You're right on the mark. Most of the content around crypto is heavily biased and just looks untrustworthy for a number of reasons. From what I can tell, it's because they're actually unreliable sources. Not because they're trying to scam you, but because there's more money in selling you crypto services than there is in crypto itself. So what you end up finding is pretty much all content marketing. Basically, you're looking for how to mine gold, and all you can find are websites from shovel companies telling you about how great gold mining is.
The sites that are not content marketing tend to come off as amateurish, often times because on deeper inspection they are actually run by amateurs. A strategy I tend to use for vetting information is to give the site a scan and look for technical inaccuracies (ie: confused/wrong/bizarre/shallow explanations about technical topics). From that, you can get a good picture of how knowledgeable the source actually is.
You know what, I could never put my finger on what exactly it was other than the amature feel of some of the content. But you're correct here, there's a lot of magical thinking that goes along with the crypto world. Lots of random sounding predictions about how crypto will evolve that are clearly not grounded in any deep understanding of technology.
I wonder how much of it is magical or wishful thinking in the classical sense, versus people who lack knowledge in general making claims about things that they don't really understand, which come off as bizarre. I've noticed actual technical knowledge is inversely predictive of interest in crypto.
So... half the reasons are those you mention... subculture. Alien ecosystem, hard to distinguish between geniuses, quacks and con artists, blade runner theme music.
The other half is because crypto is an unregulated, start up financial sector. Stories and headlines about the financial sector tend to also look inscrutable those on the outside. Chase a rabbit down a financial story for real, and it always leads to a "they can't do that! outrageous!"
The fun thing about the gamestop thing, a few months back, was that every person had reached a different outrage. Margin lending by default. That the brokers' business model is selling users' trading data to competitors who frontrun it. That the hedge funds targeted for the short squeeze is the attackers' brokers' investor/partner/customer. That there is a layer of private clearing houses between brokers and markets that regulate the market. That this private regulator can impose unlimited capital requirements on brokers. That it did so, cutting most retail investors out of the market while institutions sorted out their positions. Etc.
Stablecoins are basically an unregulated USD account. Sounds innocuous enough, until you consider that USD is just numbers in regulated USD accounts. Someone is making US dollars, and it's not the issuer of that currency. That's what a totally unregulated bank is.
So... it's only natural to think "scandal" when you hear that some billionaire and a financial demigod minted $60 billion US Dollar denominated money.
The difference is banks have fractional reserve banking and stable coins do not.
Reason being is that how most of crypto works is a derivative of bitcoin or ethereum. And, it’s fairly normal in a technical sense, just applied in a unique way that needs to be understood via good ref doc.
Once you wrap your head around those two anchor protocols and get a sense of how it relates to its comp sci primitives (file systems, p2p, cryptographic certs), it can be really demystified - ie “blockchain” is stored as blocks on a file system, in the comp sci sense.
I'm very skeptical of 90% of what I hear and I've limited interest getting involved in the industry right now but crypto is hugely impactful no matter how you look at it so it's worth keeping a decent amount of curiosity in my opinion.
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Edit: because I explicitly called out two podcasts, I should make it clear I listen to them knowing full well the hosts and the guests often have an agenda (which much of the time amounts to pumping their own investments). That's true of many types of promotion of course but especially true in this space and especially true of a16z. But the subject matter can still be very interesting.
their whole game was/is leveraging their clout to give credibility to the scene, therefore increasing the value of their investments.
"use case for Bitcoin is micropayments", "Switching to Bitcoin, which charges no or very low fees" , "Another potential use of Bitcoin micropayments is to fight spam" https://a16z.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters-nyt/
It’s an okay podcast if (and only if) you recognize that a16z is in the business of “investing” early into new coins, using their brand to hype those coins, then selling them off when they can get the market excited about the coin.
The technical content of the podcast might be reasonable, but you can’t separate it from their very large conflict of interests.
In my opinion, the process of buying / selling real estate, at least in the US, seems antiquated. There has to be some way to automate this instead of manually having some escrow company hold funds and then manually releasing them once the sale is complete, and issuing the title (gets more complicated if it's a mortgage vs a cash deal, since a bank loan would also be involved, but either way, it is possible). The smart contracts could be coded in a way where the funds are automatically released, and a title issued, once certain criteria are met. One risk is that the smart contracts could be hacked, but over time the code could be become more solid.
It seems that as a whole the world will move more to automation, over time, and smart contracts might play a part in that. That said smart contracts that can't really be stopped could also become Skynet or something (i.e. Terminator), but I don't think fear of that should prevent us from exploring the possibilities. My point is that smart contracts could automate certain things that are done manually now. They might still require some human involvement, but the amount of human involvement required could be dramatically reduced. I don't think the main benefit of smart contracts is just that they are unregulated. I also don't think that the way smart contracts are used today are the only ways they can be used. It is a new field and many things that folks haven't even thought of yet are possible with this type of technology.
I don't know that I'd invest in a deployed smart contract but I suppose it depends on the traffic and the situation of the developer
it wouldn't be hard for the original developer to deploy a competing contract
follow smart individuals religiously, podcasts are probably the best. thanks for uncommon core, i hadn't heard of it. bankless is another high signal podcast (although eth-maxi).
None of this is inherently bad, but there seems to be a growing divide between "mainstream" tech and the crypto world that is harder and harder to understand if you aren't already steeping in the ecosystem.
Another challenging aspect is how much of crypto (particularly non-mainstream) has somewhat shady origins. Maybe the shadiness is just subverting expected norms, but there seems also to be sufficient evidence the shadiness also often is around illicit activity.
I'm curious if others have found ways to build and keep an understanding of the crypto ecosystem without fully going down the rabbit hole?