Another ringing endorsement of cryptocurrency:

El Salvador Abandons Bitcoin as Legal Tender After Failed Experiment

https://ticotimes.net/2025/02/02/el-salvador-abandons-bitcoin-as-legal-tender-after-failed-experiment

El Salvador Abandons Bitcoin as Legal Tender After Failed Experiment

Understand the implications of Bitcoin's downfall in El Salvador. Learn about the failed economic bet and its impact on the country's financial stability.

The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate

It's probably worth noting that the NYT and other publications say the Securities and Exchange Commission is now moving to scale back a special unit of more than 50 lawyers and staff members that had been dedicated to bringing crypto enforcement actions.

Meanwhile, the Trump family is deeply and personally invested in a number of recent memecoin ventures that have attracted billions from investors. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump each launched their own vanity memecoins last month, dubbed $TRUMP and $MELANIA.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the market capitalization of $TRUMP stood at about $7 billion, down from a peak of near $15 billion, while $MELANIA is hovering somewhere in the $460 million mark. Just two months before the 2024 election, Trump’s three sons debuted a cryptocurrency token called World Liberty Financial.

Bloomberg writes that ten days after the Trump/Melania memecoins were launched, an application was filed with the SEC to issue leveraged exchange-traded funds on the coins. "This is precisely what sensible regulation should prevent, letting insubstantial projects into the regulated financial system to extract money from bubble-chasing speculators. People who want to gamble should do it without the false flag of SEC protection; people with real economic projects should raise capital from informed investors with full disclosure."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/business/sec-crypto-task-force.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-02-04/trump-coin-etfs-are-the-crypto-products-the-sec-should-prevent

S.E.C. Moves to Scale Back Its Crypto Enforcement Efforts

Some in a special unit of 50 lawyers and staff members that had been assigned to regulate cryptocurrency are being reassigned in the agency.

The New York Times
@briankrebs did the WSJ say anything else about collapsing the economy with fraud?
@briankrebs Totally not an ingredient for 2008 all over again.
@briankrebs @codinghorror so much for checks and balances. The entire US democratic system seems largely built on trust if one guy can come in and in one week remove all sorts of regulatory checks that personally affects him and his family. I thought the political system was corrupt, it seems much worse than that … and all this ‘tariff’ nonsense is just a smoke shield over what is really happening in the background!!