Pardoning Ulbricht was a campaign promise he made at the Libertarian National Convention in response to it being a popular demand among the libertarians.
And more importantly, among the crypto crowd that dumped millions into his campaign. Libertarians have essentially no clout or money on their own. This was a pardon bought by Coinbase and Gemini and A16z.
Why would Coinbase and Gemini and A16z care about an obviously shady person who reportedly tried to hire a person to kill someone? surely they could find a more legitimate hero to advance the legal crypto case? i mean, it's kind of like them - companies trying to do legit crypto - rallying today around SBF when they already have image problems from other exchanges?
Because much like the billionnaires already flanking Trump, the heads of Coinbase and A16Z are out-of-touch charisma black holes that have no clue how to talk to the average Trump voter to get them on their side. Ross Ulbricht is the avatar for their ultimate goal of legitimizing crypto in the US financial system.
Not sure, but when they have various political candidates getting millions from the crypto PACs and all of them in unison talking about how Ross Ulbricht needs a pardon, I'm not sure what else to tell you. Maybe someone just knew Ulbricht personally and is using their money to spring him.
But unless you can point to any other group with actual power and money who was pushing for it, the most obvious answer is that the main funders of the crypto PACs were at least ok with it. There's no way they couldn't have subtly squashed this pardon with Trump if it was just the Libertarians asking for it given that they seem to have gotten him to commit to do literally everything else they want.
There is no "legit crypto" - it's a myth. Every single exchange that swaps spit with the Bitcoin ledger is laundering money made by criminal (often violent or fraudulent) means. Many if not most altcoins are equally as fraudulent, or used to launder ("tumble") other suspicious coins.
Let's be honest anyways, the cryptocurrency "industry" as we know it is less than 4 years old, and in 4 years it may be gone. Exchanges like coinbase and so-called defi innovators like A16Z need this legally-dubious signalling or they'll risk never having another leader corrupt enough to sanction their behavior.
I got cash out of an airport currency exchange ATM the other week, and when I tried to use it to by groceries yesterday, the cashier tested it for cocaine and it came back positive. There is no "legit cash".
I think that might be a myth? If I tried buying a $0.50 candy bar with a hundred-dollar bill, I think that the cashier might refuse it and I don't think they'd get in trouble for doing so.
I thought the "legal tender" argument only worked in regards to debts to the government, though IANAL.
no it literally happened at publix the other day, its like a mall cop mentality I guess. I suppose it is not that strange because most bills have traces of cocaine on them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency
It's confusing because there's no logical point to it nor does it follow along as a regular conversation.
"Some cash has cocaine on it" has no logical relationship to "all cryptocurreny use is illegitimate".
If they wanted to refute the original claim and say that cryptocurrency has legitimate uses or if they wanted to make a separate point to say that cash is similarly only useful to criminals, they failed.
> the cashier tested it for cocaine and it came back positive
There is no commercial product capable of testing cash for drugs. Anyone claiming to sell such a product is lying.
There is a wipe, like a baby wipe, that is sold as a "cocaine detection wipe". It is a lie.
It uses a dumbed down version of a spot test that is very good at detecting cocaine, but it also reacts with many other substances that are not cocaine.
The test was dumbed down because the substances needed to make it more accurate are much more dangerous than the cobalt thiocyanate (which is STILL not good for you) used in the "safe" tests.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of substances that will cause a cocaine detection test to return a positive reaction. One of them is Benadryl. Benadryl causes such a strong and vibrant reaction that you would think the entire object being tested was made of pure cocaine.
If you keep a single packet containing one Benadryl pill in your bag and you use it and while taking it a handful of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) molecules get transferred from your fingers to the outside of the packet, and then you toss the packet into your bag and they get transferred from the packet to the interior of your bag, to a wallet in your bag, to the cash itself, testing the cash in that wallet with a cocaine field test will produce a stronger positive result than if you had rolled up a bill and snorted a line immediately prior to the test and there was still powdered cocaine on the bill.
This is not a joke or exaggeration. If you touch a single Benadryl pill with the tip of your index finger, then poke the tip of your finger to a sheet of paper, then you put that sheet of paper in a printer and a rubber roller in the paper-handling mechanism rolls over the spot you touched, every single sheet of paper printed by that printer for MONTHS will test positively for cocaine. (using the tests that don't require training, PPE, and expensive lab equipment).
Did your totally real and not bullshit cash have drugs on them, or Benadryl, or ANY substance with the ring of carbon atoms that the test detects?
"But this study found 80% of bills had dru..."
Buddy 100% of all bills that have been used just once have actual literal shit, feces, dookie, poop, (and staph!) on them.
They rubbed some sort of pen thing on it, and they took the bills to some machine in a back room. At the time, I figured it was because they thought the bills were fraudulent (I was paying with 100s because my card didn't work).
Maybe the pen thing was only to test if the bills were fraudulent, and then the machine in the back of the store could also do drug tests? Or maybe it was all a lie and they were just bullshitting me.
No love for Trump or libertarians but I am a cypherpunk[0] at heart. I'm on board with the idea of ensuring that things can happen online outside of the jurisdiction of any nation[1], so for his part in building towards that I'm happy Ross is free.
On the other hand, it's clear to me that the correct amount of jail time wasn't zero either, given everything else he allegedly did.
[1] I think about this in the same way that we accept the possibility of bad things happening because people can have private conversations in their own home, or are able to have complete control over potentially dangerous tools and vehicles. IMO the risks are worth the trade-offs and these are important rights to protect in the relationship between people, technology, and government (or whoever wields power).
I’d like to know who wrote that speech. A lot of talk about how libertarians are domineered and persecuted. Something like “after criminal prosecutions, if I wasn’t a libertarian then, I sure am now” in front of a very idealistic audience whose skepticism of government is unrelated to how many billionaires it fingerprints. So, they booed and heckled him, and in hindsight I wonder if he was grasping for concessions.
