This article is silly. There are many companies that provide corporate registry services. For instance, if you searched all the tens of thousands of companies that use CT Corporation, you would find lots and lots that have been involved in litigation. And that would have literally no bearing on any of the other companies. I don't know anything about this Wyoming outfit, but that you'd use a generic registration service for a Delaware company is nothing special. It is, in fact, the norm.
That a business uses a registered agent and PO Box is hardly surprising. My company shares the same address as Google! Maybe the rest of the argument has weight, but focusing on this really kills the author’s credibility to me.
Man, who cares about the grift, how about the level of cringe on those trading card images? I thought the one in the article was for lulz or something, but no, it fits in the theme of the rest on the referenced URL well enough that I'll assume it's real.
This seems like a weird play to me, but it seems to have worked? He apparently sold out. But I do see even a lot of conservatives (and not the "Never Trump" kind) groaning at this.
It's interesting to follow the corporate webs behind this but ultimately not particularly newsworthy from my reading of this article. These NFTs being associated with a sketchy NFT company is just more evidence (like we needed it) that NFTs are a scam.
Ultimately, an NFT is just a small payload, typically a URL. I'm always curious that no one talks about what happens if that website goes down or someone loses control over that domain.
I see two interesting things about this particular NFT release:
1. Trump sure does some scammy things for someone so supposedly wealthy. Would you, as an alleged billionaire, put your name behind something as cheesy as this fora (maybe) a few million dollars? It's claimed tens of thousands have been sold. It's not clear to who (eg Trump himself may have "bought" many to prop up the market ie standard crypto shady nonsense); and
2. The timing. Trump announced his candidacy for president last month. He's never stopped fundraising since leaving office. As a private citizen you can do pretty much whatever you want to with that money and it's clear he's used it as a slush fund for personal expenses. But that changes the second you're a candidate for something. Now campaign fundraising falls under a different legal set of restrictions. This really is more evidence of someone who is cash-strapped.
The art itself is particularly bad, like embarrassingly so. I'd be really curious to know how many genuine sales there actually are.
> Trump sure does some scammy things for someone so supposedly wealthy. Would you, as an alleged billionaire, put your name behind something as cheesy as this fora (maybe) a few million dollars?
IIRC, Trump basically went bankrupt decades ago, and was only been able to maintain the aura of wealth by selling his name to be put on cheesy things (remember Trump Steaks) and playing the character of a rich businessman on TV.
I'm sure there's much buyer's remorse out there, that people will learn from this experience, and be better judges of character in the future. Absolutely sure of it.
Wow so if a buyer resells the NFT, 10% of the proceeds go directly to the company and Trump. I think it’s clear this has more to do with “collectible” plates and coins and less to do with any application of crypto technology.
The funniest part of all these projects is how they're trying to explain NFTs to people not into crypto. The FAQ includes questions such as "why do I need a crypto wallet", "are there physical cards created of these cards" and "what is the shipping policy" ("Trump Digital Trading Cards are not delivered physically!").
I remain as convinced as ever that NFTs will never be mainstream. But luckily it seems that the parties involved with this shitshow are probably not concerned about that aspect.
There are many interesting points, that maybe nothing special for NFTs, but I didn't know.
" If any buyer decides to sell their Trump card in a secondary market, they don’t get all the proceeds. The fine print reveals that 10% of every secondary market sales goes right back to Trump and his fellow grifters."
Yeah, the article makes this sound shady, but I've heard this feature touted many times as a major benefit of NFT's, as the creator can potentially revenue share in downstream transactions.
I believe there's a notice on the site for the cards saying the money goes directly to Trump and not to his campaign. I would double check but I already saw the video once and I'm still trying to detox.
Trump's done speaking fees. And years of overpriced merchandise. And routine/regular appeals for donations (save America, etc) - to the tune of 3-5 emails and texts per day. Regardless of how much I 'unsubscribe'.
So... this isn't an "either/or" situation. This is a "both/and then some" situation, and... I'm sure we'll see more variations on this until Trump dies.
I've got a red MAGA hat right here, that was randomly sent to my address.
It's got an American flag on the side, but no tag saying "made in ..." anywhere. You'd think if it were made in the US, it would prominently state that. Of course there's no way to know if it's an "authentic" MAGA hat personally sold by Trump himself (lol), but it seems to be a representative sample.
I'd been holding on to it hoping to think of something intelligent to do with it, but that became a lot harder after Trump doubled down on the ignorant pandemic denial and trashed the economy.
"What exactly are buyers of the Trump Trading Cards purchasing? Yes, they are NFTs, but unlike others of these digital art pieces, the people foolish enough to purchase a Trump Trading Card don’t actually own the things they paid for, at least not in the traditional sense. If any buyer decides to sell their Trump card in a secondary market, they don’t get all the proceeds. The fine print reveals that 10% of every secondary market sales goes right back to Trump and his fellow grifters."
This is where I stopped reading. The author clearly knows nothing about NFTs. Being able to earn money from secondary sales is one of the innovations of NFTs and is very common.
It is way more boring than this site (which is literally devoted to fearmongering about Trump) makes it out to be. Trump loves cash. He loves being in the spotlight. He keeps drumming up these "big announcements." Everybody "knows" that he's going to run in 2024. And maybe he will. But once he does that, he's subject to regulations. And he hates regulations, especially the ones that interfere with his ability to make money.
