CryptoGrifters: When cryptobros like Ben Horowitz, Mark Andreessen, and company go in supporting Donald Trump, of course they convince Web3 wannabe true believers like me that in their hearts of hearts they see the whole thing as a scam, and are just hoping to scam as much as possible:

Matt Levine: World Liberty: ‘I wrote last month <bloomberg.com/opinion/a… about World Liberty Financial, the crypto project that is affiliated with the Trump family…. World Liberty, I wrote, staked out a novel third position: “Crypto is mostly for scams, and US regulators should allow it, so I can do scams.”… Here’s a Financial Times article <bloomberg.com/opinion/a… about how crypto boosters don’t like World Liberty because it highlights the scammiest bits of crypto…. Yes, hahahaha. Of course Donald Trump’s crypto project was outsourced to guys with somewhat questionable track records—“One of them previously ran classes teaching men how to pick up women and the other faced allegations of fraud and illegal drug sales”—and will raise money on the back of Trump’s endorsement. Of course if you want the conversation around crypto to be about innovative technology that provides real benefits to people, you will be suspicious of this. Obviously crypto does a certain amount of this stuff—Donald Trump didn’t invent Goatseus Maximus! — but you want the focus to be on the real stuff, not the memes…. [But] meme finance has [also] colonized the stock market…. It is plausible that Trump’s crypto token is about extracting value from investors rather than creating long-term value for them, but it’s plausible that that’s true of his [Trump Media & Technology Group Corp.] stock too… <bloomberg.com/opinion/a…>

Especially when the only crypto use case they now propose that has any legs are the stablecoins as safer havens for people who don’t trust either their own country’s currency or the U.S.’s regulatory umbrella.