Par for the MAGA course - Part 2

Two former Trump advisers are promoting an anti-Biden cryptocurrency but experts are warning that it’s structured in a way that could substantially disadvantage those foolish enough to invest in it.

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The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spent a week listening to the absolutely bonkers content on [Steve] Bannon’s podcast, WAR ROOM PANDEMIC. Among Miller’s observations was that Bannon had “teamed up” with Boris Epshteyn to promote a new cryptocurrency called “$FJB” — short for “F*ck Joe Biden — that they were promoting to Trump supporters as a way to stick it to Biden somehow.

  Mediaite

Part 1 (earlier today) here.

And Bannon's already been charged and convicted (and pardoned by Trump) for ripping people off in a scheme over the border wall.

Not only does every purchase bolster the value of Bannon’s and Epshteyn’s holdings, crypto experts say the currency is designed in a way that affords its operators an usual amount of discretion in blocking owners of coins from selling their tokens—a power that could cause problems for investors…

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De la Rouvier points out that this restriction doesn’t apply to the operators of $FJB. “They can transfer as much as they want, whenever,” he says. De la Rouvier outlines a possible scenario: If $FJB’s price started to drop, the coin’s operators could freeze some token holders from selling to prevent a further spiral, while the operators remain free to sell off their own coins.

[Mother Jones]

[Mother Jones] also noted that some $FJB holders had reported their holdings had already been placed under “arbitrary locks and unlocks,” and that all users have to pay an 8 percent fee to the $FJB operators with every purchase or sale of tokens.

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Originally called the Let’s Go Brandon coin, each $FJB coin was valued at $0.0019 at launch, according to Coinbase. It hit a low of $0.000971 on Dec. 20, 2021, a high of $0.0046 after Bannon and Epshteyn started touting it, and then dropped back down to just above launch price at $0.0021 as of Jan. 18.

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A source with knowledge of $FJB’s operations pushed back on the accusations in Mother Jones’ report that the coin was structured in a way that posed an unfair risk to investors, telling Mediaite, “The fee structure and lock only works with on chain transactions and do not apply to any trades made on centralized exchanges, which are the majority of the trading volume.”

This claim is refuted by one of the experts cited by Mother Jones, an engineer who reviewed the code used for $FJB, who said that a lock could “arbitrarily be placed on almost any address,” and also by de la Rouvier, who noted that the code empowered the coin’s operators to manually select individual users’ wallets and lock them

UPDATE 1/22: