What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

May 27, 2022 11:04 AM

"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."

"A Newcomer's Guide To Crypto" By Kevin Roose, originally published in The New York Times on March 20, 2022, with 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.
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posted by mhoye (51 comments total)

The NYT publishing misleading, groundless, poorly researched self-aggranding pablum? Clutch my pearls, Martha… Isn’t it all the news that’s fit to print ?

I note the author’s name rhymes very well with ruse.

Thanks for the post. The more awareness created around the chicanery of “crypto” currencies, the fewer people who’ll be robbed. I hope. I mean, a ton of people are going to lose money, cuz that’s the design. But maybe as awareness grows, some increasing portion of the losses will be realized by the robbers instead of just the marks.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 11:22 AM on May 27, 2022 [15 favorites]

This is a crypto takedown....and an NYT takedown as well?

Oh, this is delicious. Thank you.
posted by gimonca at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2022 [37 favorites]

Are you trying to tell me that the New York Times has covered a technical topic, from which numerous billionaires could gain a further financial advantage if it boosted the greater fool pool public interest, and done so in a less than rigorous fashion, choosing instead to gussy it up with a dose of the old gee-whiz?

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Jeeves, lay out my pearls. I wish to clutch them.
posted by flabdablet at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2022 [36 favorites]

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)?

Quoted for truth.
posted by Monochrome at 11:24 AM on May 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

In what universe is it a good idea for everyone's financial transactions to be publicly available

One that's fundamentally hostile to tax havens, perhaps?
posted by flabdablet at 11:27 AM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

But the libertarian jerk-offs and con men who created and promote cryptocurrency tout tax evasion as one of its primary benefits.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:32 AM on May 27, 2022 [14 favorites]

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)?

I think an initial although possibly specious reasoning is related to open knowledge of coworker compensation helps proletariat not capital.

That instead of wall street darkpools where money travels without any light upon it that instead there be a shared knowledge space of financial currents and rivers and tributaries that kept everyone at least honest if not equal.

But instead this seems to have gone in the "Beanie Baby" direction commodifying that which was supposed to be the medium of exchange.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 11:33 AM on May 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

Crypto's biggest flaw remains that it has no demands, no exports, no innate use besides speculation and illegality.

One of the things that gives fiat currency its almost unshakeable feeling of worth is that everyone wants it. Why? Because everyone has to pay their taxes in it. No other form of payment is accepted in each country besides that country's money. If you don't pay your taxes, at least in theory, the state is armed, has a monopoly on violence, and is effectively able to force an individual to render what's required of them under threat of losing wealth or liberty.

What can bitcoin do in that regard? Nothing. It's a promise and one that is both fragile and ever changing. At least when the US backs the US dollar with the "full faith and credit of the United States" you know that your money is basically good until the fall of civilization as we know it.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:35 AM on May 27, 2022 [22 favorites]

y'see, flabdablet, after that time of reckoning in the late aughts where it became apparent to many within and without the NYT that it had become unpopular to provide extensive and zero-cost PR for any ... organization that might want to .... liberate, say, a foreign country to the tune of two trillion dollars and countless millions dead, the NYT editorial staff decided to redirect the efforts of its staff of External Marketing Services to a new domain of clientele, that which you've described. The portraits of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others from the AEI or PNAC no longer hang in the newsroom; they've been replaced with those of a cast of characters from the Tech Titan set.

Strangely, in the corner we find Judith Miller's still hanging. Perhaps she's put a DAO together?
posted by armoir from antproof case at 11:39 AM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

Is there anything in this article we haven't talked about many times before here? I feel like maybe we should refrain from crypto posts until Tether collapses. Not that that hasn't been discussed before either, but the metric ton of schadenfreude 2nd and 3rd order effects of that event would certainly be discussion worthy.
posted by gwint at 11:44 AM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

the news that’s fit to print ?

all the Roose that's NFT to print.
posted by chavenet at 11:44 AM on May 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

I've posted this before, but worth repeating: Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him
posted by chavenet at 11:52 AM on May 27, 2022 [19 favorites]

I'm only about 10% of the way through the guide, but I'm really enjoying it.

I learn so much when experts who really understand something well are willing to explain things to non-experts like me. I have zero interest in buying cryptocurrency, but I always appreciate the opportunity to become better informed about important issues.

