Trump Signs First Major Federal Crypto Bill Into Law 47
President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, marking the first major U.S. regulation of stablecoins by creating a legal framework for their issuance and consumer protections, while also championing crypto innovation as a major financial revolution. The bill passed the House on Thursday with the support of 206 Republicans and 102 Democrats. From a report: Members of Congress and top executives from Robinhood, Tether, Gemini and other crypto and financial firms were in attendance for the signing ceremony. The fate of the GENIUS Act was in question earlier this week when a dozen conservatives stymied a procedural vote. A compromise was ultimately reached, and the holdouts allowed the legislation to proceed. The president on Friday suggested that he spoke to the holdouts individually on the phone to persuade them, after House Speaker Mike Johnson told him there were a dozen Republicans opposing the bill.
"The good news is, I call up, 'Hello, Jim, how are you?' 'Sir, you have my vote.' Boom. 'Sir, you have my vote.' I really just, they just want a little love," he said. "Unfortunately, it's always the same 12 people." David Sacks, the venture capitalist-turned Mr. Trump's AI and crypto czar, said the president "stepped in and saved this bill." Mr. Trump also said Vice President JD Vance had been on the phone late at night, helping push the legislation through.
"The good news is, I call up, 'Hello, Jim, how are you?' 'Sir, you have my vote.' Boom. 'Sir, you have my vote.' I really just, they just want a little love," he said. "Unfortunately, it's always the same 12 people." David Sacks, the venture capitalist-turned Mr. Trump's AI and crypto czar, said the president "stepped in and saved this bill." Mr. Trump also said Vice President JD Vance had been on the phone late at night, helping push the legislation through.
Re: Current Stage: The Great Grift (Score:1)
Re: Current Stage: The Great Grift (Score:1)
Kiss Monetary policy and the USA goodbye (Score:3)
If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works
If that happens kiss your ass goodbye (Score:2, Interesting)
Failing empires will inevitably invade other countries and loot them in order to fill their coffers. And we have a growing Christian nationalist movement and things we are literally protected by God so the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't going to be a deterrent. Jesus will just swap those pesky icbms away.
Here for the 12-year-olds unable of (Score:1)
Critical thinking. For that to make sense you need to understand a little bit about American politics. Not much just a little.
So Trump doesn't have enough votes in our lower chamber, the US House of Representatives, to cram through The 5 trillion dollars in tax cuts for billionaires he wants. There's a handful of Republican politicians that run on the deficit and they would lose their primary elections if they added 5 trillion to the national debt for anything let alone for tax cuts for billionaires.
So Trum
Re: (Score:2)
Because it means the American empire, which is propped up by the dollar, will have gone down the drain completely and we will still have the ridiculous military and we will use it.
You know, the whole purpose of passing a constitutional amendment to have a federal income tax on individuals was to fund the military. That social contract you always go on about not only demands that you pay taxes, but also that you go to war when drafted by the military. It's amazing the way you get all authoritarian about some unwritten social contract that you yourself wouldn't even honor.
Re: Kiss Monetary policy and the USA goodbye (Score:2)
I admit to bring very ignorant to monetary policy and economics, but there's a part of me that very much hopes for a well-designed L1 cryptocurrency to become a preferred global currency. Since controlling a currency is one that governments can exert power over their citizens, fund wars, or bail out banks.
I probably need to read about this more to not br so naive or ignorant. Any recommended sources, for someone who wants to learn without taking a whole economics class?
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I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian econom
Re: Kiss Monetary policy and the USA goodbye (Score:2)
Thanks! I'll read up on Bretton Woods system as well as monetary policy. In my mind will be the question of whether or not the benefits of a world bank or similar, centralized system outweigh the drawbacks. I'm sure I'll find an easy and obvious answer. ;)
Trump Doesn't understand Crypto... (Score:3, Insightful)
but he'll happily take "investors" and help with his crypto coin $Trump.
Transactional presidents are so much easier to deal with if you're a billionaire crypto bro...
It's also convenient if you could use a pardon.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com]
Re:Trump Doesn't understand Crypto... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
All he needs to ask is, what does it mean for me and the midterm, and they will explain to him that it'll help his coin and crypto bros will pump more money for election. That's all he needs to know.
Will it actually help his coin and the crypto bros? I'm not so sure.
A lot of crypto bros believe that all that crypto-assets need now is legitimacy and they'll blow up and take over the world. They also think, probably correctly, that regulation will legitimize crypto-assets. In some sense that may be true, but the ability to sidestep regulation is and always has been crypto-assets' killer feature. Take that away and they may be legitimized, but they'll also lose their only actual reason for existence,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Our country is run by the heritage foundation not by Donald Trump.
