Beyond the president, Americans will also choose governors, representatives, and senators

Cryptocurrency has been declared dead so many times that its supposed demise is a running joke within the industry. According to the website 99Bitcoins, the obituary of crypto’s flagship token has been written at least 477 times since 2010. A round of eulogies occurred last year, after several crypto-trading giants, including FTX, collapsed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a barrage of lawsuits against major blockchain companies. “Crypto is dead in America,” said the tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the All-In podcast in April 2023. Publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wondered if the technology was, once again, kaput.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that crypto is back. What’s shocking is just how back it is. The total market capitalization of crypto assets this year has been within striking distance of its all-time highs in 2021. The crypto sector has been the biggest political donor in the current election cycle, surpassing even the fossil-fuel industry, with contributions flowing to candidates from both parties. In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that included many of the policy demands of crypto lobbyists, while the Senate rolled back guidelines by the SEC designed to protect consumers of cryptocurrencies. And both presidential candidates have flirted with crypto enough that, no matter who wins in November, the market could be on the brink of a deregulation-fueled bonanza.

How did crypto bounce back so fast? Part of the answer is pure smashmouth politics: The industry started spending gobs of money—at least $130 million to date—to elbow its way into this year’s congressional races. It has also refined its sales pitch. Since the FTX meltdown, the industry has been making efforts to distance itself from the Sam Bankman-Fried school of charm. Gone are the mussed hair and grandiose talk of altruism and saving humanity. In are the MBAs and lawyers, the Ivy Leaguers who know how to speak the language of Washington persuasion. The industry’s message now: Make crypto normal. Regulate us, please. All we want is to know the rules of the road. They highlight the most mundane, inoffensive applications of crypto, while condemning the scammers who tarnish the industry’s reputation and avoiding mention of the “degens,” or degenerate gamblers, who represent much of crypto’s actual demand.

[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]

But the truth is that the scammers are only getting bolder, finding new creative ways to rip off retail investors. Should the crypto lobby get its way, the new regulatory regime will clear a path not just for the industry’s “respectable” wing but also for the wildcatters and criminals. If you thought crypto was a problem before, you should be alarmed. The worst is likely yet to come.

The crypto industry insists that its goal—the reason it’s spending ungodly sums of money to sway elections—is to be boring. Nothing to see here. Crypto companies say they merely seek “regulatory clarity.”

This phrase is, to be generous, a sleight of hand. Companies don’t just want clarity; they want a particular set of rules. Currently, crypto exists in a state of regulatory limbo. The SEC says that most crypto assets are securities, defined as an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The paradigmatic case is a share of stock in a publicly traded company. Securities are subject to a lot of rules: You can only trade them through a registered exchange, and issuers have to disclose a bunch of information about the underlying companies. That way, investors can make informed decisions about which securities to buy and which to avoid.

If digital assets are indeed securities—a position that some federal judges have accepted, at least one judge has questioned, and is currently being tested in a number of ongoing enforcement cases—then crypto operations would have to behave like other Wall Street institutions. Companies like Coinbase, for example, would need to separate their brokerage services—that is, helping their customers buy and sell tokens—from their exchange services. (This is one aspect of the SEC’s pending lawsuit against Coinbase.) Plus, crypto operations could no longer launch overnight—not legally, at least. They’d have to register with the SEC and issue thorough disclosure documents before allowing the public to invest, a burdensome and costly process that would weed out a huge share of dodgy crypto schemes with no sound business model.

The main plank of crypto’s bid for normalcy is that tokens should be considered commodities, not securities. What could be more boring than a commodity? Wheat, orange juice, coffee beans, livestock: Commodities are interchangeable, and you can trade them with other people directly. The crypto lobby says tokens are clearly commodities, since they’re fungible like bags of corn and do more than just go up and down in price. For example, users can spend tokens as “gas” to interact with a blockchain or participate in the governance and upkeep of the blockchain; they don’t merely rely on “the efforts of others.” (The SEC agrees that bitcoin is a commodity, since unlike almost every other crypto asset it has no central issuer.)

Classifying cryptocurrencies as commodities would bring them under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the SEC. The CFTC has been friendlier to crypto, going so far as to advocate for controversial deregulatory measures pushed by FTX. It’s also much smaller, with roughly one-sixth the budget and staff. With the CFTC in charge, the SEC’s long list of pending cases would disappear, and we’d probably see a lot fewer prosecutions of crypto companies.