I appreciate the new information I hadn't come across before:

Illicit activity is more than financial: "Abuse and harassment on the blockchain". Blockchain is incompatible with GDPR and the transactions contain actual illicit content which makes hosting a node actually illegal.

and the pushback against incorrect but widely-held beliefs:

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.

and the pointing out of logical fallacies:

Roose, NYTimes: "Understanding crypto now — especially if you’re naturally skeptical — is important for a few reasons."

Neil Turkewitz: "...his very introduction is problematic. Why would understanding crypto be of particular importance for the “naturally skeptical?” ... 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.

and the contrasting voices:

Roose, NYTimes: 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 ...

Molly White: WHAT

Anonymous 1: 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.

This is a really great, information-rich, entertaining, educational piece.

I am really glad to know it exists, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

Thank you so much for posting it, mhoye!

(Aside: blockchain has now ruined the HTML tag blockquote for me. Sigh.)
posted by kristi at 11:52 AM on May 27, 2022 [13 favorites]

Web3 is going just great.
posted by box at 11:54 AM on May 27, 2022 [11 favorites]

Setting aside the fact that crypto-coins fundamentally do not work without insane levels of resource-burning (Bitcoin burns electricity and ties up capital in rapidly-depreciating ASICs, other proposals would burn electricity and tie up capital in rapidly-depreciating hard drives)—and I know, "setting aside" that is a pretty tall order—the general idea of having all financial transactions public but partially-anonymous... doesn't really bother me that much?

It's a weird sort of quasi-anonymity, because it basically allows a single transaction to be anonymous, but any pattern of repeated transactions quickly becomes identifiable.

I don't think that's necessarily a terrible compromise. And some compromise between total anonymity (facilitates tax evasion, corruption, human trafficking, arms dealing, sale of child exploitation materials) and total public knowledge (allows discovery of people getting abortions, obtaining mental health services, doing relatively harmless drugs) is necessary in a functioning society.

There's a reason that not even the Swiss ("did somebody say war gold?") have an entirely private banking system anymore. It's just corrosive to society to have money sloshing around in large quantities without any oversight or accountability at all.

Similarly, I don't think a total panopticon of mutual surveillance is desirable, either. I don't need my neighbors tut-tutting over how much I spend on Doordash or Costco Pharmacy.

Cash has some similarities, in that it's not as anonymous as people tend to think it is—it's just labor-intensive to trace. Every bill is uniquely serialized, and you could pretty easily build the ability to read and record those serial numbers as bills flow through the financial system, if you wanted to. (It'd be pretty simple to put a camera and a strobe light in every bank's bill-counting machines, if you were so inclined.) Nobody has really bothered, because the societal ROI isn't there. We generally only bother recording serial numbers and tracing bills for significant criminal activity, like bank robberies, kidnap-for-ransom, terrorism, or very large-scale organized crime.

That sort of "soft anonymity" is a pretty desirable feature of a lot of systems.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:15 PM on May 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

"The WeWork founders are starting a carbon credit crypto company and they already raised $70 million in funding "

Aaaaaaaaahhhhbhgj

(from web3igjg)
posted by clew at 12:18 PM on May 27, 2022 [11 favorites]

This looks very well done and I’m excited to read it - always want more reasons to hate crypto!
posted by Going To Maine at 12:20 PM on May 27, 2022

it's called blockchain because i block u
posted by lalochezia at 12:32 PM on May 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think I’m also excited about this because it feels like a much more direct interaction between tech reporters covering crypto and skeptics who complain about the coverage. Usually it all seems very second hand - I’ve seen a lot of reporters saying that they are skeptical of crypto, critics need to get a grip, and a lot of crypto skeptics saying that reporters aren’t skeptical enough. (This all, of course, is very dependent on the particular outlet that we’re talking about.) It’s nice to see a more direct review of the content. I’m curious about the tool they used to use the annotations.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:35 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, Kevin Roose's article on crypto was printed on March 20. But then about two weeks later, on April 5, the NYT's Ezra Klein actually interviewed Dan Olson to talk to him about his two-hour video on NFTs. Since I was familiar with both, it was like having a, "What is this, a crossover episode?" kind of moment. But the weirdest was that at the end of that episode, Ezra says he consulted with Kevin Roose as part of research for the interview. I'm curious how that conversation went.

Anyway, I don't think the NYT had a single view on NFTs/crypto.
posted by FJT at 12:37 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

It's a weird sort of quasi-anonymity, because it basically allows a single transaction to be anonymous, but any pattern of repeated transactions quickly becomes identifiable.

