1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".
2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.
I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.
Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.
Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).
I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.
That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.
Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.
There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.
This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.
Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.
Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).
Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.
Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
[1] https://elpais.com/argentina/2024-12-21/milei-celebra-una-ba...
... Not sure about that; it's not like it has had many success stories, and it somehow manages to chug along.
As in three days before Trump's inauguration? And then $MELANIA the day before? Yes, absolutely no obvious ethical violation there (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-new-crypto-coin-spar...).
> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.
Is there any evidence that LIBRA can do that? If not it's even more scammy.
Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.
>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?
Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.
Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.
Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.
Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).
Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.
If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Regarding 3 it seems clear to me that he was not an insider, but he was scammed into spending his political capital and reputation.
As a whole, it's classic cargo cult situation,imitating what a more powerful country is doing without understanding the nuances.
- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.
Or,
- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.
Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?
lmao, where is the great take?
Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.
We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.
> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"
Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.
I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.
"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.
The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.
Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.
I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?
Tell me you don't live in Argentina without telling me you live in Argentina.
When this $Libra token launched, everything else dumped as capital flowed into it, and then effectively got siphoned off by insiders. So even people that didn't chase "Argentina's coin" got screwed. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are some winners in this game, mostly insiders and cabals, but a whole bunch of losers.
I would say something's gotta give, but the stark reality is that America's casinos are always jampacked with dream chasers.
It is much worse than that, legitimate gambling is fine.
In meme coins everyone knows they are scamming and and it is a pump and dump but just think that there would be some dumb "bag holder".
In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.
These people fully know what they are doing.
If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
I don't buy into any of the people that claim they were scammed, they knew the rules and they tried to make money out of nothing. Other than perhaps trading unregulated securities, I don't see the actual fraud.
To be clear it is distinct from pretending to be a security for an actual productive company, that is actual fraud, but usually the coins are very transparent about having no underlying value.
If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.
These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.
(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)
Neither do many of the people who say such a thing here. Instead they regurgitate classic HN talking points around crypto without really considering their logic.
Simple example: calling something like bitcoin a "ponzi scheme" when it's literally run by nobody in particular and has no specific fraudulent promotion being done by its administrators (since there are none) for the sake of personal gain through redirected funds.
I feel pyramid schemes are just a special kind of pump-and-dump scheme, and I don't understand how these aren't being punished effectively and swiftly by the existing laws and enforcement agencies...
I can’t believe people are still falling for these claims. Every single time someone launches a coin with claims that purchasing it will help fund some special cause, there is no basis to the claim.
If you want to fund or finance a cause, give your money to that cause. If you buy a meme coin, you’re only giving your money to insiders who held the coins before the pump.
For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project. This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click. Meanwhile, states operate their own lotteries and casinos (e.g. "Lotería de la Provincia") where the poor and hopeful go to pay a tax on their ignorance.
Of course, the president and his advisors are responsible for not investigating enough and blindly trusting these so-called "businessmen". We'll see what the Law has to say about that, but I remind you that Argentina is a place where a vice-president tried to steal a company (look up Ciccone Calcográfica).
Last, the 4.4B number looks huge, but that is just "market cap", i.e. valuation extrapolated to the total supply of tokens, and not the actual amount of money that went into the coin.
Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.
Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
You would've definitely been able to buy it with cash and a few clicks, for example using moonshot. (And I'm sure a couple other / similar platforms)
People lost money but I doubt there was much collateral damage
So, it's OK to participate and promote a memecoin rugpull if they're not from your own country?
My introduction to it was at a local mall here. A person just approached and me and I politely said "I don't want it" assuming it was the credit cards or donations and he chuckled and said "sir, it's not credit cards" but I kept moving and then he pointed me to that creepy looking shiny globe/round thing. The moment I saw "Sam Altman" mentioned on a print-out kept there, I couldn't run faster out of there. I later read about it and found out this time around the creepy bugger was out scanning everyone's iris.
I think there are many types of scams after all. Good scam, bad scam, legit scam, illegitimate scam et cetera.
Cryptocurrency 'pig butchering' scam wrecks Kansas bank, sends ex-CEO to prison for 24 years
The massive embezzlement led to the collapse and FDIC takeover of Heartland Tri-State, one of only five U.S. banks that failed in 2023.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/cryptocurrenc...
