Follow the Crypto

July 14, 2024 1:59 PM

Molly White, independent journalist, maintainer of the site Web 3 is Going Great and the newsletter and podcast Citation Needed (not the podcast about Wikipedia), has a new project called Follow the Crypto. In 2024, the cryptocurrency industry has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to influence races across the US, more than the health or energy sectors despite being a much smaller fraction of the economy. Follow the Crypto reveals what's been learned about their enormous pile of lucre and the ways it is being wielded to distort the United States' political processes, by organizations like FairShake, "Defend American Jobs," and "Protect Progress."
posted by JHarris (4 comments total)

Grift knows grift
posted by chavenet at 2:06 PM on July 14 [4 favorites]

Ha! I was going to do a Molly White post; great minds think alike! She’s a treasure and deserves as much boosting as possible. I like that she’s very rooted in the details with sober analysis and just a sprinkling of snark.

Her YouTube channel has some longer pieces on it that are worth a look.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:11 PM on July 14 [6 favorites]

[g:] Tracers in the Dark is a related book;
How a 27-year-old busted the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity [ars technica]
posted by HearHere at 2:47 PM on July 14 [2 favorites]

Quelle horreur! A public ledger is not anonymous!?!

If you want a contemporary understanding of bitcoin privacy that isn't 5 years out of date you need to look at how privacy can be protected and obfuscated on secondary layers of the network like Lightning or Liquid.
posted by neonamber at 1:39 AM on July 15