Has there ever been a technology which people felt more emotionally attached to or revolted by? Why do people like crypto so much? Why does it piss them off so much?

I want to set some misconceptions straight, address why people hate crypto and why it is actually good.

Most “Crypto” You See Really Is A Scam

99% of crypto-related stuff you see is an actual scam. As in, there are scammers trying to steal your money, often closely mimicking the branding of a real project to trick followers into sending all their tokens. The randoms talking about ELON BOUGHT THIS TOKEN– that’s actually a scam, and if you click on the website you’ll lose everything. There’s no coin.

There is nothing new about this, but since crypto transactions cannot be reversed and there is no PayPal Fraud Detection Unit to deal with it, it’s just way easier to scam people with crypto and get away with it. The explosion in social scamming is a result of a massive price drop in automating scambots that are hard to detect with AI and crypto payment methods which make transactions one-click.

I don’t think it’s fair to call this crypto. If you remember the old days, email inboxes were just as bad as Twitter timelines. We should acknowledge that lower friction and startup-costs are always going to benefit scammers, because they benefit everyone.

Everyone Else Is A Bot or Shill

Anyone can make a token in a few minutes now. Deploying a token contract used to cost hundreds of dollars on Ethereum (and still does), but most of the current crypto meta you see has moved to chains where anyone can launch for a few bucks.

This has created massive incentive to produce large quantities of bots to shill tokens as a service. Grifters will spin up a token and hire a botting group to promote it. Some shillers are kids or low-wage workers just doing it by hand or with scripts, but most are just ChatGPT bots now.

There are lots of people in crypto not trying to sell you something, but they’re not in the public square yelling and selling. Everyone who buys a bag is immediately incentivized to pump that token and get others to buy it. Mostly, though, this happens in Telegram and Discord chats, places where alpha is shared, not on Twitter. Twitter is mostly scams and funnels for noobs.

Successful projects tend to contribute culturally with memes, GIFs, weird art and cultural artifacts that increase the popularity of the meme behind their token or project. Because these are often for their own culture, they are not even recognized as crypto– for example, at this point the vast majority of Twitter knows what Milady is but has no idea that it’s a crypto project.

This has an interesting polarizing effect: anything that looks like scummy crypto is crypto, and most things that are legitimate, well, people have no idea they’re crypto, so they don’t update their priors on crypto.

The Technology Is Real

What is enabling all of this madness is a simple idea that solves a long-standing problem in cryptography and distributed communication networks. Before there were dogecoins and The Network State, there was the Byzantine General’s Problem. An anonymous person came up with a good-enough solution for it by cobbling together previous solutions and adding a novel idea he got from looking at how centralized systems dealt with email spam.

A lot of people seem to question that there was ever a problem that needed solving– they are flat out wrong. There was a very long standing problem and it was solved. Otherwise, there would be no Satoshi Nakamoto, no Bitcoin, no blockchain, no “crypto”.

The problem is that it’s really hard to talk about the technology in good faith without people bringing steadfast opinions based on their cultural biases and perceptions.

The people who are building the actual technology are rarely if ever the ones shilling memecoins, scamming people, hyping doge bullshit or any of that. Anyone who has real “alpha”– knowledge on how a token is going to do in the future– is keeping it to themselves. Devs are almost never motivated by money in and of itself, and many of them are deeply critical of everything you hate about crypto.

The main argument that people lob against crypto is that it’s not practical or useful. Again, this is objectively wrong. An entire economy of people making traditional stuff– video games, apps, websites, etc.– is flourishing on the back of frictionless payments, enabling a global talent pool to tap into Western projects and get paid Western-level money. Cracked teenagers are making a living in far off places building and coding, receiving payment in crypto and divying with their crew in kind. Earning $40/hr is totally viable for a hardworking kid self-teaching from YouTube videos. In a world where many digital creatives beg for donations via Patreon or take small commissions to get by, crypto is a low-friction and viable path to get paid and earn a living.

The Future Is Decentralized

In the present, decentralization is an abstract concept. But more and more of our lives are being centralized to just a small handful of datacenters run by a small handful of companies.

I don’t think everything needs to be decentralized. But having a parity option for open source and decentralized with closed source and centralized is important. It’s important to have the choice. It keeps everyone honest.

Tokens don’t have to be worth financial value, but could represent reputation, access, membership, etc. In a world where we are all increasingly becoming strangers, decentralized reputation systems may be a useful way for society to regulate itself without needing security state-level centralized sociaal credit systems and surveillance.

I’d like to see a world where people are more fair and cooperative, and so need less social control to behave correctly. In order to achieve this without becoming a centralized security state, we need to give some power to organizations to issue units of value and value them as they see fit, socially or economically or whatever it is.

When crypto is really ready for prime time, there will be no hype, no luxury goods, no pump and dump. It’ll just be the roads and the streets of the Internet, as boring as TCP and TLS. For now, the hype has brought insane money and resources into the field and enabled a lot of development that otherwise just wouldn’t have happened. I don’t love that it has to all start with money, and it has to go through these gross hype cycles, but I just don’t see another way.

If you want to hate me for npm installing some packags and engaging in the sci-fi future for fun and profit, well, I guess that is your prerogative, but it’s a pretty objectively stupid position to hold. I think we can agree the current meta enabled by crypto tech sucks– but that’s just a temporary blip in the long run of things. Shitting on technology that is a decade old has almost always been a bad investment of time and intellectual capital. It’s possible to have a nuanced view, and to think that scams and grifters are dumb but that solving Byzantine’s Generals problem is interesting and has social value.