Democrats have paid a political price for taking on Silicon Valley — but not a very expensive one.

Summary

In 2017, tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin supported progressive causes, yet over time many shifted toward pro-business, conservative stances.

Changing economic conditions, capital crunches, and reduced growth diminished the appeal of progressive policies, prompting tech firms to prioritize profit and market dominance.

Biden’s aggressive regulatory actions, including antitrust cases and wealth tax proposals, further alienated Silicon Valley, significantly intensifying its shift toward conservative support.

Such realignment poses significant political challenges, forcing Democrats to urgently reconsider policies and strategies while balancing public interests against ever-growing corporate influence.

  • @[email protected]
    5•15 hours ago

    Some regulation is necessary in the space, but Biden’s SEC was going way too far.

    Could you please elaborate on this? In what ways did they go too far?

    • @[email protected]English
      2•14 hours ago

      The SEC wanted to consider every bit of crypto a security. But most securities are issued for the purpose of raising money. So, a company makes a formal offering of shares, or debt, and that is all regulated. The investors are essentially participating in whatever the company is doing.

      Cryptocurrencies with Blockchains aren’t like that, though. It’s not a cooperative enterprise where everyone is making a profit. It’s released on a set schedule according to the protocol. Anyone can join in the mining/staking process simply by having the right equipment (and in the case of staking, enough of the coin to qualify). Furthermore, you can buy and sell coins without participating in the underlying mining/staking mechanics. So it’s not a common undertaking at all, it really resembles a currency or commodity.

      The SEC went hard after US exchanges like Coinbase for selling “unregistered securities”, while not really defuning it all that well, and without actually giving exchanges a process to register even if they wanted to.

      Now, I will add that there exchanges also all sell shitty tokens like $TRUMP. Those are different, because they are governed by a smart contract riding on top of a Blockchain. They are a layer removed from the Blockchain they are riding on. There is no utility there; the utility is all in Ethereum or Solana or whatever Blockchain enabled the shitty token.

      The SEC could have done everyone a lot of favors by simply saying “Blockchain coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum are commodities, Shitty ERC-20 tokens (or their non-ethereum equivalent on other chains) are securities and need to be registered before being traded in the US”. If they provided a web form and charged $100 per shitty token, they might even make enough to fund all the crypto enforcement when those shitty tokens inevitably get pump-and-dumped. ($TRUMP will get dumped, too, eventually.)