David O. Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya had this exchange on their All In podcast a few years back. What I saw opened my eyes to the reality of shitcoins. I recognized Chamath right away from CNBC, but I didn’t recognize Sacks as the guy chuckling along with him, enjoying the fiat he earned by rug pulling unsuspecting fortune seekers. They sure looked like they were having fun.
Fast forward to 2025. Sacks was shopping for his new $10.3 million D.C. home while naive MAGAs sucked up his latest Presidential shitcoins. The whole gang shared in the profits.
It’s good to be the Crypto (and A.I.) Czar
Sacks is a member of The Paypal Mafia, along with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. J.D. Vance is a Thiel protege. The Economist wrote an article titled The Paypal Mafia is taking over America’s Government.
All I have to do is read this article by Whitney Webb to be terrified of Thiel, Vance, Elon and Sacks. On the other hand, when I overdose on Whitney I become convinced my dog is a globalist.
All I have to do is read this article by Whitney Webb to be terrified of Thiel, Vance, Elon and Sacks. On the other hand, when I overdose on Whitney I become convinced my dog is a globalist.
A big chunk of the bitcoin community has decided to accept the Trump administration as being flawed, but more good than bad, or something to that effect. They acknowledge the shitcoin problem, but they focus on what they see as the bright side:
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Biden And Kamala Are Gone
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Ross is free.
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Trump is a noob. He will learn.
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Having a “crypto” friendly White House will benefit bitcoin.
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Bitcoiners will be allowed to do more stuff
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Devs will have less fear of being shut down or thrown in jail on a whim.
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Hodlers will get more advantageous tax treatment.
And... the gigantic elephant sitting in the corner:
- NGU
Sacks can fairly be called an OG bitcoiner, as he claims to have made his first purchase in 2013. Now he’s better known for his solana investments.
On the All-In podcast in 2021, he said:
“There’s smart money in Silicon Valley betting on a flipping where Solana overtakes Ethereum as the preferred platform.”
His involvement doesn’t stop there. David backs Multicoin Capital, a crypto investment firm, adding more weight to his reputation as a blockchain believer.
It’s not that he doesn’t understand bitcoin’s revolutionary potential. The guy is very smart. He graduated from Stanford University and The University Of Chicago Law School. He said this in December:
“The Church and state used to be intrinsically linked... Now, we think about them being separate. Bitcoin, it’s sort of this sci-fi future where you could maybe have these two things decoupled.” David saw Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat inflation and censorship.
What a weak, lukewarm statement. You could maybe have these two things decoupled? This potential cypherpunk would rather pump his bags and extol the virtues of “blockchain technology.”
The Sly, Roundabout Way
I am reading Erik Cason’s book Cryptosovereignty. Cason identified as a socialist as a young man. He learned about 19th and 20th century anarchists including Proudhorn, Bakuin, Goldman, and Rocker. I think it’s fair to say that today he would identify as a crypto anarchist. Some bitcoiners, like Michael Saylor, disdain this idea, have no problem working in the U.S. dollar system, and even question the need for self custody. In a MAGA world we probably will be ALLOWED to do more with our bitcoin, but that attitude betrays the ideas upon which bitcoin was built. As Cason writes:
Satoshi saw that the cypherpunks had a political philosophy that was rooted in anarchism and did not rely on traditional sovereignty, law, or prohibitions to create systems of power. Instead, cypherpunks wrote code, used cryptography, and built systems that did not need the same physical force, violence, or permissions of authority that all contemporary legal orders need to consummate their power.
Cason then quotes John Perry Barlow, who wrote these words:
You [governments] have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one… I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
— John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace
This hit home. I feel a close connection to Barlow, who I have written about before. I admit I’m no hero. The government has big guns and scary prisons. We should all take precautions. But that doesn’t mean that we should ask Big Daddy for favors like good little toadies. To paraphrase The Who, we don’t want the new boss to be the same as the old boss.
Cason says this:
The goal of Bitcoin is to fundamentally disengage traditional forms of sovereign power, law, and the violence they must always contain in order to create something better and more fitting for our times. With Bitcoin the sovereign decision becomes the individual’s choice alone. The code guarantees and assures itself through cryptographic proofs, which alone makes it sovereign.
While reading this passage, I thought about Sacks, Elon, Thiel, Don Jr. and Trump himself:
...these are the very people who are the real crypto-anarchists. The secret of what is occurring is concealed to them in the deepest of ways in order to make them into the greatest allies in our cause. Their blindness and hubris has allowed them to thoughtlessly believe they could bring Bitcoin into the vulnerable inner cloister of the state financial system, where their infinite fiat money will never be able to defend itself against the immovable fixed supply of Bitcoin. They more than any other group have help propel Bitcoin deep into the heart of financial Troy, sincerely believing the gigantic horse of blockchain was a gift from God to dignify their new world order and panoptic surveillance CBDCs.
Pretty much every crypto project out there consists of a group of sycophants who will praise Bitcoin while failing to understand why Bitcoin is the only real crypto project that there is. The crypto bros have mutilated the technology of Bitcoin to create new systems of surveillance, new modes of manipulation, and greater means of state empowerment than has ever been concocted. The crypto bros have been given the greatest technology that has ever been given to man, and they have chosen to clone and mutilate it just to deepen their own enslavement for the sick and pathetic means of more fiat money. The crypto bros are nothing more than a group of corrupted men who will lead us into a darkness from which we cannot escape if we do not resist their ways.
They have lost their own way while leading the state to interlope into our realm with their CBDCs [AKA Tether] and the vacancy that is their ‘crypto’ which is broken, transparent, and insecure. A total misunderstanding of that which is truly crypto and they will only realize that in the final turn in which they realize they have led the procession of the horse into Troy, where Bitcoiners lie hidden inside waiting for the right time to strike.
This Too Shall Pass
Trump Coin, Melania Coin, Doge Coin will all have their brief moments in the sun. Trump’s inner circle will get even richer. This crew says nice things about bitcoin, but I’m pretty sure that’s because of the big fiat value attached to its ticker symbol. Either that, or they see it as a way to keep the party going with a Bitcoin Dollar. It isn’t surprising. These people are fiat kings. They play the system and win. Their disregard for the fundamental difference between bitcoin and their shitcoins matters. It can’t just be dismissed as “the boys just having fun.” It matters because Trump, Elon, Sacks, Thiel and the rest intend to embrace fiat in a modern, digital form. Same shitty fiat crammed into a shiny new container. It still stinks.
Bitcoin has other plans, whether they like it or not.