[dyslexit]

This opens the door for fully legalized bribery. Which is already happening. The SEC recently asked a judge to halt its own investigation into Justin Sun for fraud after he bought $75 million worth of Trump's WLF coin, $56 million of which went directly to Trump, immediately after the election. The case now will likely get dropped completely.

What's to stop foreign governments from doing the same thing, if they aren't already?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/sec-fraud-prose...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-26/justin-su...

[citadel_melon]

I am against meme coins, but ruling them to be collectibles like a trading card makes sense to me. How is a meme coin different than a baseball card? What about a virtual baseball card or other virtual item from CSGO or World of Warcraft?

To bolster my point, one could face the same corruption issue we face today with baseball cards: Trump could own a limited-edition baseball card; foreign governments then could then buy all the other prints of the same card, lowering the supply and raising the demand of Trump’s collectible. One can thus see how anyone can use any collectible as a means to corruption in the same ways that meme coins can be used.

I am illustrating why the SEC ruling is not completely unfounded on first pass. However, I think meme coins have a higher chance of being used for scams (and corruption, but that is a separate point) because there is an implicit promise that this product will induce a return and because the coin is rarely an ends in itself. But how do you regulate people’s intention? You can’t read people’s minds and force people to not to buy a collectible for the sole purpose of making a return on investment. I think people would find it ridiculous to tell pawn shops to not buy a Pokémon card if the shop treated the item solely as a means to flip, for example. Moreover, such market participants are beneficial because they offer liquidity to more sincere buyers and sellers.

I am not sure what logically consistent and beneficial regulations around meme coins would look like, but with more thinking than I have been able to put into this topic, I am sure one could come up with some. My instinct is SEC regulating the tokenomics to maximize transparency and force the creators to release the tokens in a way that won’t allow them to “rug pull” would be a good starting point. I think I would not be opposed to such relegations in any collectibles market, making the regulations logically consistent.

Regarding the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm to avoid conflicts of interest. I think that anyone who becomes the president of the United States should have to liquidate their whole net worth — collectibles and all — and put it into an independent fund that they have no control over. They will then get a set percentage amount of money from this fund every year, and everything left over when they die goes to their presidential library. They are not allowed to take money from anywhere else ever again. That would fix this corruption problem for good and has the added benefit of deterring people from running who just want to use the office for their own personal gain.