Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send *them* any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively. Furthermore, there is deniability: holding the coin is, in financial effect, a linear combination of donating to the issuer and gambling. Hence you can intend to do the former but when challenged claim that you are doing the latter. You can even hold the coin privately, and show that you are holding it to whoever; you do not need any zero knowledge proofs, you just send a test transaction. This is all risky to democracy, for reasons similar to what I wrote in https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html and elsewhere. TLDR: the economic arguments for why markets are so great for "regular" goods and services do not extend to "markets for political influence". I recommend politicians do not go down this path.
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jon
@jonbray.eth
it's obviously problematic in a lot of ways, but how are any of those things any worse than a politician holding any token? it seems that if anything, it's preferable for them to openly (or assumedly) have a branded token that way there's at least somewhere to look if you're investigating things like bribery especially compared to just holding a large percentage of any given long-tail token—particularly ones without a vesting schedule—where the financial effects on any individual investor or holder is magnified, price is easier to manipulate, and potential laundering is harder to track
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