Annotations by Molly White, Matt Binder, Grady Booch, Amy Castor, Stephen Diehl, Dirty Bubble Media, Dr. Catherine Flick, David Gerard, Geoffrey Huntley, Bennett Tomlin, Neil Turkewitz, Ed Zitron, and some anonymous contributors. Published March 25, 2022.
On March 20, 2022, the New York Times published a 14,000-word puff piece on cryptocurrencies, both
online and as an entire section of the Sunday print edition. Though
its author, Kevin Roose, wrote that it aimed to be a “sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually
is“, it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for cryptocurrency that appeared to have received little
in the way of fact-checking or critical editorial scrutiny. It uncritically repeated many questionable or
entirely fallacious arguments from cryptocurrency advocates, and it appears that no experts on the topic
were consulted, or even anyone with a less-than-rosy view on crypto. This is grossly irresponsible.
Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won’t.
Note: Annotations that are quoted directly are explicitly credited to their authors inline. Annotations without inline attribution are a summary of multiple comments.
Crypto is a lot of things – including terribly explained. We’re here to clear things up.
Until fairly recently, if you lived anywhere other than San Francisco, it was possible to go days or even weeks without hearing about cryptocurrency.
Now, suddenly, it’s inescapable. Look one way, and there are Matt Damon and Larry David doing ads for crypto start-ups. Swivel your head — oh, hey, it’s the mayors of Miami and New York City, arguing over who loves Bitcoin more. Two N.B.A. arenas are now named after crypto companies, and it seems as if every corporate marketing team in America has jumped on the NFT — or nonfungible token — bandwagon. (Can I interest you in one of Pepsi’s new “Mic Drop” genesis NFTs? Or maybe something from Applebee’s “Metaverse Meals” NFT collection, inspired by the restaurant chain’s “iconic” menu items?)
Crypto skeptic Ben McKenzie has argued that this is a sign that the bubble has become precariously large, not that crypto has become ubiquitous: “The celebrities are a symptom of a much bigger problem… You’ve got all this money and you’re trying to get it out to more people and get more people to buy. And if one were to compare cryptocurrency to, say, an MLM or a ponzi, then you would need ever more people to come in to keep the thing going. Celebrities are sort of the natural endpoint for that. At its biggest, you need the biggest: you need Matt Damon and Larry David and sports stars to sell it.” (Crypto Critics’ Corner, episode 51)
Miami’s mayor also introduced “MiamiCoin” to his city. The Miami residents and everyone else who still hold the coin have all lost money, and the coin is trading well below its initial price.
Roose fails to mention the many companies who have jumped off the bandwagon as quickly as they jumped on, after realizing that their users are not only uninterested in being sold NFTs, but actively oppose them. Countless video game projects, MeUndies, The Gorillaz, and the World Wildlife Foundation are just a few companies and groups who’ve canceled NFT projects after announcing them, due to backlash from customers or supporters.
Note also: this is the NYT treating literally the paid marketing as news in itself.
Crypto! For years, it seemed like the kind of fleeting tech trend most people could safely ignore, like hoverboards or Google Glass. But its power, both economic and cultural, has become too big to overlook. Twenty percent of American adults, and 36 percent of millennials, own cryptocurrency, according to a recent Morning Consult survey. Coinbase, the crypto trading app, has landed on top of the App Store’s top charts at least twice in the past year. Today, the crypto market is valued at around $1.75 trillion — roughly the size of Google. And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush.
This number came from a study with a sample size of 2,200 people, and which did not disclose anything about how subjects were recruited.
This isn’t really representative of anything. People that buy crypto products don’t tell us much about the general population. Other than a predisposition towards risk-tolerance in investing.
As David Gerard wrote in his 2017 book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, “Cryptocurrency advocates and lazy journalists like to talk about the ‘market cap’ of crypto, which is the total number of coins or tokens in existence multiplied by today’s price. This is a bogus number that’s not actually applicable to anything — it’s not money that was put into the crypto, it’s not a realisable value like a company market cap, it doesn’t affect prices — it’s just an easily-calculated number that sounds good in a headline. Trading is so thin in any crypto, even Bitcoin, that you could never realise a fraction of the number.”
Yeah, market cap is a meaningless number. It assumes everyone bought at the current price and could cash out at the current price.
As it’s gone mainstream, crypto has inspired an unusually polarized discourse. Its biggest fans think it’s saving the world, while its biggest skeptics are convinced it’s all a scam — an environment-killing speculative bubble orchestrated by grifters and sold to greedy dupes, which will probably crash the economy when it bursts.