I don't really think you can call crypto even quasi-anonymous. The money comes from someplace first, so you would need to do the prohibitively resource intensive mining if you only wanted to use a wallet once. Otherwise you have two connections to a new wallet, where the money came from and where the money went to. And then the identity of that wallet needs to be kept secret, almost nobody has the patience for that kind of operational security in their everyday life.

Really this kind of huge graph analysis is exactly what tech surveillance companies/government agencies are good at. In the crypto future I bet there will be services to find out all the previous transactions from a wallet and any linked burner wallets, like those creepy person-finding ads if you google a name. It's a recipe for stalking and harrassment. Molly White had a good piece about this earlier in the year that's linked in the post.
posted by crossswords at 12:42 PM on May 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don't really think you can call crypto even quasi-anonymous.

It is difficult enough to even quasi-anonymize crypto transactions that a willingness to make the attempt is prima facie evidence of a crime in progress.
posted by mhoye at 12:46 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

A Newcomer's Guide To Crypto

Actually it's "A Latecomer's Guide to Crypto". Just to remind all of us that we're on the verge of missing the crypto boat...

... 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 love how Roose's "comical example of what skeptics think" is actually nearly a statement of fact.

Cryptocurrencies, even the jokey ones, are part of a robust, well-funded ideological movement that has serious implications for our political and economic future.

I am as high as a kite.
posted by mmoncur at 1:02 PM on May 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

The original crypto article was published in the same New York Times that refuses to describe in plain language what the Republicans do an say openly because it sounds like editorializing.
posted by Gelatin at 1:09 PM on May 27, 2022 [23 favorites]

Of course, there are millions of crypto owners, the vast majority of whom are not white supremacists.

Wow, if you're about to launch a cryptocurrency company, there's a great slogan!
posted by mmoncur at 1:19 PM on May 27, 2022 [16 favorites]

Q: So blockchains are … fancy Google spreadsheets?
A: Sort of!

This is like "Christ, what an asshole," but for lame tech explainers. It works for everything!
posted by Western Infidels at 2:08 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ed Zitron taking journalist Kara Swisher to task for uncritically parroting claims of crypto grifters.
posted by chrchr at 2:32 PM on May 27, 2022 [10 favorites]

I do wish the commentary itself were less editorialized, e.g. White’s “so brave” in response to Roose’s deepest belief being that crypto needs an explainer, etc. (It does need accessible public explainers!)) I just wish snark didn’t have to creep into everything these days, grouse grouse.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:47 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

(Similarly, really wish there were no Anonymous comments on this. It kind of drags the whole things down.)
posted by Going To Maine at 4:03 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Crypto is so entirely not-anonymous that there is an entire set of investigations based around using the data to "follow the money" and there have been MASSIVE crime rings busts of various more or less awful sorts in the past few years based on this kind of deep data mining.

I'm lacking the ambition to do the research right now, but there have been more than a few articles about this published recently, and the tools and investigators are only getting more sophisticated as they encounter more trails they are trying to trace.

The problem with the idea of "crypto needs an explainer" is that it doesn't need an explainer. It might have had a good purpose at one point, but the dark side of human nature captured it and it's all just a giant ponzi scheme now. First One In wins, Last One In loses the most. (That "Last One In" could be an entire group of millions of people.)

So, maybe there's an idea there... but as it stands, there is only fraud and fleecing. I've been tempted to find a thing to buy into early and cash out as soon as I got to 10X or something, and do that over and over... But all that means is there are 10X people behind me who funded my exit, because crypto has no actual material THING underneath it. There is no economy, no work, no basis for it. So it is only funded by people who buy it. You cannot make anything that makes crypto, because crypto has no actual value, only perceived value.
posted by hippybear at 4:19 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

this has sent me to Molly White’s twitter account and now I know about soulbound tokens and I absolutely hate them and the idea that Vitalik Buterin is being rewarded for any of this.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:42 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Of course, there are millions of crypto owners, the vast majority of whom are not white supremacists.