I'd blame the bank staff just as much as the CEO. No controls, signing off on wire transfers above material thresholds...I assume that Board and bank officers will get reamed for gross negligence and willful misconduct. Those can pierce liability caps and insurance.
He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although definitely someone near him definitely was, not necessarily a dev, but definitely someone with a "bag", holding it and speculating that it would go up, essentially utilizing their position for personal gain, which I think is a very classic form of corruption.
It's not the minister of economy, it's not his modus operandi (Funds and offshore accounts), this has the markings of someone young. Whatever he got out of it, either by buying early and holding, or by founding it himself, he for sure lost of all of his political capital.
I'll take a look at the specific contract, and addresses, I'm assuming it's a basic pump.fun thing, but there may be more to it.
Similar question, is it better or worse if our country commits war or war is committed upon us?
And perhaps a different question, regardless if whether it is better or worse, which would we rather be if we had to chose.
Also let's remember that 'neither' is also an option. And oops just happened once but let's not make it a habit, is too. No need to go to extremes.
It's very likely they are denying to delay legal consequences or continue monetizing.
It doesn't seem that long ago that this would have been a scandal but now with the moron in the Oval Office creating his own meme coins without even trying to hide his business interests, and now the president of Argentina is doing the same shit?
Is this really the world that we want? I mean, I guess the answer is "yes", but I don't have to like it.
> "A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever. I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)."
Either the headlines know something we don't know to say he "backtracks on a memecoin" and "Argentinian President Milei launched a memecoin, $LIBRA" or they are not true. Given the context, it seems to be the latter, so I wonder why they'd be lying?
No, he wrote the Tweet himself. His words, not a retweet.
It’s right there in the article. I don’t know why people are trying to defend him and rewrite the story.
Really not sure why you say that with such authority.
https://www.history.com/news/roaring-twenties-scams-ponzi-wa...
It happened in the 20s, before 2008, and it's happening again. Trump doing this is an extra level of depraved, and I suspect the coming crash will follow suit.
Normally I'd buy treasury bills, but honestly considering that Elon has been fucking around with the treasury's code with no oversight, and considering that Trump's big strategy for eliminating national debt has been to "declare bankruptcy" (whatever that would even means in regards to an entire country that is the world's reserve currency?), I'm hesitant to even do that.
I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
-"Every one of these memecoins serves to make insiders money, what am i supposed to do NOT launch the project?"
-"This famous person lost $5 million so we made him whole and refunded to avoid any issues"
-"These coins are just a casino"
It's so funny that these guys are way more lucid and honest than most of the "investors"
Edit:
Oh man so this guy spends 40 minutes moaning how sniping and scams are rife in the Solana ecosystem but he himself sniped $MELANIA and claims "To not have made any money" which means nothing to me because I'm sure your bank account grew.
Also looked him up and he has 0 experience in development, LA Based, and was an "entrepreneur" for 7 years before becoming the CEO of a Bitcoin consulting company. This guy is the stereotypical rug pull con artist.
Some reports indicate he gets paid to say things about products or companies, which has more credibility because he’s, you know, the president. And that’s what happened with this meme coin thing.
He holds a degree from a third-rate private university. Private university is where you go to school in Argentina for when you don't have the chops for public university and need to go to a degree mill.
His doctorate is from another bullshit institution made up by a rotting old landowning oligarch who holds prehistoric beliefs in just about everything.
He made a mistake and backtracked instead of instinctively doubling down. Count your blessings.
How can a president with an army of advisers let him publish something like that? Even if it was his very own mistake it is really unbelievable that people around him didn't know a thing on the matter, is just simply not possible.
He really should stay away from the stupidity of social networks and do better for the country that is still going through hard times.
In one occasion he also denied the climate change, possibly due to Trump's position, showing that he doesn't know a thing about certain topics. In such situations he should really shut up and get properly informed.