I’ve been writing about crypto for nearly a decade, a period in which my own views have whipsawed between extreme skepticism and cautious optimism. These days, I usually describe myself as a crypto moderate, although I admit that may be a cop-out.
This is a statement desperately in need of some links. Although Roose has linked to his own writing quite liberally throughout this article, it certainly doesn’t show “extreme skepticism”, nor for that matter does his optimism seem particularly cautious. This article notably doesn’t seem to link to his August 2021 Times article about the “Pudgy Penguins” NFT project, which served to lend the project legitimacy and pump the price before the group later attempted to scam a prospective buyer of the company. No follow-up was ever published—this is a recurring theme for the articles Roose writes about various crypto projects, as you will see throughout this commentary.
Roose has publicly advocated for journalists who write about crypto to be able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies and NFTs, despite himself acknowledging the “strong biasing effect” it would have and that the traditional finance equivalent of this behavior is prohibited by most reputable publications. He holds the cryptoroose.eth ENS domain (which he bought in October for $21… plus another $136 in transaction fees). He uses the associated wallet for transactions relating to his reporting, including the $500,000 sale of an NFT representing a Times article that he mentions in this piece, the receipt of some Pudgy Penguins NFTs from the creator of the project (later returned), and similar.
I agree with the skeptics that much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets, and I am unmoved by the most utopian sentiments shared by pro-crypto zealots (such as the claim by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief, that Bitcoin will usher in world peace).
“But other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?”
But as I’ve experimented more with crypto — including accidentally selling an NFT for more than $500,000 in a charity auction last year — I’ve come to accept that it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built. I’ve also learned, in my career as a tech journalist, that when so much money, energy and talent flows toward a new thing, it’s generally a good idea to pay attention, regardless of your views on the thing itself.
Let him bring evidence! Not empty claims of aspirations untethered to reality.
I can see we’re going to need that “[citation needed]” stamp a lot
There are so many bubbles in tech that amount to nothing … Can pay attention to them but mostly it’s just noise.
Absolutely agree with this point—however he is conflating “keeping an eye on something” with “keeping an open mind about something,” and “keeping an open mind about something” with “giving something the benefit of the doubt.”
My strongest-held belief about crypto, though, is that it is terribly explained.
Because it’s all a scam wrapped in technical and financial obscurantism. And the best case in point is probably this article which borders more on apologetics than journalism.
On the other hand, I observed that my strongest-held belief about crypto, though, is that it not that it is terribly explained, but rather, it is altogether terrible.
Recently, I spent several months reading everything I could about crypto. But I found that most beginner’s guides took the form of boring podcasts, thinly researched YouTube videos and blog posts written by hopelessly biased investors. Many anti-crypto takes, on the other hand, were undercut by inaccuracies and outdated arguments, such as the assertion that crypto is good for criminals, notwithstanding the growing evidence that crypto’s traceable ledgers make it a poor fit for illicit activity.
Why is it that critics are undercut by inaccuracies and outdated arguments, but pro-crypto people are just poorly-researched?
As I explored in my Spaces with Angie the other day, I come to this with a very different lens: from the point of view of software and systems architecture, cryptocurrencies are computationally inefficient, fragile, demonstrably unable to scale to global levels, and — most damning — introduce an incredibly broad and dangerous attack surface. Whether or not you agree with the philosophy/economics behind cryptocurrencies, they are — simply put — a software architecture disaster in the making.
According to Chainalysis, illicit addresses received $14 billion in 2021, almost twice the amount they did in 2020. Roose uses as an example the case of two alleged criminals whose level of incompetence reportedly includes storing private keys in Dropbox cloud storage, and keeping a file on their desktop called “passport ideas”, and yet even they operated for 5 1/2 years before being arrested.
So even if this is true:
- There are cryptos where you struggle to see on-chain activity: Monero/Zcash
- There are layer 2 designs that obfuscate transactions
- There is the ability to bridge between chains to make tracking increasingly more challenging
- There are on-chain obfuscation technologies like Tornado Cash and Samurai
- Part of the nature of the illicit activity that crypto enables is as a pretense for integration in money laundering
Notwithstanding that, yes, competent criminals can absolutely use crypto for illicit activity—isn’t the flip side of this argument that blockchain ledgers are fundamentally privacy-less? If the argument is that it’s easy to track criminals through crypto ledgers, then it would be easy to track anyone through them. Especially the average person, who doesn’t know how to obfuscate their activity.
