I was looking at https://www.opensecrets.org/industries because this site inspired me, it suggest finance/insurance/real estate spent $1,249,076,508 so far in the 2024 election cycle which seems a lot more plausible than $50 million. The risk-reward here suggests industries should be pumping billions into elections. The payoffs for regulatory capture are huge and the crypto people are novices compared to anyone else in finance.
OpenSecrets doesn't make it as easy as it could to analyse all this, but I suspect what that is really telling us is that most of the money doesn't enter the race through PACs. Super PACs [0] seem to be different [1] and bring in about 2x as much money. So I don't think the industry PACs are giving a clear an impression of where money is coming from.
My guess is the crypto community isn't outstanding in terms of spend as much as being naive about how to get the money to politicians in a way that gets them the regulation they want. And the players in this game might put some effort into subtlety.
I was looking at https://www.opensecrets.org/industries because this site inspired me, it suggest finance/insurance/real estate spent $1,249,076,508 so far in the 2024 election cycle which seems a lot more plausible than $50 million. The risk-reward here suggests industries should be pumping billions into elections. The payoffs for regulatory capture are huge and the crypto people are novices compared to anyone else in finance.