Re:Trump Doesn't understand Crypto... (Score:4, Insightful)
And you're obviously autistic, in your own words:
Ad Hominem. Even if so, it doesn't make him wrong. Stay on topic.
Re:Trump Doesn't understand Crypto... (Score:5, Informative)
Trump is obviously senile.
The signs are there. For example, Trump, 79, Can’t Remember Appointing His Own Fed Chair [thedailybeast.com]
“He’s a terrible Fed chair. I was surprised he was appointed,” the president vented. “I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him.”
However, it was Trump who appointed Powell to lead the Federal Reserve during his first term. In his Nov. 2017 announcement, the president praised Powell’s leadership, judgement and expertise.'
Even worse is his completely made-up "brag" about his uncle teaching the Unabomber at MIT. Fact check: Trump tells fictional story about his uncle and the Unabomber [cnn.com]
Trump was speaking at a Pennsylvania event about energy and innovation when he said he had to “brag just for a second” about his uncle’s intelligence. After wrongly saying his uncle was “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT” (he was one of the longest-serving but not the very longest) and wrongly saying his uncle’s three university degrees were “in nuclear, chemical, and math” (two were in electrical engineering and one was in physics), the president claimed, “Kaczynski was one of his students.”
He went on to tell a story about having asked his uncle about what Kaczynski was like. “‘I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said, ‘Seriously, good.’ He said, ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
For two big reasons, this story could not possibly be accurate.
First, the president’s uncle died in 1985. Kaczynski was publicly revealed as the Unabomber more than a decade later, in 1996, when he was captured; before that, he had lived as a recluse in the Montana wilderness. There is no apparent reason that Donald Trump would have been asking anyone about Kaczynski in 1985 or earlier.
Second, Kaczynski attended Harvard University and the University of Michigan, not MIT. An MIT spokesperson said in a Wednesday email: “We have no enrollment record or information that Ted Kaczynski ever attended MIT.”
Why people and reporters continually give him a pass on this stuff when he says it is beyond me.
Re:Trump Doesn't understand Crypto... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why people and reporters continually give him a pass on this stuff when he says it is beyond me.
There are two main reasons:
Firstly and primarily, because it happens every day. It's not news any more. When Biden gaffed - and he did, sometimes very badly - it was in the news cycle for days, but most of the time he was able to speak and react to questions reasonably well. He might have been coached, or practiced his speeches in the mirror thrice nightly, or had some other coping strategy, but that's not really important. What is important is that his bad days were just that: bad days.
If Biden had invited a foreign leader to the Oval Office and started rambling about domestic political issues, much less personal ones, people would still be talking about it now. For Trump? That's just a day that ends with a Y. Except weekends of course; Trump goes golfing most weekends. Funny how people don't bring that up any more, eh?
Secondly, because of the media. I'm not talking about those outlets who purposely don't report about Trump's blunders. I'm referring to something more basic: Trump doesn't allow what he considers to be unfriendly news organisations close to him if he can avoid it. Those interviews/ambushes in the Oval Office? Hand-picked "reporters" only. When he speaks to a wider audience (which these days always seems to be standing next to a toilet on Airforce One) and he's faced with a troublesome question he simply insults them and refuses to give an answer. Every time. See previous reason.
Bonus reason: because he's a master of the art of the dead cat. [wikipedia.org] Remember when he ordered USAF to bomb a sovereign nation just because the last person who spoke to him said to do it? That was just six weeks ago. Now everyone has moved on to Trump cancelling Elmo, among... other things. Again, refer to reason the first. It's nigh-impossible to challenge a man on what he did yesterday when what he did today is even worse. It seems however that Trump will have some trouble with the... other things in the near future. Cancelling Elmo only works as a distraction against people who cared about Elmo in the first place.
Sane washing (Score:2)
It got so bad that a new term was invented to describe it, sane washing. It's the practice of taking absolutely crazy right wing lunatics and constantly hiding their insanity and evil.
Stephen Colbert just got fired so that Paramount can get their merger approved by trump. That is textbook fascism. The melding of corporate
"Helping push the legislation through" (Score:2)
Does this mean making bribes, deals, or threats? Because I thought passing legislation was mostly supposed to be about reading, understanding, deciding, and voting.
Maybe "pushing the legislation through" is a sofa-related euphemism?
Re:"Helping push the legislation through" (Score:4, Interesting)
MAGA is amazing at following orders. Look how they keep voting against releasing the Epstein files.