In what universe is it a good idea for everyone’s financial transactions to be publicly available (especially to, as this very sentence implies, to law enforcement)? “Debunking” this anti-crypto argument only forms a stronger, much more critical one.
What I couldn’t find was a sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is — how it works, who it’s for, what’s at stake, where the battle lines are drawn — along with answers to some of the most common questions it raises.
No technology is “sober” or “dispassionate” in its creation, nor is it neutral or apolitical, and thus anyone who is claiming to view it from that perspective is DEFINITELY selling you something.
Roose claims to be giving “the view from nowhere” but his entire thesis here is loaded with all these assumptions that somehow somewhere there actually is a “there” there and yet he can’t even point to it. Seems more like an article of faith than a reasoned position.
This guide — a mega-F.A.Q., really — is an attempt to fix that. In it, I’ll explain the basic concepts as clearly as I can, doing my best to answer the questions a curious but open-minded skeptic might pose.
Crypto boosters will likely quibble with my explanations, while dug-in opponents may find them too generous. That’s OK. My goal is not to convince you that crypto is good or bad, that it should be outlawed or celebrated, or that investing in it will make you rich or bankrupt you. It is simply to demystify things a bit. And if you want to go deeper, each section has a list of reading suggestions at the end.
Crypto will be transformative
Understanding crypto now — especially if you’re naturally skeptical — is important for a few reasons.
While I appreciate Kevin’s attempt to “explain” crypto to the masses, his very introduction is problematic. Why would understanding crypto be of particular importance for the “naturally skeptical?” Wouldn’t it make more sense to posit that understanding crypto was of greater immediate importance to those likely to invest money that perhaps they couldn’t afford to lose? Isn’t it more likely that the “naturally skeptical” are probably more familiar with how crypto works than the “naturally embracing” given the amount of pro-crypto propaganda to which we are constantly bombarded? And even the use of the term “naturally” is itself intriguing and telling—suggesting that skepticism is likely to stem from a certain form of romantic and emotional uniformed resistance to change a la Larry David rather than from the application of reason and the too-rare employment of critical thinking.
To fully explain crypto to the masses, one might be forgiven for thinking that priority number one should be to carefully and fully describe the manifest financial risks, and to explain to the innocent how crypto is anchored in, and supports, a vision of society in which public institutions and functions are replaced by private parties. And how that vision naturally aligns with, and advances, a political agenda that undermines progressive ideas of society and government, regardless of one’s personal views of how it might be employed to advance a particular noble or progressive cause. Kevin wants us to know that not every person that invests in crypto does so out of pure selfishness, or to support regressive frameworks of governance. That is undoubtedly true, but it entirely misses the point.
The first is that crypto wealth and ideology is going to be a transformative force in our society in the coming years.
Surprised this is a declaration that it is inevitable, not even couched with “is poised to be a transformative force”.
Okay, so I sort of see what he’s going for here in his clumsy way. There is a libertarian bent that’s sort of meshing with crypto and web3 — crypto has been absorbed into the right wing part of tech.
The wealth could be interesting, but this is also something that is easily questioned.
Technolibertarianism has been around longer than crypto, though—why are we now taking it on faith that it will be a “transformative force… in the coming years”?
This is where Roose goes from being objective to prescriptive. With no justification. Just that crypto is “inevitable” for no reason.
How is this at all demystifying/explaining? This is an opinion, unsupported by anything other than hopes and dreams of unicorns that fart rainbows.
You cannot write this line then refuse to engage with the political thought that has influenced crypto. You just can’t. You have to talk about what ideology that wealth is going to be used to advance. Talk about the candidates they are giving money to who support evil things. Talk about something please Kevin.
You’ve heard about the overnight Dogecoin millionaires and Lamborghini-driving Bitcoin bros. But that’s not the half of it. The crypto boom has generated vast new fortunes at a clip we’ve never seen before — the closest comparison is probably the discovery of oil in the Middle East — and has turned its biggest winners into some of the richest people in the world, essentially overnight. Some riches could vanish if the market crashes, but enough has already been cashed out to ensure that crypto’s influence will linger for decades.
