Molly White

it's a sacrifice i am willing to make

i may have picked a bad time to hit "publish" on that newsletter 😬

correct

(500x the $215k that is, they haven’t raised $5 billion... yet)

it is all going one way in the sense that it’s all going to support “pro-crypto” candidates.

as far as party lines, it’s been roughly 80/20 thus far -- something i’ll track more accurately on the site i’m working on.

i haven’t observed much in terms of public opinion, but i am worried that the politicians are buying the industry’s story that there is a big single-issue crypto base they need to appeal to.

SUBSTANTIALLY more. in 2020, crypto industry donations to all congressional candidates was around $215k. this cycle they spent $10 million against Katie Porter alone, and have raised 500x that.

see the next tweet in the thread for a sense of scale

Unlike the companies creating these pro-crypto advocacy sites, I am just one person, and I haven’t got billions of dollars, but I’m going to do my very best. If you haven’t already, now would be a great time to support my work.

www.citationneeded.news/pay-what-you...

Pay what you want

All content is free and available to all readers, and will continue to be that way. Paywalls suck and you won’t find them here. What you receive will be exactly the same regardless of whether you choo...

www.citationneeded.news

It’s far past time time to shine a light on this coordinated and incredibly well funded effort to buy US elections. I’m working on a project to do just that, and will be releasing it shortly.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrency companies like Coinbase have been aggressively recruiting their customers to donate and vote along pro-crypto lines, with in-app calls-to-action and flashy websites that rate politicians based on their perceived pro- or anti-crypto stances.

Fairshake, a crypto-focused super PAC, is #3 on the list of super PACs by the amount of money raised. Coinbase and Ripple are both in the top ten companies by amounts donated to outside spending groups. This is far out of proportion when you look at the size of the industry.

Cryptocurrency companies have raised over $115 million to influence US elections this cycle, and they’re just getting started. We need to closely watch how cryptocurrency companies are influencing US politics.

www.citationneeded.news/2024-cryptoc...

Cryptocurrency companies have raised over $115 million to influence US elections this cycle, and they’re just getting started

As election season kicks into high gear, we need to watch how cryptocurrency companies are influencing US politics.

www.citationneeded.news

they're working on better footnote support in the editor, but until then you have to do some kind of a workaround. i know some people use markdown blocks for it (ghost.org/help/using-m...)

it's a very custom and somewhat janky solution. basically i have some shorthand i use while writing to mark where footnotes should go, then i run a script before publishing to convert them to the right HTML markup, and then there's some code in my custom theme to do the sidenotes

you're tempting fate with this one

probably a lot easier if the money didn't come from another huge fraud

i alias molly@mollywhite.net to my gmail address. that way if gmail ever goes up in flames i can swap out the provider underneath, but i don't have to deal with the bullshit that goes into running my own mail service

getting sentenced to 7.5 years in prison and immediately logging on to argue with @​tittyrespecter about your charges is peak poster

there's no topping this

just keep posting through it

"since I found out half of ftx customers money was somehow missing"

FTX's Ryan Salame has returned to Twitter for the first time since FTX collapsed — hours after he was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for his role in the FTX fraud and for his illegal campaign contributions 💀

what in the world

for once, DNS was not (my) problem

might've been this guy's problem tho

lol no, bug in my crossposter

huh. unlike on twitter, these scammers are manually involved in running impersonation accounts.

this one copied my original post and edited it to claim i have a "private account" (i don't). on twitter, they usually just repost things verbatim.

oh come on

accepted solution: take the day off

yeah, just for fun

they've been doing it for ages over on the birdsite and i STILL haven't figured out what the strategy is

i love that!

yeah, i'm fiercely protective of mine. i would be really heartbroken if i lost it.

sorta related sneak peek into an upcoming piece: i firmly believe that if you're going to spend money on one thing online it should be a domain — particularly as online identity gets more fragmented.

i've had mollywhite.net for 10 years(!) and as platforms come and go, you can always find me there.

yep -- if you go to molly.wiki it's got a "verify my identity" link in it!

if you ever see an account that looks like it might be me, you can double check at www.mollywhite.net/verify/

if it's not listed there, it's almost certainly not me.

Verify – Molly White

Verify Molly White's online identity.

www.mollywhite.net

sorry if anyone has received DMs from various accounts impersonating me 😞 apparently DMs have brought in the scambots.

i only have one personal bluesky account (@molly.wiki), and i'm never going to DM you asking about your crypto trading or whatever.

> no one seems to care look at how many already lost fortunes or have gone to prison for it

first time here?

“Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue”
“If Kevin Roose Was ChatGPT With A Spray-On Beard, Could Anyone Tell?

thank you to these new independent media companies like @404media.co and @defector.bsky.social for giving us the headlines we deserve

also possible with ZK

If you say so. I see it as a good opportunity to discuss my concerns with regulation of the financial system.

it certainly is

indeed, it’s a pretty terrifying degree of traceability blog.mollywhite.net/abuse-and-ha...

the latter

I don’t think it is. And I don’t think the solution is swinging all the way in the other direction and just doing away with financial regulation, but I do think the current state of affairs is far too much on the side of total surveillance.

I’m glad you think so. I think I have been, too, but I think I also sometimes assume everyone is familiar with my earlier writing and have that baseline understanding of where I’m coming from — which is perhaps unfair to expect as those pieces pass two years old.

as i explain in the piece, “money laundering” is practically required to have any privacy on public blockchains like ethereum. this is a flaw of the technology, absolutely, but i understand why people do it.

In a perfect world, what is moral and what is legal would exactly align. We don’t live in a perfect world, and strong privacy protections are essential for human rights.

Some who know me as a cryptocurrency critic may find these opinions surprising coming from me. But if you are surprised, I have failed. And I think I have, because I think some of you will be.