Consumer advocates argue that exempting crypto from securities laws would make it easier for Americans to buy risky digital assets: Not only would exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken be likely to offer fringier coins—they’d be harmless commodities, after all—institutional investors like pension funds might see the new rules as a stamp of approval to dive into crypto. Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University who studies financial regulation, told me that designating cryptocurrencies as commodities would create a loophole that non-crypto companies could exploit. “Slap a blockchain on it,” she said, “and you too can be free from securities regulation.” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me the real reason the crypto industry doesn’t want tokens to be classified as securities is that disclosure rules would expose them as financially dangerous. “If you had to fully and truthfully disclose the risks associated with crypto, the people who would engage in crypto would be near none,” he said.   

The industry deflects such arguments by downplaying its chaotic history and focusing on its more mundane use cases: stablecoins, for example, which are designed to maintain a fixed value and can be used for instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions, particularly cross-border remittances, and as a hedge against inflation. (Argentina has seen growing adoption lately.) Or, even more boring, “decentralized physical infrastructure networks,” or DePIN, which employ blockchain technology to reward users for providing public resources such as data storage or Wi-Fi.

But the rules the industry is pushing would also juice some of crypto’s most degenerate schemes. The breakout hits of 2024 are fundamentally just new ways to gamble. Polymarket, the platform where wagers are made exclusively with crypto, has taken off this year thanks to interest in betting on the election. “Tap-to-earn” games such as Hamster Kombat have surged in popularity, luring users with rewards in the form of tokens. The apotheosis of speculative crypto insanity, though, is the website Pump.fun. On Pump.fun, anyone can create a memecoin instantly—all you need to do is select a name and an image—and the site creates a market where people can buy and sell it. One recent top token was named after the internet-famous baby hippo Moo Deng. Inevitably, creators are going to absurd lengths to promote their tokens: One guy posted a photo of himself apparently using meth. Another suffered burns after shooting fireworks at himself during a livestream.

The industry doesn’t foreground these casino-like use cases, but it implicitly blesses them. Speculation is normal, advocates say. In fact, it’s what drives innovation in the first place. “Speculation, taking risks—that’s what fuels the economy,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, told me. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, says that allowing people to buy and sell tokens isn’t about whether crypto is good or bad. “I don’t necessarily know that it’s net positive or negative,” she told me. “I think it’s about the ability of people to determine what they want to do with their own money.”

The biggest degen of all is on the ballot. Donald Trump clearly has no idea what a blockchain is, but he understands that it’s related to money, which seems to be enough. He has declared himself “the crypto president.” In July, speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, he pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet” and called crypto “the steel industry of a hundred years ago.” In September, he stopped by a bitcoin-themed bar in New York City and spent $950 worth of bitcoin on a round of burgers and Diet Cokes. Trump has also announced his involvement in a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. While the details of the project are hazy, it would apparently offer a stablecoin. (The project’s launch last week saw low demand and extended outages.)

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

The industry is salivating at the prospect of a Trump win. Trump has said he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” and free the American cybercriminal and crypto hero Ross Ulbricht from prison. Any Trump-affiliated crypto project, such as World Liberty Financial, would operate in a legal gray area unless Congress passed the new regulatory regime the industry is asking for. In other words, he has skin in the game. “It’s clear Trump would be very positive for crypto,” Smith, the Blockchain Association CEO, said.

How a Kamala Harris administration would regulate the technology is less clear, but her recent statements have given crypto fans hope. In September, she promised to help grow “innovative technologies” including “digital assets.” Then she announced that she would support regulations that enable “Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation” while keeping those investors “protected”—a strange and careful framing that implicitly acknowledged how many Black men have lost money on crypto. These comments could just be campaign rhetoric meant to fend off attacks by the crypto lobby. But they show that Harris is listening to the industry’s arguments, particularly those couched in the language of opportunity and equity. Harris is, if nothing else, sensitive to the direction of political winds. If a newly crypto-friendly Congress were to pass the industry’s desired legislation in a bipartisan way, a President Harris might feel great pressure to sign it.

And even if Trump and Harris do nothing to help crypto, the technology has by now proved its indestructibility. As if to drive home the point, 99Bitcoin’s obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is from April. I messaged the site’s owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn’t respond.

