Both the crypto maximalists and the anti-crypto folks are the ones who are speaking the loudest as soon as crypto pumps or crashes. On either event, this is where both of them start capitalising on their grift.

You will rarely see them together having a normal discussion about the issues and possibilities or even see either of them compromising on their ideas.

Do not listen to the extreme of either side. Especially those like [0] and ones that have a rushed a book on Amazon to sell you on the subject on how all of it will 'die in a fire'. [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/saylor

[1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl

Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books? I'm not selling any books, and I'll tell you that all of crypto is a giant fraud. The technology is fundamentally useless and the economics are just ponzi scams on top of ponzi scams. There's no reason to try to "both sides" this. All crypto is a negative sum game by design, where the HODLers are expected to absorb all losses while the miners take a cut in fees. It's mathematically impossible for it to be a good investment. There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.

> Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books?

There is no comparison. Both are totally extreme in their rhetoric and using that as engagement farming for their grift. Either publicly promoting a cryptocurrency or rushing a badly written book without disclosing a conflict of interest after the author's failed blockchain company shutdown which he has been hiding from everyone since the company was killed by blockchains like Ethereum, and Cardano.

> There's no reason to try to "both sides" this.

There is no point in you trying to be absolutist on any extreme side. Either way, both sides will compromise on their delusional ideas; both crypto maxis and skeptics. Only some blockchains are here to stay and the others won't be around.

> There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.

The whole of crypto would already have been 100% and totally banned, everywhere a long time ago and the regulators already know that it is unrealistic and extremely difficult to ban and stop all of it. China has tried it, yet crypto is still there despite the 'ban'.

Crypto isn't going anywhere and you know it but refuse to admit it. Not all of them will survive and even the author of that book once admitted that.

A handful of people have made a name for themselves covering crypto from a critical point of view, largely because they filled a vacuum for that sort of coverage. Crypto press has generally not been self-critical, and mainstream press is mostly confused by it. So there was a latent demand for this sort of coverage, and people like Molly have filled that void.

No journalism is self-critical, that's the whole point of journalism, like Taleb likes to say. It's entertainment for whoever wants their own bubble justified, not information. Of course the pro-crypto journalism is much worse in this regard, but that doesn't change the fact that journalism on both sides is useless for anyone who wants actual information content.

Who in their right mind would want to spend time debunking pro-crypto people and anti-crypto people?

They're both completely nuts. I'd rather debate a flat earther.

The argument is not that there is nothing in crypto but scam(s). It's that whatever crypto ia actually good for, it's either unable to solve or inappropriate to solve almost all of the problems it is claimed to be a "fix" for.

Sadly, it is possible for a >$1T industry to be absolutely useless. We have numerous examples, pick nearly any global pop subculture and there's a shiny example.

I mean as with any debate, you SHOULD have proponents and opponents. If you don't like opposition, that means you have a closed mind and are not open for debate.

I mean you can argue that it's too on the nose or too linearly opposed, but a centrist / 'both sides' argument won't offset the heavily funded multi-billion pro-crypto industry.

Normally i would agree with this, but crypto might actually be the exception to the rule here.

At the very least it seems like it is in the realm of possibility.

Well said, there's a lot of scams for sure but to say it's completely useless even the technology behind it is absurd, or hired to do so.

The thing is, I think it's right to say "cryptocurrency is a scam industry". I don't want this to be true, but it looks like it is.

For a few years I was like, "Wow, Ethereum is cool! Haha, imagine email over ethereum where recipients charged a fee, goodbye spam! Solidity is a pleasure to write in! Decentralization is cool! Oh wow, ZKsnarks!"

Now, I'm thinking, "Ok, where are these cool blockchain things?" All I see are:

- Cryptocoin exchanges or lotteries, but that's not interesting, - NFT exchanges which are too reliant on centralized services to be interesting even if they weren't full of scams, and - "Layer n+1" platforms which promise to be the foundation of something cool. (Maybe a "Layer n+2" platform?)

None of these are cool. I want there to be cool decentralized Things. The only three interesting things I've found are (1) notarization, (2) datascience and profiling data from publicly available blockchains.

Not sure about cool or interesting, but there are boring but important (to some) use cases, like

- Self custody of wealth, without having to deal with gold

- Payments that don't rely on a middleman like PayPal, Wise, etc, who are known for regularly blocking legal transactions, and sometimes stealing the funds

- Commerce with real privacy (Zcash, Aleo, Aztec, etc)

- DNS without the censorship or rent-seeking

I'd say most of us in the blockchain space are focusing on making those use cases cheap, secure, frictionless and so forth, rather than trying to come up with cool/interesting applications.

I guess I should clarify, "cool" would at least be:

1. Something besides strictly processing payments, and

2. something that is not better served by existing technology, and

3. something that is meaningfully decentralized.

I think the ENS is the 'coolest' of that list, and hits all three of these points.

But I think we can agree ENS is not a convincing example that cryptocurrencies aren't a scam. Auctioning off strings (which may be later sold or rented) is similar to DNS. Except, we know some domains which point to fun sites (like wikipedia.org or tvtropes.org).

A 'cool' example would be some 'cool' Etherem .eth domain. (But not wikipedia.eth, which appears to be hoarded by someone hoarding .eth domains, and not tvtropes.eth, which is actively being auctioned off for $1300 by someone else hoarding .eth domains.)

ENS doesn't hit those points. It doesn't fulfill any need that isn't served by DNS, and it still depends on other centralized services for it to actually be useful: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=ethlink-service-about-to-go...

The goal of ENS isn't to add new bells and whistles; it's to do the same things DNS does, just without the censorship (see Sci-Hub) or rent-seeking.

I don't see how Virgil's story implies some kind of reliance on centralized services? Yes, if a domain owner is unavailable, it will eventually expire; that applies to ENS and DNS equally.

Criticizing crypto isn't the same thing as running crypto scams. This is a false equivalence. If more people had stood up to this dumb fad earlier, we'd all have been better for it.

I'll preface this by saying I'm not claiming you personally are doing this, but I've noticed a shift in the tactics of the crypto hucksters now that the shine has worn off. They'll concede that the current landscape is "mostly scams" (or at least, that it is marred by some "bad apples") while touting some vague future utility that crypto will eventually unlock. The claim here is that the skeptics are somehow wrong for dismissing this potential.

Yet instead of making any specific claims about valid use cases, they'll attack the critics for going "too far" in their critique of crypto, to try and sew a seed of doubt and leave the door open.

I've been watching this space for ages. I see literally nothing with any utility here, and it all looks like scams (or, somewhat more charitably, casino chips) to me. I don't see why we should demand that anybody hedge on this assertion and I applaud anybody who was willing to stand up to the madness back when it wasn't quite so fashionable to do so.

While I think there HAS to be some intrinsic value somewhere in a $1T industry, I have yet to see it and am starting to think that the arguments it's worth zero are more right than wrong. Previously, I thought once the irrational market comes back down to earth it would be an interesting technology to start exploring, not as a speculative asset, but I have yet to see any real world examples appear.