but — certainly from the reports — whiffs of fraud,” the former Treasury secretary under Barack Obama said. “Vast explosion of wealth that nobody quite understands where it comes from.”

And I believe there is a bit of the Fyre Fest hoaxster, Billy McFarland, embedded in Bankman-Fried’s mental DNA.

Notwithstanding Summers remark, there have been few if any screams of anger from prominent Democrats about the FTX ruination. I wonder why. Not!

The mainstream media coverage of Bankman-Fried has largely avoided this word–megadonor. Which is of course how the MSM reflexively labels major Republican campaign contributors such as Ken Griffin, Andy Sabin, Ronald Lauder and so many more. When I entered “megadonor” into the Google News site this morning and their names popped up. Not so much with SBF–and most of those mentions came from conservative-leaning sites such as Fox Business and the Washington Free Beacon. NBC News managed to use the word “megadonor” in an article about SBF–but take a look at the mournful headline that accompanied that story: Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall could deprive Democrats of key donor.

We used to see similar media malpractice–until bloggers and conservative journalists repeatedly called the MSM out on it–with the phrase “mass shooting” only being used when the evil perpetrator was a white male. 

You know who else is almost never called a megadonor by the media? 

George Soros. 

Media bias is like the Hydra, a beast from Greek mythology. There are so many heads that need to be sliced off. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Update: Welcome HOTAIR Headline readers John is one of our original magnificent seven writers. He writes here every Sunday.

The crypto tidal wave is here. What does it mean for conservatives?

Posted: April 17, 2021 by ng36b in Uncomfortable Truths
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But what’s in your wallet?

Two big cryptocurrency news stories hit recently. This week, Coinbase, a large cryptocurrency exchange, went public on the NASDAQ stock market. It direct listed its stocks and is trading now around 340 dollars a share. When you look into the 8K and other filed forms, you see Coinbase is actually a profitable company, unlike many of the IPOs during 2020. The other big news is that Visa is partnering with Anchorage, a cryptocurrency bank, to process transactions in US Dollar Coin (USDC). It’s big news because most people probably haven’t heard of stablecoins before, only being familiar with the often violent stock movements of Bitcoin.

When I wrote earlier about cryptocurrency, I had in mind that by the end of this year, we’ll have more normal people using crypto and it becoming less of a big deal to do so. For conservative groups, now through the 2022 election cycle is going to be a time where everyone and their brother gets labeled as a hate group. The SPLC deliberate mislabeling of groups that resulted in Visa and Mastercard canceling their accounts was just the first act in the long war. If you thought Facebook and Google filtering wasn’t bad enough, I’m already seeing Parler become “inaccessible” when searching through Google, but pops up just fine on the Brave Browser using Tor.

Cryptocurrency is going to be the way you go about your lives and stop being canceled. If gun stores have their credit card accounts turned off “for auditing purposes” or some other baloney excuse, what are you going to do? Withdraw lots of cash, which not only is declining in value thanks to our printing volumes of money, but is automatically tracked by your bank and can trigger yet another investigation? If you’ve ever taken a large amount of cash on a plane or withdrawn from a casino, you’ll know what forms I’m talking about. And while that level of scrutiny normally sits at $10,000, it can be lowered without much fuss by executive order.

Your free exchange of value for goods is being threatened by a group of left wing nut cases that would be happy for you to die, and that’s not an exaggeration. By attempting to drive conservatives out of the marketplace, they are trying to make the basic day to day transactions and economic engagement so hard that conservatives have little time for anything else. Putting conservatives on a defensive gives these nut cases a chance to push more of their agenda. Boycott all you want, but if you don’t have a credit card, routine living becomes very difficult, and most people will cave if they don’t have another option.

Now is the time to start practicing. Get a crypto account (I recommend Coinbase because its easy, use this link to start) and put some money in it. Practice transferring money from a wallet. Get your hardware wallet and set it up. All of these things will become swamped once the left wing nut cases start really tightening the screws on people. Instead of the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, you’ll have the Great Cryptocurrency Shortage of 2021. Above all, don’t let losers shut you out of an economy that you helped build and should be allowed to participate in.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Actually, we should buy lots of Coca-Cola

Posted: April 10, 2021 by ng36b in economy
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stock, that is.

Back when Coca-Cola cared about America. From Flickr.

I totally understand the desire to boycott Coca-Cola, Delta and others. And, truth be told, I haven’t bought Coca-Cola in…a long time. The fake high-fructose corn syrup was never good for you, and giving it up helps me maintain a healthy weight. So for me, boycotting Coca-Cola is easy.

Delta might be harder. What if Delta is the only ones to have a flight when I need it? Or, take Amazon and Home Depot. Sure, in many cases I can switch to another company, but at some point, Amazon might be the only place I can find something. Or Home Depot might be the only place I can get lumber at a reasonable price.