So he's doing an NFT grift. It's a spectacle. We all learned in 2016, or should have, that he's completely shameless and every scandal pumps up his base. Duh. This keeps him in the spotlight, pulling in cash without attracting the attention of the FEC. The details are irrelevant, except the salacious ones -- "no news is bad news."
Wow, I actually missed that. I think I'm proud of that fact? Or maybe glad that the mainstream left&right media that I consume is actually bored of him?
Though, I think what I said largely stands, with a slight modification: whether or not this is something the FEC can touch is something he can draw out in court until the money long gone.
Trump's base, as everyone knows but for some reason is unwilling to point out, is mainly white men and married white women. Clearly everyone is an individual and there's probably a single black woman somewhere who voted for Trump, but without those white voters he has absolutely no chance.
Why does that matter? Because they're completely disillusioned with him. The spectacle was well and good, but rather than focusing on the concerns of his base, like border security, immigration, creating blue collar jobs, and trade school scholarships just to name a few, his greatest achievements are Operation Warp Speed, which they don't like, and the usual tax cuts for the rich, which they don't care about. His main tangible policy that benefitted the white working class was not sending their sons off to die in a new pointless foreign war.
The upshot of all that is that you can rest assured that Trump hasn't got a prayer of winning reelection in 2024 and I'm near certain that his team knows it.
The Trump of today is not the Trump of 2016. I wouldn't say it's impossible, given the last decade, but the guy recently called for the repeal of the Constitution so he could be reinstated as President and it barely got a ping on the media's radar. In 2020 that would have triggered a riot.
I think Trump is done, but Trumpism itself isn't. The base is going to look for more competent leadership, maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz or one of Trump's kids.
> I think Trump is done, but Trumpism itself isn't. The base is going to look for more competent leadership, maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz or one of Trump's kids.
People here aren’t going to like to hear this, but think less Cruz and more Fuentes for the future of what you’re calling Trumpism, but if we’re going to be honest we should just call white identity politics.
I just finished a reread of Anathem and it’s left me disinclined towards “bullshytt.”
Reading this article, I got a vague vision of an elementary school student chosen by the administrators to be a hall monitor, gleefully tattling on his fellow students…
It’s not just the number of points that matter, it’s points over time. 3 points very quickly will rocket you over 20 points in 4 hours or something. And comments factor in too, so commenting “why is this on the front page” just helps it be on the front page
An extremely partisan voting block heavily flagging something is a piss-poor signal for on-topicness, come on. That kind of sloppy logic is a great way to let organized voting rings suppress uncomfortable news, though.
Incredibly embarrassing statement for someone moderating this place to be making.
Sorry, I'm not following you here. The sensational-indignant OP, just like anything sensational-indignant of whatever political flavor, is obviously not in line with HN. That should be obvious both in theory (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and in practice (https://news.ycombinator.com/front). So it was correct for users to flag the submission. If people hadn't been flagging such things for well over a decade, HN wouldn't still exist.
I mean, if you want to argue that the story is actually a substantive and intellectually interesting one, containing significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and it's just the title that's sensational-indignant, that would be fine. But that bar is necessarily pretty high when it comes to garden-variety political pieces. If it weren't, then HN would just be a political site.
> I mean, if you want to argue that the story is actually a substantive and intellectually interesting one, containing significant new information
Why would I want to argue that? It certainty doesn’t describe the million identical ChatGPT circlejerks that rocket to the front page without getting flagged out of existence.
This NFT story was no less tech adjacent than them, and no less vapid and inane than them, but it had the appearance of being embarrassing for a certain hyperpartisan political segment, so it was flagged by a bunch of those supporters, and you in your infinite fecklessness are sitting here back-inventing justifications for this flag based on “well no I’m sure all those flags were about the low intellectual quality of the article” as if 97% of the front page wasn’t idiotic pablum aimed at potted plants.
It’s hard to take seriously the suggestion that you’re too stupid to realize those flags weren’t politically motivated and not just a comment on its indistinguishable-from-any-other-garbage-that-gets-popular quality.
Sorry but I really think you're off base here. It's true that politically minded users (or partisans of any strong cause) tend to flag stories from the side they don't like. But it's also true that many HN users flag stories that they think don't belong on HN, given the site guidelines. You can tell the two categories apart by their flagging histories. I looked at a bunch of the flags on the OP—not all, because there was a massive number of them—and saw plenty of examples of the latter, including some from users who have been high-quality HN contributors for many years and never shown signs of politically motivated flagging.
Trump and NFTs are both such well-trodden flamebait that it's hard to imagine one , but maybe it's possible to get a -1 x -1 = +1 effect. It's not intrinsically offtopic, just probably so.
I'm not sure what you mean by "manipulated"? unless you mean the general category of "curated", "moderated", "censored", etc., all of which seem to have the same factual component and vary mostly by the feeling they express.
I don't mind which word you use but I do want the community to understand what we do and that we're open about it, at least in the sense that when people ask questions, we answer them.
If you include software, mods, and community, that's the totality of the system, in which case I don't think you can call it manipulation; can the system manipulate itself? But it's not clear to me what the GP meant by that word.