This links to a Kevin Roose article in the NYT about Glauber Contessoto, who took all his savings and borrowed money to put ~$250,000 into Dogecoin, and was boasting holdings worth $2 million when this article was written in May 2021—which was also when Dogecoin reached its all-time-high of around $0.70. Dogecoin is currently priced at around $0.12 and the “Dogecoin millionaire” is back to being a hundred-thousand-aire who serves to inspire others to make enormously risky decisions and hold their positions beyond all reason. Roose, of course, has not written about this part.
Yeah, like Molly said, he’s doing the thing where he’s counting unrealized gains, which countless media outlets do in crypto puff pieces. Just completely inaccurate to say this.
The other “half of it” is that it’s a zero-sum game so for every dogecoin millionaire there’s hundreds of people who lost everything. All to produce … nothing … just a giant financial redistribution game with no economic output.
This is lunacy. Petroleum is a one-time endowment based on millions-year old organic material found beneath the earth’s surface, whereas crypto is bringing in suckers in a zero sum game. It’s really not a good comparison whatsoever, and it is deceptive to try to frame crypto in this way that portrays it as a free “found” natural resource.
In the sense that it has made a lot of already powerful and wealthy white men more powerful and more wealthy, this may be true.
And we know how well the discovery of oil in the Middle East did for global politics.
“Some” is doing a lot of work here. Considering it’s all paper wealth tied up in fictitious assets. The whole thing could vanish overnight.
How was this conclusion reached?
Yet more of these pronouncements pulled from thin air, after he tried to portray himself as an honest broker at the start of the piece. We cannot be the only ones who see this huge discrepancy, can we?
I mean even if it’s true, it’s not doing him any favours. All it’s doing is solidifying the problematic argument that some people have found someone else to hold the bag.
If taken as true, literally all he’s done here is gesture at a far, far more important question than what he’s talking about: who are these people that are now fabulously wealthy? What do they think about how the world should be run? What are they doing with it? If this influence will linger, what do they intend to influence?
Crypto’s madcap, meme-crazed online culture can make it seem frivolous and shallow. It’s not. Cryptocurrencies, even the jokey ones, are part of a robust, well-funded ideological movement that has serious implications for our political and economic future. Bitcoin, which emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, first caught on among libertarians and anti-establishment activists who saw it as the cornerstone of a new, incorruptible monetary system. Since then, other crypto realms have fashioned similarly lofty goals, like building a decentralized, largely unregulated version of Wall Street on the blockchain.
Please explain to me one unifying ideology of cryptocurrency that’s also “robust.” If it’s libertarianism, sure, I actually believe that, but not for the reasons you think — crypto is the dream libertarian society, where people are tricked in a totally legal way into enriching the people that rigged the thing that people are tricked into buying.
If it’s literally anything else, well, who knows what it is, he never says.
Also this is SO not “sober, dispassionate”. This is an argument that gives it credibility.
Well-funded is an important observation. As I often observe, cryptocurrency is just the same old power structures but with shiny new technology.
I really wish he would describe this ideology he keeps referring to, rather than just vaguely alluding.
We are already starting to see a swell of crypto money headed toward the U.S. political system. Crypto entrepreneurs are donating millions of dollars to candidates and causes, and lobbying firms have fanned out across the country to win support for pro-crypto legislation. In the coming years, crypto moguls will bankroll the campaigns of crypto-friendly candidates, or run for office themselves. Some will peddle influence in the familiar ways — forming super PACs, funding think tanks, etc. — while others will try to escape partisan gridlock altogether. (Crypto millionaires are already buying up land in the South Pacific to build their own blockchain utopias.)
How’s that going so far? It’s also pretty weird to describe libertarian seasteading as simply “escap[ing] partisan gridlock”.
Yeah, I don’t recall any of the founders of these citing “partisan gridlock” as the reason for anything that motivated them.
It’s so weird how there’s never any consideration of the efficacy of any of these efforts he cites.
This one REALLY annoys me. All the hype is around how it’ll all be crypto etc. but yeah sure, the cleaners and caterers and boat drivers and all those jobs you feel are beneath you but which are totally necessary are totally not going to be accepting crypto, so how is that all going to work? Also irony of buying up islands that will be no doubt swamped by rising sea levels caused in part by massive environmental impact from energy use of crypto.
Crypto is poised to soon become one of a handful of true wedge issues, with politicians all over the world forced to pick a side. Some countries, like El Salvador — whose crypto-loving president, Nayib Bukele, recently announced the development of a “Bitcoin City” at the base of a volcano — will go full crypto. Other governments may decide that crypto is a threat to their sovereignty and crack down, as China did when it outlawed cryptocurrency trading last year. The divide between the world’s pro-crypto and no-crypto zones could end up being at least as big as the divide between the Chinese internet and the American one, and maybe even more consequential.