Is there anyway to start a cryptocurrency that will only harm white supremacists and nazis when it crashes? 'Cause i could get on board with developing and pushing that.
posted by Mitheral at 5:30 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

The NYT has this today: How Influencers Hype Crypto without disclosing their financial ties.
posted by storybored at 6:39 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Re: anonymity; it's probably fine for authorities who are able to treat legitimate but politically potent transactions with discretion, but I can imagine a future where your credit score would be impacted because you pay union dues.
posted by Merus at 7:14 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is there anyway to start a cryptocurrency that will only harm white supremacists and nazis when it crashes?

AryanKKKoin—the hot new coin for the 21st-century neo-Nazi. It's just an Ethereum clone but all transactions are rounded to the nearest 0.88.

I'm honestly surprised if nobody has done this yet. It seems like such an easy, low-effort scam.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:59 PM on May 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

One more comment about the original article:

The last time I read something so unabashedly enthusiastic about a product while pretending not to be an advertisement, it was a comic featuring Twinkie The Kid.
posted by mmoncur at 11:42 PM on May 27, 2022 [10 favorites]

I keep seeing all these crypto gains and losses equated to dollars, and I'm not sure that makes any sense at some point. (example) "The loss has been estimated at around 750 ETH (~$1.5 million)"

I mean, I'm sure that's what a noob would have to invest at current rates, but I'm not sure that makes any sense to talk about that way. Really, they're internet "points", same as like playing online poker for fake money. You may have built up those points by working hard, but when you lose a 1.5 million fake-dollar pot, it's not like you really lost 1.5 million real dollars of your own money. And that's what makes fake-money poker no fun, people do stupid, irrational things they would never do if it was real money, and that screws up everyone else's strategies that count on rational behavior.

The surest way I know this is not real money is nobody is being killed by mob hit squads in real life. Stealing millions in real money in real life would give the thief a serious physical security problem.
posted by ctmf at 11:02 AM on May 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

The surest way I know this is not real money is nobody is being killed by mob hit squads in real life.

Well, not sure we can say that—it sort of depends on who's doing the stealing and from whom. Many of the folks who are being stolen from probably don't have connections to "I paint houses" sort of people. The ones who are doing the stealing, or are at least at the end of the chain that begins with theft, very well may.

One of the big problems with cryptocurrency is that it's very hard to get real money back out of the system. My guess is the extraction of hard currency is where you find the heavy hitters: state-level actors like the North Koreans, European organized crime, Chinese currency smugglers and gambling operations, etc. They know how to move significant quantities of money around quietly through (or outside of) the financial system.

This mirrors other kinds of theft networks. The dudes who do the breaking-and-entering to steal your family silver are generally not very high on the criminal food chain. But as you work your way along, the people who fence and resell stolen goods, and who capitalize those fronts, are likely to be bigger fish.

If you steal a bunch of ETH or BTC or whatever from somebody, now you have a wallet with what are basically Mr. Krabs Wacky Bucks. If you want to turn that into USD fast, my suspicion is that after running it through a tumbler or two, the fastest exit is by selling it at a significant discount to someone who can make a duffel bag of cash (which you hope is not counterfeit) show up on your doorstep. And I'd bet they are not altogether nice people.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:23 PM on May 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don't understand why crypto is talked about as if it was real money. Can someone explain it to me? If I bought 10 $cryptobucks and then they went up to a million, but without any way for me to make use of those gains, and then they collapsed to 1 $cryptobuck, I have lost 9 bucks and not a million.

Seriously, I feel like that line from the Asterix, I was born too late into this too ancient world.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:19 AM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Is there anyway to start a cryptocurrency that will only harm white supremacists and nazis when it crashes?

Crypto-fascism. I mean, the word is right there.
posted by SPrintF at 7:13 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Pyrogenesis, I'm under the impression that there is a way to realize those gains by selling at peak, but it requires making suckers of the people who would buy from you based on religious fervor about peaks being stairsteps on the way to "the moon". There is also a culture that heavily discourages selling because they want you to be that sucker.
posted by Selena777 at 7:52 AM on May 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is there anyway to start a cryptocurrency that will only harm white supremacists and nazis when it crashes?

In the darkest timeline, the Monkey's Paw grants this by somehow turning everyone into nazis.
posted by clew at 9:31 AM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

The last time I read something so unabashedly enthusiastic about a product while pretending not to be an advertisement, it was a comic featuring Twinkie The Kid.

For me it was that shitty book Blockchain Revolution, which gets recommended all the time and is just a long press release for crypto that some academics were bribed to write.