Alexza, a Midwest native, struggled with credit-card debt for 10 years, working multiple jobs—as a nanny, bartender, and distillery tour guide—just to meet the minimum payments. Collection agencies called her constantly. She stopped answering, but that wasn’t enough to escape her financial anxiety. She entered an inpatient therapy program in large part because of the stress, which compounded her debts further. (Alexza requested to be referred to by only her first name in order to speak candidly about her finances.)

She had considered bankruptcy, but she was afraid of what it would say about her. “You kind of feel like a failure,” she told me. The cost of filing—in her case, about $1,800 to cover legal fees—was also prohibitive for someone without any savings. But in September 2021, while working at a coffee shop, she decided, “I can’t afford to continue to just barely tread water.” She borrowed the money from a friend and met with a lawyer. Less than two weeks after she filed, the calls from collection agencies stopped. By January, she had erased nearly $20,000 of medical and credit-card debt.

[Read: ‘Nobody knows what these bills are for’]

Debt has long plagued many Americans like Alexza. Today, people in the U.S. carry more debt than they did a few decades ago. Household debt tripled between 1950 and 2022; as of 2020, 14 percent of Americans had so much debt that it outweighed the value of their assets. In this context, you might expect more people to reach for the kind of financial fresh start that bankruptcy can offer. Yet last year, fewer than 0.2 percent of American adults filed. Of course, not everyone in debt would benefit from bankruptcy—but a lot of people might. At a time when so many Americans are struggling, why aren’t more people taking that path to a second chance?

Until the early 19th century, Americans in debt had few mechanisms by which to dig themselves out. But beginning in the 1810s and 1820s, the political scientists Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston write in The Political Development of American Debt Relief, white farmers in the southern and Plains states, who sometimes had to take out loans if their crops failed, began demanding that their political representatives do something to help. Thanks in part to those efforts, legislators began working to create a process by which people could take their creditors to court, with the goal of erasing what they owed; the debtors would be free to start over. (The process was mostly concerned with helping farmers in debt keep their property; it did little for Black sharecroppers, who didn’t own any land to begin with.)

The first federal voluntary bankruptcy law was passed in 1841. It was repealed two years later but reintroduced and expanded in 1867. As one senator who supported the 1867 expansion put it, all the law proposed was that anyone should be able to “escape from [their debts] and be again a man.” That idea was radical: It turned the U.S. into one of the most debtor-friendly countries on earth. Within three years of the American law’s reintroduction, nearly 43,000 debtors had cleared what they owed.

Today, U.S. bankruptcy law looks a lot different. American laws remain more forgiving than those in many other wealthy countries, such as Australia and Austria. But over the past several decades, financial-industry groups in the U.S. have pushed legislators to amend the bankruptcy system in a way that prioritizes creditors over debtors. And with each legal update, “it just gets harder and harder on consumers,” Robert H. Scott III, an economics professor at Monmouth University, told me.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, bankruptcy was more common than it is now, and Americans were successfully canceling $4 billion per year in credit-card debt. But then credit-card lobbyists, worried about all of that lost revenue, began promoting the notion that certain debtors were abusing the system and driving up the cost of credit for everyone. (“What Do Bankruptcies Cost American Families?” one of their newspaper ads asked.) They argued that mass bankruptcies hurt the economy. So, however, does failing to help debtors: Debt is one of the greatest drivers of wealth inequality. Plus, many scholars contend that debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws foster entrepreneurship. But the creditor argument won out, and after much pushing, legislators passed the inelegantly named 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Since then, filing has become riskier, more onerous, and more expensive.

To file, debtors owe an up-front fee that can exceed $1,000—a bizarre catch-22 for someone who can’t afford to pay their bills. The bankruptcy process can also affect your credit score. Although research on exactly what filing does to a score over time is limited, a bankruptcy can stay on your credit report for up to 10 years, potentially limiting your access to rental housing and bank loans. Depending on where you live and what type of bankruptcy you file for, you might also be more likely to have to give up your home or your car to repay your debts. People filing in some states are more fortunate. In states like Rhode Island, which has a generous $12,000 motor-vehicle exemption, the risk of losing what might be your only way to commute to work is low. Alexza, for instance, was able to keep her old car. Texas and Florida homeowners are also lucky, as their houses are essentially protected from creditors. But people living in places with less generous protections may have to accept bigger losses.  

