Summary
Elon Musk claims his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is shutting down payments to federal contractors, including a Lutheran charity, asserting it is eliminating corruption.
This suggests DOGE has access to Treasury’s payment systems, though officials have not confirmed the extent.
Senator Ron Wyden warned that DOGE may interfere with Social Security, Medicare, and government contracts.
Musk also called USAID “a criminal organization” that should “die,” amid DOGE’s growing influence over federal financial operations.
horse_battery_staple has a more comprehensive comment than this one:
Yeah bitcoin is public, but anonymous (until the very first time you interact with some account in your name). Monero, in short, is like bitcoin but with washing is built into every transaction. It’s far, far from perfect (like all current crypto-currencies), but is a meaningful improvement over Bitcoin (it also supports higher transactions/second).
In my opinion, Bitcoin and Monero are the only crypto-currencies worth engaging with at this time. I haven’t looked into Etherium or Solana, mostly because the idea of ‘decentralized apps running on the chain’ seems like beyond ludicrous scope creep for the problem of ‘minimal trust currency’. The one thing they do right is the Proof of Stake transaction confirmation algorithm, which is much more energy (and CO2) efficient than Proof of Work as used by Bitcoin and Monero.