It is the HEIGHT of ignorance to not include how badly it’s going there. Just an absolutely insane thing to not include, especially if you’re trying to give a “sober” look at it.
How does he mention El Salvador without talking about how corrupt and conniving the entire effort is? It’s unconscionable. I can’t believe Roose is truly this ignorant. He knows just what he is selling.
It’s amazing in no small part because Bukele is so obviously self-serving that even Bitcoin maxis on Reddit, who have been waiting for a country to adopt Bitcoin with bated breath for a decade, are like “yeah, that’s a scam.”
The NBC News article that Roose cites inline states, “But several analysts and experts say it’s impossible for a project of that magnitude to materialize in the coming years. No technical plan for the project has been disclosed.” Furthermore, the first $1 billion that Bukele hopes to raise through “volcano bonds” are earmarked for purposes unrelated to building this supposed Bitcoin City. For full context to the reader, those bonds were also just paused due to unfavorable market conditions—that was reported two days after this article was published, and so the omission of that specific fact shouldn’t be held against Roose.
There’s a lot of army helicopter tours for his wealthy European and American friends, not a lot of road building or pipe-laying.
The vast majority of El Salvadoreans aren’t using crypto, and never will!
This is one of the few times I actually want a journalist to talk to an academic because the academic would say “what are you talking about?”
As an academic I would love to ask that question, because it’s a good one and what the hell??
In America, we have already seen how crypto can scramble the usual partisan allegiances. Former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts, are united in crypto skepticism, for example, while Senator Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas, is in the same bullish camp as Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon. We have also seen what can happen when the crypto community feels politically threatened, as happened last summer, when crypto groups rallied to oppose a crypto-related provision in President Biden’s infrastructure bill.
Donald Trump just shouted out the Let’s Go Brandon coin at his rally yesterday. Literally promoted its web address to supporters on stage.
It would have been considerably more compelling if Roose could have pointed to some numbers around who has come out in support of or against crypto and in which parties. One could also cherrypick a Republican who supports abortion rights and an anti-abortion Democrat, but most reasonable people wouldn’t try to argue that opinions on abortion rights don’t heavily follow partisan lines.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that despite the goofy veneer, crypto is not just another weird internet phenomenon. It’s an organized technological movement, armed with powerful tools and hordes of wealthy true believers, whose goal is nothing less than a total economic and political revolution.
This is a lot of crystal balling for someone who was trying to provide something in the neighborhood of “sober and dispassionate”.
Also, it’s totally another weird internet phenomenon. Just because it’s making some people money doesn’t change that. It’s still impenetrable to most.
Contradicts the “decentralized” message, no?
Absolutely baffling that an editor let him get away with such a handwavy statement about unspecified tools.
I suspect there is much less overlap between the “wealthy” and the “true believers” than Roose posits here. The true believers don’t tend to be the ones hoovering up VC investments or spinning up new shitcoins to pump and dump. Some of the wealthy (e.g. some of the folks behind exchanges like Binance and Kraken) parrot true believer talking points, but I suspect those are not so much strongly-held convictions as they are convenient ways to launder their work as ideological rather than money-driven. I talked a little bit about the true believers and those who just repeat the true believers’ talking points in This Week In Startups last month.
Yeah, this is the thing, the ideological talking points are very palatable covers for the underlying greed. So it’s actually quite hard to tell which is which.
Crypto could be destructive
The second reason to pay attention to crypto is that understanding it now is the best way to ensure it doesn’t become a destructive force later.
In the early 2010s, the most common knock on social media apps like Facebook and Twitter was that they just wouldn’t work as businesses. Pundits predicted that users would eventually tire of their friends’ vacation photos, that advertisers would flee and that the whole social media industry would collapse. The theory wasn’t so much that social media was dangerous or bad; just that it was boring and corny, a hype-driven fad that would disappear as quickly as it had arrived.
This is easily the most egregious “citation needed” yet, because I cannot think of anyone outside of a circle of complete doofuses who would have predicted this before like, 2011?
It’s Writing 101 to cite anything you use as an argument. Who edited this?