The choice of whether to file gets more complicated when you factor in the different kinds of bankruptcy. While bankruptcy has many permutations, the two most common types for individuals are Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7, which Alexza filed for, erases most eligible debts but also demands that you give up any possessions over a certain value, with a few exceptions. For the poorest Americans, it’s a natural choice; 95 percent of people who file for Chapter 7 keep everything they own, and 96 percent have their debts discharged.

Chapter 13, by contrast, is essentially a long-term repayment plan. It comes with one major benefit—you can keep your assets—but it’s overall much less forgiving. If you miss payments, your whole case could be dismissed, leaving you solely responsible for paying off all of your debts once again. As Zackin and Thurston write in their history of debt relief, Chapter 13 was created in the 1930s not to protect debtors, but as a way to funnel money back to American business owners who worried that bankruptcies were costing them. One contemporaneous study found that few debtors could keep up with payments; today, only about half of people who file for Chapter 13 ultimately become debt free, and some filers wind up in worse financial shape than when they started the process.

However, the legal system pushes a lot of poor people who don’t own much toward Chapter 13. Some of the pressure is structural, as traffic tickets and other court fees, which are disproportionately levied on the poor, can be forgiven only through Chapter 13. But bias in legal representation also plays a role: A study published by the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review found that when advising debtors with identical financial situations, lawyers were more likely to recommend Chapter 7 to white clients and Chapter 13 to Black ones.

In various other ways, bankruptcy does not serve Americans equally. The typical filer is more likely to be middle income, even though low-income Americans have the most debt relative to their earnings—suggesting that the system may not be reaching them. This may be in part because many of the broadest exemptions are targeted at those who already own significant assets. Many states allow homeowners who file Chapter 7 to keep their house if it’s below a certain value, but renters don’t necessarily get to save possessions that most likely cost a lot less than a home. Meanwhile, many debts faced by formerly incarcerated people, such as restitution debts and parole fees, cannot be removed during Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. And student loans didn’t become easier to discharge in bankruptcy court until 2022.

[Read: Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem]

The inequities don’t end there. Even as bankruptcy has failed to reach many of the Americans who need it most, it has morphed into an escape hatch for the wealthy. Chapter 11 was designed specifically for wealthy people and corporations. It lets them pay back creditors over the long term, sometimes in part at a lower interest rate, while their companies operate as usual, in the name of protecting their employees’ jobs. Rudy Giuliani, Francis Ford Coppola, and Donald Trump have filed for Chapter 11—in Trump’s case, six times. Though the process is expensive and complicated, according to the scholar Melissa Jacoby, it is actually much friendlier than the bankruptcies the rest of us use.  

Leaving aside the difficulty of filing, the perhaps more significant barrier to choosing bankruptcy, for many Americans, is the stigma. Some scholars have likened the process to a kind of public penance. During it, a court scrutinizes your finances and choices. And because many people consider debt to be an individual failing, those going through bankruptcy can feel humiliated—even though, in many cases, debt is more properly seen “as a collective misfortune,” Daniel Platt, a legal-studies professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told me. In the 19th century, members of the debtors’ movement understood that their struggles were shared. Glimmers of that mindset emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, when many people drew a direct line between corporate exploitation and individuals’ money troubles. But even in the absence of widespread economic catastrophe, when someone declares bankruptcy “there has been a failure,” Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, explained. “A lot of that failure is not on the person but on the system that has no other safety net for you.”

Of course, bankruptcy cannot save individuals from that systemic failure. Expunging your debts cannot, for instance, solve the problem of stagnating wages or rising housing costs. But for people like Alexza, it can offer some breathing room. One moment she couldn’t see a way out of her debts. Then, before she knew it, they were gone.

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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

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Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, was released from federal prison after completing his four-month sentence for being found in contempt of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris's speech tonight—which she says will be her campaign’s closing argument—will be delivered from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same location where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021. Israel’s Parliament passed two laws yesterday that include provisions banning UNRWA, a UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating in the country. Israel has accused several members of UNRWA, which distributes the majority of aid in Gaza, of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7.

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Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and a too-angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator villain, and to add insult to injury, the inscription at its base was marred by misspellings. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so aghast at a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him into making a new one.

It gives me no pleasure—and, in fact, considerable pain—to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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