Pro tip: if a crypto asshole brings up remittances or “the unbanked” to claim crypto is altruistic, it’s a dead cert they read that piece of shit.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 2:49 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

My strongest-held belief about crypto, though, is that it is terribly explained.

I think one reason it's terribly explained, and this article does not correct this, is the technology actually does very little. A lot of things attributed to the technology are really about a social construct they're trying to build around the technology.

Like, there's Steve Jobs' alleged prediction that cities would be designed around the Segway. And if that happened, it would have been a massive transformative technology. The technology would be less impressive to me than the massive social change required to make that happen. We could also design cities around public transit and better accommodate wheelchair use.

I started understanding this after we got a bunch of people trying to convince game developers to use NFTs in games. A lot of those conversations had the game devs asking what does the NFT does for them, and the answers all had prerequisites of what the game devs had to do for the NFT.

The most blatant was how NFTs will let you have inter-operable items in games. All the game dev needs to handle is the small details of having inter-operable items in games, and then obey the NFT when it says which players are and are not permitted to use these items. It stops feeling like, "this is what NFTs can do for you," and more like, "this is what you could do for NFTs."


From the article, related points:

[crypto critics] generally arguing that crypto itself is an exploitative scheme, with no real-world value.

But that distracts many from the deeper truth: the casino is a trojan horse with a new financial system hidden inside.”

See there, the critics see no real-world value in the technology. The proponents are banking on designing a new financial system around crypto, much like we could design our cities around the Segway.
posted by RobotHero at 6:06 PM on May 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

Why is it so weird and insular?

It explains this, too. If the technology doesn't really do much without the social construct around it, you could cut off and reduce interaction with people who haven't bought into the social construct.

If I have millions in Robot Bux, but I'm surrounded by people who don't care about Robot Bux, it does me no good. If I surround myself in people who all attribute value to Robot Bux, now that actually means something.

Understanding crypto now — especially if you’re naturally skeptical — is important for a few reasons.

The first is that crypto wealth and ideology is going to be a transformative force in our society in the coming years.

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.

This is another bit of rhetoric you see, that crypto's dominance is inevitable, but the direction of it is not. So skeptics have a moral obligation to get involved, to change the system from the inside.

But there's going to be severe constraints on what crypto could be. It has to be something that ideologically supports the value of crypto. Becoming involved in crypto might accomplish nothing to change its direction, but only enmesh more people into the system.
posted by RobotHero at 9:08 PM on May 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Cryptocurrency is Skee-Ball tickets.
posted by rhizome at 12:57 PM on May 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

The value of Skee-Ball tickets relies on there being a counter where you can exchange tickets for prizes. And that counter exists because someone makes a profit off you playing Skee-Ball. And they collect their profit in quarters.

So ultimately the value of Skee-Ball tickets relies on the influx of quarters into the system. They can't just pay themselves the Skee-Ball tickets.
posted by RobotHero at 5:55 AM on May 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

I was thinking the counter is the same as the crypto exchanges where you can buy money (if you do it right!) they way you use Skee-Ball tickets to buy a stuffed animal.
posted by rhizome at 12:13 PM on May 31, 2022

Yeah, with the additional slight wrinkles that there are multiple counters where you can exchange your tickets for stuffed animals, the prices of the stuffed animals in tickets varies all the time and without warning, some of them will take your tickets and tell you that you own a stuffed animal but then only let you look at it once in a while and are real sketchy about when you get to take it home, some of the "stuffed animals" are actually MDMA and others are counterfeits, and the whole operation is fueled by a power plant out back that burns whale oil.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:03 PM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

Pro tip: if a crypto asshole brings up remittances or “the unbanked” to claim crypto is altruistic, it’s a dead cert they read that piece of shit.

It's also a dead cert that the crypto asshole in question is themselves a piece of shit.

Crypto bros want you to simultaneously believe:

(1) Crypto is going to make life better for those not well served by the existing banking system
(2) If you don't get in early, you'll regret it

These are mutually exclusive propositions. A banking system where getting in early is hugely important is a system where those without the funds to get in early (or those who are literally not even yet born) will be left out.

Crypto bros aren't trying to solve the world's problems. They're trying to invent a parallel world where they are effectively "born into wealth" by dint of having been there first. Their end goal is the same (or worse) economic inequality, just with different people (themselves) at the top of the pyramid.
posted by a faithful sock at 7:59 AM on June 1, 2022 [13 favorites]

Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow
posted by box at 6:57 AM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]