Truth be told, at some point boycotting doesn’t work. Unless we want to live isolated on our own 10 acres of land in a bunker with solar power and a well, we’ll have to use the services of places that don’t always line up with our views. Boycotting easily becomes a retreat, because once we stop buying Coca-Cola, why should Coke care about us anymore?

I propose we buy Coca-Cola…stock. Buy up the company. Once you have enough votes, you can kick out board members. When I heard Donald Trump was interested in starting his own social media platform, I thought “Why doesn’t he just buy Gab?” Heck, what if he found a way to buy out Twitter?

Boycotting is too often ceding ground to our enemies. They aren’t really interested in Coca-Cola, they are interested in punishing people they don’t like. Pushing back twice as hard is the only force they understand.

And, an additional note on my cryptocurrency article, based on the good sleuthing of a reader on Coinbase. Yes, Coinbase terms of service do allow for potentially blocking your account. That being said, there are some ways to prevent that from happening:

  1. Sign up with a fake email that you only check while using a VPN. That can keep you from personally having issues.
  2. Get a hardware wallet, like the Ledger X. People can send money to your hardware wallet that you physically own.

I use the Coinbase exchange, but I draw my coins off onto a hardware wallet. That keeps them from getting stolen and keeps my ownership of them secure. I don’t put it past Coinbase to go woke, but right now they have a lot of competition and its REALLY easy to shift to other exchanges, so hopefully that will keep them in check.

Good eye, Sailorcurt! Thanks for doing the digging and asking the hard questions!

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Cryptocurrency for conservatives

Posted: March 20, 2021 by ng36b in blogs, Uncomfortable Truths
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Cryptocurrency and their symbol, from coinmama

Boycotts and deplatforming seem to be all the rage in 2021. Won’t stand for the National Anthem? People will vote with their remote controls and watch something else. Don’t like someone’s opinion? Easy, just demonetize their videos, like what YouTube is doing to PragerU right now. It’s easy to sit back and watch this as a passive observer when you don’t really care about ESPN or make YouTube videos.

But when your bank cancels your account, or you can’t use a credit card, it makes that passive stance no longer tenable. You might not care about ESPN, but not being able to purchase gasoline with a credit card becomes a regular nightmare. Worse still, what if no major bank will carry your money? Almost all employers pay employees electronically. What would you do?

If that sounds far fetched, its not. Bank accounts associated with conservative groups like the NRA have been under pressure to get canceled. Mastercard and Visa, the biggest names in credit cards, stopped donations to the David Horowitz Freedom Center (although they eventually restored it). Attacking financials hits home for everyone, because you can’t boycott banks, and that makes them a juicy target for radical liberals wanting to hurt conservatives.

While we should all be standing up and fighting these efforts, we should also protect ourselves. If you own a business that risks cancellation, you should be accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, is a disaggregated ledger system where individual nodes on a network verify accurate transactions, and pay for that with a coin. If it sounds confusing, it is, however, so is trying to understand how banks process your money electronically. A good Bitcoin primer is this video from 99 BitCoins:

More importantly, Bitcoin and other blockchain cryptocurrencies have now been around for a while. Most of the bugs are worked out, and major companies are accepting them as payment. Tesla is the most notable, but add AT&T and even Burger King (only in Venezuela) to that list. Its growing and its not going away.

For conservatives, cryptocurrency offers the ability to pay people in a peer-to-peer mode that nobody can cancel. No government can freeze your account. No financial institution can be bullied into canceling you. Even better, the money transfers between crypto wallets (think of them nominally as the account that holds your cryptocurrency) only lists account numbers. This makes it incredibly difficult to track down or dox people that are frequenting a business or donating to conservative candidates.

Speaking of donating, since we’ve seen a fair amount of doxxing of people who donate to PACs, Political Action Committees can accept cryptocurrency, and its happening more frequently. Conservatives that think they shouldn’t get hassled about legal donations should consider telling their candidates to take cryptocurrency. Most PACs right now immediately cash the cryptocurrency into US Dollars and report it, which is fine, and it still maintains a decent level of anonymity for the donor.

Now is the time to get started. I recommend all conservatives learn about cryptocurrency, get a cryptocurrency wallet, and purchase some common cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and Ethereum are good candidates due to their popularity). For individuals, you should get an account that allows easy bank transfers, such as Coinbase, which doesn’t charge for ACH transfers. Even better, Coinbase has a series of short videos that teach you about different cryptocurrency and pay you in small amount of crypto to help you get started. If you use this link, it also helps me out.

For businesses, Coinbase offers a commerce site, https://commerce.coinbase.com/. The site generates a separate commerce wallet for common cryptocurrency and makes transferring to your commercial bank account easy. Even better, if your bank tries to cancel you, you can hold your money in cryptocurrency until you setup at a different bank.

Cryptocurrency is going to be the conservative answer to financial cancel culture. Now is the time to start, so that when the times get bad, you’re one step ahead of the liberal juggernaut.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.