Have I got a crypto coin to sell you!

I’ve got a hot investment tip for you, straight from the horse's mouth. (Well, some part of a horse’s anatomy.) It’s a hot new cryptocurrency called World Liberty Financial ($WLFI). It is the surest of sure things, a can’t-miss proposition, a bona fide gold mine. (I’ve also got a gold mine to sell you, but I’ll save that for another post). 

How do I know this? Just look at the elite team of Extremely Qualified Fintech Professionals $WLFI has assembled:

The startup’s principals are self-proclaimed “Internet dirtbag” Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. Herro made his money selling weed and colon cleanses, and Folkman gained fame (of a sort) by founding a dating advice site for hopeless incels lonely men, Date Hotter Women. Both are co-founders of Dough Finance, a crypto app that was recently hacked to the tune of $2 million. 

There’s also this guy and his two half-wit sons [1]:

Sorry, make that three half-wit sons. Barron is also involved, as some kind of after-school project to keep him from spending his Dad’s money on worthless crypto tokens. Per the New York Times: 

Mr. Trump’s title is “chief crypto advocate.” Barron Trump, his 18-year-old son, is listed as the project’s “DeFi visionary,” a reference to the branch of crypto known as decentralized finance. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are each described as a “web3 ambassador.”.... 

[$WLFI co-founder/Trump family friend] Steve Witkoff … envisioned the project partly as a way to give Barron Trump some experience with entrepreneurship, the person said, and steer him away from memecoins, a scam-ridden segment of the crypto industry. 

“No son, don’t get taken in by those scams. We’re Trumps – we create our own scams.”

Aside from assigning creative job titles, World Liberty is leaning hard on the Trump brand to lure suckers potential investors. The as-yet-nonexistent currency’s Telegram channel, which features a profile pic of Trump getting his ear nicked by a bullet, boasts nearly 150,000 subscribers, many with names written in Cyrillic lettering. Probably just a coincidence. 

I totally trust these guys to be responsible shepherds of my crypto investments. Wouldn’t you?

Uncle Scam Wants You

Is all crypto a scam? No. And by no, I mean, yes. Probably. Some definitely are. Others are scam adjacent. But few smell as overtly scammish as this one. 

There are actually hundreds of crypto coins, many of which serve a perfectly legitimate purpose, which I would explain to you if I actually understood what they did. But the one everyone is familiar with is Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin first entered most people’s consciousness as the currency of choice for Silk Road, a dark web marketplace for drug dealers, money launderers, human traffickers, and other really fine people. Silk Road went belly up around 2015. Its founder, Ross Ulbricht, is currently serving two life sentences without parole for a range of federal crimes which, amazingly, don’t include the five times he allegedly tried to hire hitmen to eliminate his enemies. [2]

Bitcoin has had a stink on it ever since that's been hard to wash off, because it (and crypto generally) has continually produced scandalous-yet-entirely-unsurprising stories about crypto exchanges being hacked and/or coin owners being scammed. 

Take, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried, better known to his friends and fellow inmates as SBF. 

Just two short years ago, SBF was running a highly respected crypto exchange and hedge fund called FTX. It basically acted as middlemanperson when people wanted to trade their Bitcoin for some other cryptocurrency, as well as investing in other crypto startups. At one point, FTX had in excess of $15 billion in digital assets. 

For years, SBF was the poster child for the industry. He was the adult in a room full of arrested adolescent crypto bros. Silicon Valley loved him, and bikini-clad Ozempic-gulping Instagram influencers wanted to have his children. 

Then, in November 2022, there was a run on FTX. Its investors wanted their assets back in a hurry. That’s when they discovered that $8 billion of those funds were missing. It turns out that SBF was using investor deposits to buy up other cryptocurrencies, undertake speculative investments, make political donations (mostly to Democrats), and do other things of a personal nature which apparently did not include hiring a decent hairdresser. 

When the investors came to him for their dosh, he said ‘Sorry Bro, can’t seem to find it. Would you take an IOU instead?’

Where is SBF today? Cooling his heels in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, serving a 25 year sentence for wire fraud. [3] 

And that’s the best the crypto industry had to offer. No wonder the Dirtbags and Pickup Artists think they have a shot.

The grift that keeps on grifting

Why might Trump be interested in aligning his brand with a new crypto company, aside from another opportunity to separate his marks from whatever money they might have left after investing in Trump NFT trading cards and buying plummeting shares of $DJT stock? [4]

Well, he might be trying to get all those crypto-friendly Silicon Valley broligarchs to bankroll his campaign even more than they already have. Or maybe just loan him a private island to hide out on before the guys in the Men’s Wearhouse suits and Brylcreemed hair show up on his doorstep with an arrest warrant.

Biden’s SEC believes Bitcoin is an unregulated security desperately in need of regulation. Crypto bros hate that more than they hate having to act like decent human beings. For these uber-Libertarian types, personal accountability is kryptonite (or cryptonite – amirite?).

World Liberty Financial is Trump’s way of signaling that if you help me get elected, I’ll let you get away with anything you damned well please. Just another grift in a lifetime of them.

Would you buy a used Bitcoin from that man? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] If you multiply a half wit by another half wit, do you end up with a quarter wit?

[2] No actual murders were reported. 

[3] Bankman-Fried recently filed to appeal his conviction, based on the idea that he really didn’t really steal mishandle misplace $8 billion in investor’s funds, because FTX had enough assets to cover their losses during its bankruptcy proceedings. His lawyers apparently found some old bitcoins trapped between SBF’s couch cushions, which have tripled in value since his conviction two years ago. It’s a little like saying, ‘I didn’t really steal your wallet, because I bet all your money on a horse and it came in first.’

[4] The crypto product that World Liberty is allegedly going to produce will allegedly be a ‘stablecoin,’ which unlike Bitcoin does not fluctuate in value, and thus is not a speculative investment. But I’m sure they’ll figure out some way to extract and/or launder money with it.