Re:"Helping push the legislation through" (Score:4, Insightful)
MAGA is amazing at following orders. Look how they keep voting against releasing the Epstein files.
Not sure Trump actually wants everything released. Remember he said Bondi could release "all pertinent grand jury files" -- meaning (a) she gets to decide what's "pertinent", but (b) grand jury files only have a fraction of the information and (c) the judge probably won't release anything because Maxwell has a pending appeal on counts 1-5 and possible re-trial on count 6. But it *looks* like he's trying to be transparent while setting Bondi up to get thrown under the bus.
Too bad people don't all have sunglasses, they might see the truth [cbrimages.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Bondi will release one page with the name Hillary Clinton scribbled in sharpie.
Re:"Helping push the legislation through" (Score:5, Informative)
Bondi will release one page with the name Hillary Clinton scribbled in sharpie.
Well, they will have flagged and redacted all the pages about Trump ... Durbin: FBI agents were told to ‘flag’ Epstein records that mentioned Trump [thehill.com]
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he has received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi “pressured” about 1,000 FBI personnel to comb through tens of thousands of pages of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and flag any mention of President Trump.
Citing “information my office received,” Durbin said Bondi “pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division” on 24-hour shifts to review about 100,000 Epstein-related records as part of a broader effort to release documents publicly by what Durbin called “an arbitrarily short deadline.”
Durbin says his office was told FBI personnel were “instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
[In his letter to Bondi, Patel, and Bongino Durbin asked] “Is there a log of the records mentioning President Trump? If yes, please transmit a copy of the committee and the OIG,” he wrote, referring to the Judiciary panel and the Office of Inspector General.
Welcome to the Trump Deep State?
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure Trump actually wants everything released
Trump is clearly terrified of it being released. That's why he's taken to insulting anyone who brings up Epstein, attacking the credibility of the file contents (just in case he is ultimately forced to release them) and engaging in delaying tactics like this grand jury testimony order.
Remember he said Bondi could release "all pertinent grand jury files" -- meaning (a) she gets to decide what's "pertinent", but (b) grand jury files only have a fraction of the information and (c) the judge probably won't release anything because Maxwell has a pending appeal on counts 1-5 and possible re-trial on count 6.
More than that, grand jury files are secret and can generally not be released to the public. The president can ask, the AG can ask, but only the court can approve the release, and the court can only do that only as defined in
Re: (Score:2)
Does this mean making bribes, deals, or threats?
Maybe he reminded them they're in the Epstein files and *he* gets to decide what gets released ... /cynical
Because I thought passing legislation was mostly supposed to be about reading, understanding, deciding, and voting.
Hah, you're funny. :-) Several Republicans admitted they didn't read the BBB they just voted for and were surprised by what was in it. Republicans Admit They Didn’t Even Read Their Big Beautiful Bill [nymag.com]
Even when they do, they make bad choices. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is now trying to pass legislation to repeal the Medicaid cuts in the BBB, that he voted for -- guess he wants it both ways w
Hmm .... (Score:4, Informative)
The president on Friday suggested that he spoke to the holdouts individually on the phone to persuade them ... JD Vance had been on the phone late at night, helping push the legislation through.
Trump, Vance and his people support Crypto. Wonder why ... Trump’s Cabinet Is Cashing in on Crypto [gizmodo.com]:
Trump has the biggest stake in crypto, worth at least $51 million.
JD Vance ... reported holding between $250,001 and $500,000 in Bitcoin in his 2024 financial disclosure.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also reportedly had at least $500,000 in digital assets before being sworn in, but [reportedly] divested them.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard both reported holdings under $1 million, and Gabbard reportedly divested her holdings before taking office.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who reported holding between $1 million and $5 million in crypto.
Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who holds between $1 million and $2 million in digital currencies.
Scott Kupor, the guy Trump tapped to lead the Office of Personnel Management, reportedly holds almost $10 million in crypto,
Re:Hmm .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Trump to sign stablecoin bill that may make it easier to bribe the president [arstechnica.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Lest I comment on another country's politics but Ars Technica's headline came up in my RSS feed. I mean, wow, she's not holding back.
Trump to sign stablecoin bill that may make it easier to bribe the president [arstechnica.com]
I thought that was what the $TRUMP meme coin was for -- silly me. :-)
Re: (Score:1)
Trump is already promoting communism when he seized the means of production. The US Steel deal where the government now gets a cut. https://apnews.com/article/tru... [apnews.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Communism? It sounds like it lines the wannabe dictator's pockets. Remember, communism is supposed to redistribute the wealth to the people (and yeah, most don't). The Amish and Mennonites do it right, albeit with some crazy shit attached.