A) A fool that hopes to rugpull someone in the future
B) A fool who hasn't made a 5 second google search to how all these coins operate
Either way I have yet to meet any "investor" that has made any money in these investments that couldn't have been made by just parking some cash in Bitcoin / Ether / DOGE if you really wanted to get a taste of cryto.
It's a shame that as I watch more and more of these articles and investigations line up it's clear that there is such a demand to lose money from the populace that they will really turn a blind eye to when political leaders / oligarchs / techbros do it in hopes of being able to cobble together a get rich quick scheme like this.
"It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe"
It also plays neatly into conservative ideals of letting the free market reign and “do your own research” is an excuse for everything. It’s trendy to blame only the buyers of these coins while praising the creators as genius marketers.
That said, the Trump and Melania coins have generated a lot of anger in the crypto space. At first people were twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it was all very good, but one by one they seem to be capitulating to the idea that it’s not even good for crypto.
But no one deserves to be scammed. I don't really get along with Republicans, I gotta admit I don't really like most Republicans now, and I find the Republican platform reprehensible, but I wouldn't wish being scammed for a conman on my worst enemy.
Trump has been licensing his name to anyone who asks for decades.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/devon-zuegel-on-inflation-argentina...
Politically, Trump’s party controls the government and Trump is incredibly popular with his party. Financially, there hasn’t been a rug pull.
The comparable situation would be Trumpcoin gets wiped out in 2026 amidst the Democrats taking back the House.
There have been concerns of a pump and dump scheme and analysts have viewed it as a "disaster." A forensic analysis commissioned by the The New York Times concluded that 813,294 wallets lost $2 billion by trading the coin while the president's company and partners profited about $100 million from trading fees. According to Fortune, "Less than three weeks after its release, President Donald Trump’s memecoin has produced more losers than winners. For every dollar in trading fees the Trump crypto creators raked in, investors lost $20."
I hope we can all agree, crypto-fans or no, that moon coins are at best a very risky, unregulated gambling prospect!
Scammers gonna scam. Suckers gonna lose (including the suckers who fancy themselves as scammers but don’t realise it’s a rigged game).
Before you knock it, look at the following:
https://intercoin.app/investors.pdf
https://intercoin.app/currencies.pdf
Or if you want to see actual open source solutions, coded, see here:
https://intercoin.org/applications
I know some people will knee-jerk downvote this. But actually look into the substance, first.
TLDR: I have been speaking against “HODL” and zero-sum games just for “number go up” nonsense, and been building solutions for maximum utility.
Gold Standard, Government Protection, Debt, Government credit instruments.
But everything I read about currency tells me that its largely always just agreed upon make believe. The case with the Real absolutely confirmed that for me.
The benefits of having a common/standard unit for an economic ledger are enormous, as it greatly reduces trading friction. That added benefit has real (i.e., not make believe) value, and the more liquid the currency the higher the monetary premium.
Even after hyperinflation, if you normalize to the money supply, currencies generally don't lose value without losing liquidity (being less "agreed upon") .. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
If people fail to obtain units of the currency, they default on obligations that have much greater value than the value of the all the cash in the currency. Thus in an ordinary currency the incentive isn't to ignore it, or to sell, but to hoard it so that people can't obtain the money to pay their loans in order to create a crisis so that they can obtain a large fraction of the value of collateral.
This is prevented by central banks. If you try to execute this corner, you will drive up prices, so they will start printing money.
So Bitcoin and Ethereum, both remain memes. Fiat currencies have non-mem value due to the debt.
From a personal perspective, that absolutely has value. From a public perspective, is the existence of that a good thing? Whole different kettle of fish (and then you're back on the whole "is end to end encryption bad" argument).
If he goes on to promote some unknown shitcoin, said coin could easily pump 1000%, and fall harder.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
Any other administration this would have been a huge scandal but when we're in an avalanche of corruption I guess it can be missed.
What I do take issue with is this keeps happening because there's a lot of money to be made off transaction fees so nobody looks too hard into how fraudulent any of these memecoins are before allowing them on the trading platforms.
Admittedly, I don't know how the trading system works so maybe the platforms taking a cut of the profits from the blatantly fraudulent activity are victims too? Crying all the way to the bank I suppose...
All three are true at the same time. Don't mix things up.