No one in “the early 2010s” argued that social media would just go away. The prototypes of social media were already over a decade old, and the core product, micro-updates, chat functionality, and asynchronous communication, was already a deeply well proven feature for a decade before that via message boards, IRC, ICQ, and MSN messenger. The arguments revolved mostly around specific companies surviving the churn cycle of the 00s, but “will Facebook be the next Friendster?” isn’t as useful for painting these un-cited critics as dinosaurs who just didn’t get it.
What nobody was asking back then — at least not loudly — were questions like: What if social media is actually insanely successful? What kind of regulations would need to exist in a world where Facebook and Twitter were the dominant communication platforms? How should tech companies with billions of users weigh the trade-offs between free speech and safety? What product features could prevent online hate and misinformation from cascading into offline violence?
People absolutely were asking these questions (see Matt Binder’s comment above), though Roose seems to have set himself up for the defense of “well sure, but they weren’t being loud enough”. What does “loud enough” look like? Are the people asking these questions of crypto being loud enough?
Quite a few ethicists were talking about this, but we were mostly in academia so I guess that’s not loud enough for him. Here’s the entire list of abstracts from ETHICOMP 2011, for example, with plenty of ethical analyses of social media that assumed it would be successful.
By the middle of the decade, when it was clear that these were urgent questions, it was too late. The platform mechanics and ad-based business models were already baked in, and skeptics — who might have steered these apps in a better direction, if they’d taken them more seriously from the start — were stuck trying to contain the damage.
I’m trying to better understand what he is obliquely referring to here. Is he talking about how there was a disincentive to root out fake users, because more users always look better to investors and advertisers? I wish he would be more specific.
I’m totally lost. Why are we still talking about this? I thought this was meant to be a sober explanation of crypto? This feels as if it’s extremely subjective and personal commentary.
Aren’t platform mechanics and business models pretty well baked into crypto systems too?
Bizarre to place blame on the skeptics not taking the problems seriously, rather than, say, the platforms not taking the skeptics seriously.
Yeah, he’s setting up to blame the skeptics for the crooks.
So I’ve been in tech ethics for almost 20 years now and I was bashing down doors trying to get someone to talk to me (and colleagues too); it’s only really since AI came in that we’ve been actively sought after because finally the big companies realised maybe this tech thing needs a bit more than technical know-how. So yeah, we were there, nobody was listening.
This whole section seems to oscillate between referring to “pundits,” which I assume means media and commentator types, and “skeptics,” which could include more researchers, academics, or other experts in the fields. (Where it’s referring to anyone in specific at all, that is.) But which of those groups are supposed to have the power to “steer” anything?
Or to quote Max Read on this one: “I’m also increasingly less convinced that a ‘better’ tech journalism, by any definition of the word, would have made a particular difference in how the internet of the 21st century has unfolded so far. What strikes me looking back at tech journalism of the 2000s is how fast Facebook (to take the most prominent example) was growing: zero to 500 million users in just five years. I’m not sure any analysis or criticism, no matter how damning, could have slowed that kind of planetary momentum — and there was plenty of good analysis and criticism of Facebook at the time. What was missing was a coherent, organized, well-resourced political movement that could have matched Facebook’s size, speed, and capital.”
Are we making the same mistake with crypto today? It’s possible. No one knows yet whether crypto will or won’t “work,” in the grandest sense. (Anyone who claims they do is selling something.) But there is real money and energy in it, and many tech veterans I’ve spoken to tell me that today’s crypto scene feels, to them, like 2010 all over again — with tech disrupting money this time, instead of media.
Plenty of technologists have already pointed out long lists of issues around scaling, unsustainable environmental cost, etc. that point to it not working. Proponents, for their part, have mostly responded to those with “it’s early days!”, handwaving at things like Ethereum’s eternally 6-months-away shift to PoS, or pointing at some theoretical concepts that have never been put into practice (for years now), partially because some of them rely on breaking laws of mathematics or solving as-yet-unsolved computer science problems.
I find this “selling something” point odd and inconsistent with the gleeful rundown of the wonders of crypto in the previous section. In fact, ironically, isn’t it that most of the pundits are not trying to sell something, and in fact are trying to keep people away from selling/buying/trading crypto? It’s a lazy rhetorical device that paints the entire set of skeptics as being self-interested and just descends into “both sidesism”. The more I write about it, it makes me more annoyed.
This reminds me a bit of that recent Vice article about nocoiners which spoke about “the rise of a nocoiner industry”, which seemed to overstate things just a bit (particularly if compared to the money people are trying to make in the “coiner industry”). There are hardly piles of money to be made in crypto skepticism.
This is in
